Philip José Farmer has always been liked and respected inside the science fiction field as an explorer of unconventional or forbidden ideas, a maker of dangerous visions. All the same, he has received less critical attention than he deserves; outside of book reviews and fanzine interviews, only two general pieces on Farmer have appeared in print up to this time….

For [Leslie] Fiedler, Farmer represents sf's ability to arouse "wonder and ecstasy" in its readers…. He concentrates on the Freudian/sexual part of Farmer's work [see excerpt above]…. [Franz] Rottensteiner also finds Farmer typical of sf, but in the opposite direction—Farmer and sf, he says, both deal in the trivialization of important ideas [see excerpt above]…. Both writers recognize the importance of sex, violence, and religion in Farmer's work; predictably Rottensteiner finds this use inhumane, while Fiedler finds it liberating.

In this essay, which is also an...