The most flamboyant celebration of the new licence [for sexual openness] is to be found in the late 1960s with Philip José Farmer's Herald Childe (i.e. Childe Harold) romances…. There is a brutal shock achieved by these novels which violently juxtapose the clichés of the Los Angeles private detective novel (Childe is a private dick, appropriately enough), SF and hard core pornography. In mitigation it should be noted that Farmer has been battering away at SF's sexual reticence ever since the novella The Lovers, in 1952. His calculated offensiveness does, however, seem an immature response to a resented discipline. In A Feast Unknown (1969), for example, he quite calculatedly does dirt on two of SF's icons from the age of Edgar Rice Burroughs innocence. Tarzan and Doc Savage are presented as warring sexual athletes in a mish-mash of sado-masochistic fantasy. What Farmer achieves, as with the Childe sequence (which preposterously turns out to be a quest for the Holy Grail) is travesty. In a field as morally conformist as SF, travesty has some diagnostic interest. The intrinsic literary merits of the exercise are harder to perceive. (p. 175)
J. A. Sutherland, "American Science Fiction Since 1960" (© J. A. Sutherland 1979), in Science Fiction: A Critical Guide, edited by Patrick Parrinder, Longman Group Ltd., 1979, pp. 162-86.∗
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