Venus on the Half-Shell

by Philip José Farmer

  The March issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction contained “A Scarletin Study,” by Simon Wagstaff’s favorite author, me, Jonathan Swift Somers III. This story, about Ralph von Wau Wau, the hyperintelligent German Shepherd described in Venus on the Half-Shell, was to be the first in a series of stories written by “fictional authors.” In addition to myself, Farmer also wrote stories “by” Harry Manders, Paul Chapin, Rod Keen, and Cordwainer Bird. He further planned to collect these stories in an anthology and began recruiting other writers such as Philip K. Dick, Howard Waldrop, and Gene Wolfe to join in the fun.

  While attending Minicon, a science fiction convention in Minneapolis, in April 1975, Farmer was interviewed by David Truesdale, Paul McGuire, and Jerry Rauth for the fanzine Tangent. By now rumors were already beginning to circulate that Farmer was the author of Venus on the Half-Shell. While denying he was the culprit, Farmer laughingly offered up the possibility of Trout being “a collaboration between Harry Harrison and Ted White. Or Joanna Russ and Phil Dick—or Harlan Ellison and Captain S.I. Meek.”

  I doubt any of you remember Captain Meek? He wrote a madcap story called “Submicroscopic” back in the early ’30s and followed that with a sequel that was a novella, “Alwo of Ulm.” But I’m digressing again. Forgive me...

  However, before the issue with the interview could be published, Dave Truesdale discovered a notice that had appeared in the New York Times Book Review on March 23 about whom the author of Venus on the Half-Shell might really be: “This week, from Peoria comes a letter from a man who asks not to be named, stating that he is its author.”

  Even though, after calling Farmer to confirm, he was able to trumpet the news on the cover of the May ’75 issue, “Tangent Hooks Farmer on Trout,” Truesdale was not happy the New York Times Book Review chose to so callously let the cat out of the bag; seriously, how many science fiction authors live in Peoria? In fact, in the editorial where he broke the news, this sums up his reaction: “All I can say is FUCK YOU to the New York Times...” Farmer wasn’t happy either, but there was no point in denying the story now.

  Of course, the news was not immediately universally known. In a bit of coincidental timing that could only happen in fiction, when the aforementioned review appeared in the UCLA Daily Bruin “proving” Vonnegut wrote Venus on the Half-Shell, Farmer happened to be at UCLA. He was there as part of an Extension Course which featured a guest science fiction author each week. The day the review appeared, May 20, Farmer revealed to the class that he was, in fact, “Kilgore Trout” and the author of Venus on the Half-Shell. The following week, a correction was printed: “We’ve been had...”

  Slowly the word continued to spread. Locus confirmed it in early June, also saying, “Kurt Vonnegut, who went along with the gag at first, has become very annoyed because of reviews and statements made about the book...” Farmer explained years later that half the people said it was Vonnegut’s worst book, and the other half said it was his best. In July, Farmer was the guest of honor at RiverCon I in Louisville, where his speech, “Now It Can be Told” (which also happens to be the title of one of Kilgore Trout’s stories, as described by Vonnegut), was about writing Venus on the Half-Shell. Tragically, no copy of this speech is known to exist. In August, a long interview with Farmer about the affair appeared in Science Fiction Review.

  The following year my story, “The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight,” was published in the November issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and then I faded from existence, nearly forgotten. My stories have been reprinted a few times, but that is it. When Venus on the Half-Shell and Others (Subterranean Press, 2007), a collection focusing on Farmer’s fictional-author series, was published, even though I was the most prolific, the most well known of Farmer’s fictional authors, Tom Wode Bellman was invited to write the foreword. And he’s not even a proper fictional author, just a stand-in for Farmer himself!

  But I’m not too unhappy about being who I am. I just have one worry that nags at me whenever I lie awake at night unable to sleep (because I don’t exist; whoever heard of a nonexistent entity sleeping?) And that worry is this: I was created as a byproduct of writer’s block. If my father, Farmer, hadn’t had that block at that time, it’s very unlikely I would be here.

  Now then, birth is the opposite of death. So if I was created by a block, then what will kill me will be the opposite of that, in other words creative flow. Farmer is no longer with us. He’s on the other side now. And that’s the biggest block any writer can ever have: to have shuffled off this mortal coil. But what if he starts writing again on the other side? Creative flow is the opposite of a writer’s block and the opposite of a block is death to me. If Farmer starts writing again, wherever he is now, I might somehow vanish... I know that’s bizarre logic and an obscure thing to fret about. But I am bizarre. Remember: I’m writing this article even though I’m fictional!

  I can almost feel someone walking over my grave right now, even though I won’t have a grave because I don’t have a solid body to bury, but the figure of speech is appropriate; and rather bizarrely I can reveal that its first recorded use in print was in Simon Wagstaff’s A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, published in 1738. The date isn’t an error. This was a different Simon Wagstaff, one of the pseudonyms of the satirist Jonathan Swift. Talk about recursion!

  And where is Farmer now, I hear you ask? Well, I don’t know. But I’ll say this: a great many obituaries pictured him waking up along the banks of the million-mile-long river that was one of his most amazing creations in a creative life full of astounding concepts. And yet... As I mentioned earlier, Farmer was the greatest ever master of a type of writing called Bangsian Fantasy. I’d never even heard of Bangsian Fantasy until recently. It’s named after the mostly forgotten writer John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), whose most famous book was House-Boat on the Styx, in which Charon upgrades from his leaky old skiff to a luxurious boat capable of holding many dead people at once, dead people who happen to have been real in your world and not just invented by Bangs.

  What if Farmer is a guest on that house-boat right now? What if he has managed to get hold of some writing materials? What if he’s saying to himself, “Hey, Charon, let’s do a collaboration! Why don’t we write a story pretending to be Trout; maybe a story about what happens when Jonathan Swift Somers III dies and wakes up on the banks of a million-mile-long river!”

  That’s my worry. Or my hope. I’m not sure which.

  AFTERWORD

  MORE REAL THAN LIFE ITSELF: PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER’S FICTIONAL-AUTHOR PERIOD

  BY CHRISTOPHER PAUL CAREY

  “The unconscious is the true democracy.

  All things, all people, are equal.”

  PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  By one count, Philip José Farmer, a Grand Master of Science Fiction, has written and had published fifty-four novels and one hundred and twenty-nine novellas, novelettes, and short stories. Creatively, Farmer’s work is equally ambitious. In 1952, he authored the groundbreaking “The Lovers,” which at long last made it possible for science fiction to deal with sex in a mature manner. He is the creator of Riverworld, arguably one of the grandest experiments in science fiction literature. His World of Tiers series, which combines rip-roaring adventure with pocket universes full of mythic archetypes, is said to have inspired Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series and is often cited as a favorite among Farmer’s fans. And in the early 1970s, he penned the authorized biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage and inspired generations of creative mythographers to explore and expand upon his Wold Newton mythos. Yet among all of these shining minarets of his opus, Farmer has stated that he has never had so much fun in all his life as when he wrote Venus on the Half-Shell.

  I believe it is no coincidence that this novel belongs to what Farmer has labeled his “fictional-author” series. A fictional-author story is, as defined by Farmer, “a tale supposedly written by an author who is a character in fiction.” Many
of Farmer’s readers are aware that Venus on the Half-Shell originally appeared in print as if authored by Kurt Vonnegut’s character Kilgore Trout. However, most are not aware that Farmer, in league with several of his writer peers and at least one major magazine editor, masterminded an expansive hoax on the science fiction readership that spanned a good portion of the 1970s.

  As with Farmer’s usual modus operandi, the plan was ambitious. Beginning in about 1973-74, in true postmodern reflexivity, a whole team of writers acting under Farmer’s direction were to begin submitting fictional-author tales to the short fiction markets. Farmer’s files, to which the author kindly gave me access, reveal that his plan of attack was executed with focus, precision, and a great deal of forethought.

  The authors queried to write the fictional-author stories were instructed that “the real author is to be nowhere mentioned; it’s all done straight-facedly.” Each story would be accompanied by a short biographical preface giving the impression that the fictional author was indeed a living person. However, all copyrights were to be honored; those who chose to write stories “by” the characters of other authors would need to contact those creators for permission. Sometimes Farmer himself wrote the creator and, having received permission, then handed over the fictional-author story to his fellow conspirator to complete. Authors were encouraged to submit their stories to whatever market they pleased, although the majority were to appear in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, whose editor, Edward L. Ferman, was in on the joke. Once enough of the stories had been published in various markets, Farmer himself planned to take on the role of editor and collect them all in a fictional-author anthology.

  Writing even before the fallout with Kurt Vonnegut (which is described in great detail by Farmer in his “Why and How I Became Kilgore Trout”), Farmer placed great emphasis on literary ethics during the execution of his hoax. Even authors whose characters had lapsed into the public domain—and whom Farmer and his cohorts could have used legally without payment of royalties—were offered 50% of any monies made by the publication of a fictional-author story (a stipulation that appears to have been waived by all of those who granted Farmer permission). Provisions were made for the original authors and their agents to receive copies of the stories upon publication. And always, Farmer made clear that his request to write a story under the name of an author’s character was his intimate tribute to said author.

  While the vast majority of those queried for the use of their characters granted permission, a couple did not. Farmer wrote respectful, though clearly disappointed, replies to these authors, explaining again that he only meant to honor them with the stories, but that in deference to them he would withdraw his offers and pursue them no further. Most authors, however, reacted much differently and became infected by the passion that seemed to ooze from Farmer when he proposed to them his audacious hoax. Nero Wolfe author Rex Stout, besides granting permission to write the story “The Volcano” under the name of his character Paul Chapin, was tickled enough to suggest that Farmer should also author stories by Anna Karenina and Don Quixote. Farmer’s correspondence indicates that he planned on doing just that. P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Blandings Castle stories, also tried to come up with alternative fictional-authors among his own works that could be used, and it is telling of the excitement surrounding Farmer’s fictional-author conceit that multiple authors queried for permission enthusiastically consented by exclaiming the phrase “Of course” within the first paragraph of their replies. Occasionally, permissions went in the other direction. J. T. Edson, the author of many Westerns, sought permission to use Farmer’s Wold Newton genealogy as the basis for his own characters’ ancestry in his Bunduki series, a request Farmer happily approved; and while the Wold Newton genealogy was not exclusively related to the proposed fictional-author series, it remains clear that Farmer was pleased to interweave the two concepts in several instances.

  As concerns those peers enlisted to write the fictional-author stories under Farmer’s coordination, the list included (among others) Arthur Jean Cox, Philip K. Dick, Leslie Fiedler, Ron Goulart, and Gene Wolfe. Unfortunately, not all of these writers succeeded in completing their stories or having them published, though there were some notable exceptions. At Farmer’s suggestion, Arthur Jean Cox tackled one of his own creations, writing “Writers of the Purple Page” by John Thames Rokesmith, published in the May 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Rokesmith was a character in Cox’s novella “Straight Shooters Always Win” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman, May 1974). And Gene Wolfe—whose humorous “Tarzan of the Grapes” appears in Farmer’s survey of feral humans in literature, Mother Was A Lovely Beast—wrote “‘Our Neighbour’ by David Copperfield,” first published in the anthology Rooms of Paradise (ed. Lee Harding, Quartet Books, 1978), albeit under Wolfe’s own name. But the fun did not end there. Author Howard Waldrop, although not enlisted by Farmer, sought out the author of Venus on the Half-Shell and joined in with the other conspirators, publishing “The Adventure of the Grinder’s Whistle” as by Sir Edward Malone in the semipro fanzine Chacal #2 (eds. Arnie Fenner and Pat Cadigan, Spring 1977; reprinted in the collection Night of the Cooters, Ace Books, 1993, wherein Waldrop, in his introduction to the story, says, “Like with most things from the Seventies, this was Philip José Farmer’s fault”). Harlan Ellison’s “The New York Review of Bird” (Weird Heroes, Volume Two, ed. Byron Preiss, Pyramid Books, 1975), while not technically a fictional-author story, was tied in with Farmer’s project, and served to turn Ellison’s nom de plume, Cordwainer Bird, into a full-fledged fictional author. Bird went on to appear in Farmer’s fictional-author tale “The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight” as by Jonathan Swift Somers III (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Edward L. Ferman, November 1976; reprinted in Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Titan Books, 2013). Farmer himself used the Cordwainer Bird pseudonym for his story “The Impotency of Bad Karma” (Popular Culture, ed. Brad Lang, First Preview Edition, June 1977), which he later revised and had published, using his own name this time, under the title “The Last Rise of Nick Adams” (Chrysalis, Volume Two, ed. Roy Torgeson, Zebra Books, 1978), and integrated Bird into his Wold Newton genealogy in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Doubleday, 1973; reprinted in a deluxe hardcover edition by Meteor House, 2013, and in paperback and ebook editions by Altus Press, 2013).

  The failures—those fictional-author stories imagined but never written—are almost as compelling as the successes. Ed Ferman suggested that Farmer have Ron Goulart write a story as by his character José Silvera, and while Farmer did query him, there is no immediate evidence that Goulart pursued the matter. Farmer himself sought and was granted permission to write a story under the name Gustave von Aschenbach, the novelist from Thomas Mann’s A Death in Venice; however, apparently overwhelmed by the large number of fictional-author stories he planned to write on his own, Farmer turned the idea over to writer and literary critic Leslie Fiedler. This story, too, seems to have fallen by the wayside; if it was ever written, it never saw print.

  One of the first authors approached to join in the conspiracy was Philip K. Dick. Farmer trusted Dick with the secret of who had written Venus on the Half-Shell, and in the process discussed Dick writing a fictional-author tale for Ferman’s magazine. Dick decided this would be a short story entitled “A Man For No Countries” by Hawthorne Abdensen, the writer-character from his classic novel of alternate history, The Man in the High Castle. No fictional alter ego could have suited Dick better for the undertaking, as Abdensen himself was the fictional author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel that implied the existence of multiple realities. The Chinese-box scenario must have pleased Dick, who worked often with such themes; but it must also have pleased Farmer, who years later went on to write the similarly head-twisting Red Orc’s Rage, a novel wherein Farmer’s own World of Tiers series serves as the basis for a method of psychiatric therapy to treat
troubled adolescents, and in which Farmer himself lurks just off screen as a character. Although “A Man For No Countries” never seems to have been written, Farmer’s role in proposing that Dick pen a fictional-author story is important, for that unwritten story appears to have been the idea-kernel that led Dick to write the posthumously published novel Radio Free Albemuth, which itself was an aborted draft of his critically acclaimed novel VALIS. One must also ponder the timing of Farmer’s proposal, in the spring of 1974, a period when Dick claims to have had a number of mystical experiences, including one in which his mind was supposedly invaded by a foreign consciousness.

  While Farmer was by far the most industrious and successful of the group in executing the fictional-author ruse, many of his own plans had to be abandoned because of time constraints placed upon him by other writing obligations. Farmer’s correspondence, notes, and interviews from the fictional-author period reveal a long and fascinating list of stories never written and those started but not completed:

  “The Gargoyle” as by Edgar Henquist Gordon. (Fictional title and author from Robert Bloch’s short story “The Dark Demon”; permission for use granted by Robert Bloch.)

  “The Feaster from the Stars” as by Robert Blake. (This unfinished Cthulhu Mythos pastiche derives from a title and fictional author in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.” Lovecraft’s story is a sequel to Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars,” wherein Bloch kills off a character based on H. P. Lovecraft. Robert Blake, of course, is an analog for Robert Bloch, and is in turn killed off in Lovecraft’s tale. A good friend of Farmer’s, Bloch enthusiastically gave his blessing to this unfinished story about Haji Abdu al-Yazdi, a pseudonym belonging to one of Farmer’s real-life heroes, who was also the main protagonist of the Riverworld series: Sir Richard Francis Burton. Robert Blake is also mentioned in Farmer’s Cthulhu Mythos tale “The Freshmen,” which was recently reprinted in the anthology Tales of the Wold Newton Universe, Titan Books, 2013.)