Black Gate

The first Philip Jose Farmer book I ever read was To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), the Hugo-Award winning first novel in his famous Riverworld series. Today he’s just as well known for his World of Tiers, Dayworld, and Tarzan novels, among many other other popular series. Farmer was famously prolific, and he kept at it right until the very end, when he died in 2009 at the age of 91.

I have more than a few Philip Jose Farmer books in my to-be-read pile. But the oldest, way down in the stratified layers near the floor, I bought back in 1980 . Dark is the Sun, one of his lesser known novels, is a far-future science fiction tale that reads like epic fantasy, and the classic Darrell K. Sweet cover certainly reinforced that. There are witches, thieves, gigantic walking skeletons, mobile plants, magic eggs, haunted jungles, and the threat of a collapsing universe… if you wanted to market a novel to a million young D&D players in the early 80s, you could have done a lot worse.

Dark is the Sun reminds me of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, with its fifteen-billion-years hence setting; the 1982 British paperback edition from Panther, to my mind, rather resembled Brian Aldiss’ far-future classic Hothouse (see below).

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The Signet science fiction novels of Zach Hughes

Zach Hughes’ For Texas and Zed (1976) was one of the very first science fiction novels I ever read, at the tender age of twelve. I probably plucked it from the paperback spinner in the PX on Rockcliffe airbase in Ottawa in the fall of ’76, shortly after we arrived from Nova Scotia — the same place I bought A.E. van Vogt’s Slan a few weeks later. The description on the back of For Texas and Zed was precisely the kind of thing that would have appealed to me at the age of 12, even if I was a little vague on where Texas was, exactly.

Spacemen from Texas on Earth had settled this remote planet centuries ago. While the rest of the galaxy was being divided between two vast warring empires, Planet Texas preserved its independence, created its own unique civilization, developed its own advanced technology. But now all that Planet Texas was and all that it believed in were threatened, as the super-powers of space moved in for the kill.

I was still figuring out what science fiction was all about at the time. But even at 12, I knew For Texas and Zed wasn’t a very good novel (even if if did contain the very first sex scene I ever encountered, with a casual description of female nipples that’s still scorched into my brain four decades later). Slan proved to be a much better book, and I gladly searched out more by A.E. van Vogt. But I never read another Zach Hughes novel (though it’s possible I did furtively flip through them in book stores, on the lookout for the word “nipple.”)

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