Philip Farmer - Venus on the Half-Shell

But this is just nitpicking. Xog was infested with nits and picked them all, or most of them, probably. And I am not he. The point is that Farmer was a pioneer, an explorer, an authentic original. He was a serious trickster who liked to juggle with mirrors and sometimes jump through them; and the images in those mirrors were often other mirrors full of other tricksters juggling mirrors or leaping through them. And every time he jumped through a mirror, he always emerged unscathed on the other side, and so did his reflections.

I should know, I, Jonathan Swift Somers III, being myself a fictional author who is a parody of another fictional author, created as a character in a book that supposedly didn’t exist. Right. So, who better than me to give you a brief overview of Farmer’s blatant disregard, if not downright manipulation, of reality?

My story begins, oddly enough, with writer’s block. The best way to deal with writer’s block is to tackle it head on. That’s where the expression “block and tackle” comes from. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Nonetheless it’s true. If you have writer’s block, tackle it!

Farmer did exactly that. He was under pressure from publishers and readers (and let it be noted that these are different kinds of pressure) to write the next book in his renowned Riverworld series (which is fiction about real historical people in an imaginary afterlife), or the next book in his World of Tiers series (which contains characters named from William Blake’s mythology as well as a character with the same initials, P.J.F., as Farmer himself), or the next volume about Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban (pastiches of Tarzan and Doc Savage). Even though all of these novels borrowed playfully from other works in one way or another, Farmer realised that he was stuck and needed a new toy to play with.

At this point I’d like to mention something that Harlan Ellison once said, which is that there are in fact two different kinds of writer’s block. The first kind is the famous kind, where the writer simply has no ideas; but the second kind is worse than that, even though it’s rarely discussed or written about. The second kind is when the writer is full of ideas, bursting with them, has so much choice that he’s paralyzed. He simply doesn’t have the energy to—

Excuse me. I seemed to run out of steam for some reason… But to return to what I was saying earlier… Farmer was stuck.

Enter Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a science fiction writer with mainstream success, or a mainstream writer who used science fiction tropes—it all depends on whom you ask, and how stuffy that person’s contemporary American literature professor was, or how keenly you want to go along with Vonnegut’s own interpretation of events. I’m happy to go along with anyone when it’s easier. In many of Vonnegut’s novels, various things crop up more than once. Firestorms, for example. A bird that goes “poo-tee-weet,” for another. Who knows why? Maybe Vonnegut did.

But anyway… one of the many things that crop up more than once is a character who is himself a science fiction writer; always down on his luck and trod upon, the all-but-forgotten genius Kilgore Trout. More often than not, Trout doesn’t appear in Vonnegut’s novels in person, so to speak, but is instead cited as the author of a wild science fiction story that is then described. Because of Trout’s crooked agent, most of his stories ended up as filler in cheap porn magazines instead of being sold to science fiction markets where Trout might have gained the recognition and wealth he deserved. Mind you, talking about wealth, at the end of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, he is given $50,000 by the Rosewater Foundation, so maybe he wasn’t that unlucky after all. But let’s not nitpick… Me not Xog.

In name, if not circumstance, Trout was based on the real-life writer Theodore Sturgeon, whom nobody seems to have a bad word to say about. But Farmer felt that he himself also had much in common with Trout, to the point that he easily identified with this fictional author. In fact, he identified with him so strongly, he decided to become Trout. At least in name, at least for a while. And let’s remember what Vonnegut claimed the moral of his novel Mother Night was, namely that we are who we pretend to be, so we should be careful who we pretend to be.

Rather impertinently at this point, I would like to inject here the observation that if Kilgore Trout had ever met the writer Greg Bear the stage would have been set for a symbolic wilderness scene of paw fishing that couldn’t ever really happen. Bears do fish for trout, don’t they? Or is it just salmon? Don’t mind me, I’m eccentric.

Anyway, Farmer’s idea was simple, but it was also bold, ingenious and daring. It was this: take one of the novels that the fictional Trout is described as having written and actually write it. Hey presto! Although Vonnegut’s paperback publisher, Dell, loved the idea, gaining permission from Vonnegut was a bit harder. It was almost as hard as escaping from the interior of the planet Mercury in a flying saucer, or traveling the entire length of the universe just to deliver the message, “Greetings!”

After sending many letters to Vonnegut in the days before email but never receiving a reply, Farmer finally got him on the phone. After a long conversation, Vonnegut reluctantly (and presumably curtly or even Kurtly) agreed to let Farmer borrow his creation. Lending creations is always fraught with danger! Will you get them back dog-eared and battered? Or spruced up and bettered? That’s the gamble!

Before we see what happens next, assuming you haven’t already skipped this paragraph like an impatient rascal, let’s back up just a bit. How much? This much, no more, no less. Mind out, paragraph reversing! Oops, crushed a pedestrian in the margins. His mind really is out right now. Anyway, long before Farmer decided to go all out and write a novel pretending to be Trout, he studied the fictional science fiction writer as intently as it’s possible to study a nonexistent personage. He read every novel by Vonnegut, apart from the ones that hadn’t yet been written, and compiled a comprehensive dossier on Trout. Then, filling in the missing data with his own invented “research,” Farmer wrote “The Obscure Life and Hard Times of Kilgore Trout: A Skirmish in Biography” (Moebius Trip, December 1971).

Short term, the result of Vonnegut’s agreement was the immediate obliteration of Farmer’s writer’s block. Farmer knocked out the novel Venus on the Half-Shell in six weeks, but that’s just a figure of speech, because nobody has ever really “knocked out” a prose work of any length, have they? And even if it were possible, why would you want to punch a novel before it was published? Anyway, Farmer had a wonderful time writing the book; laughter could be heard howling up from his basement office, drowning out the sound of the typewriter keys banging away. And a drowned sound isn’t a pretty sight, bloats up bad and bursts… Only joking. Long term, the results were much farther reaching. And if you’re a non-rascal look away now… So you thought you’d skip the last paragraph, did you? Wiseguy, huh?

Talking about “typewriter keys banging away,” did I mention that Farmer was the greatest ever master of Bangsian Fantasy? We’ll return to this later…

Venus on the Half-Shell was touted (trouted?) as the publishing event of the year, the year in which it appeared, naturally. Locus magazine ran an announcement in its April 6, 1973 issue which stated that Venus on the Half-Shell would be written by “(a well-known SF author—not Vonnegut) ((Sturgeon??)).” The April 29 issue contained a follow-up reporting that, “Theodore Sturgeon has denied being ‘Kilgore Trout.’” This was followed by the May 11 issue that contained a letter from David Harris, an editor at Dell, who claimed to have a letter from Trout. This in part said, “As far as that item about me goes, I’m not at all surprised—there are times when I doubt my own reality…”