Philip José Farmer (born January 26, 1918) is an American author, principally known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

Many of Farmer's works involve reworking existing characters from fiction and history, such as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg , filling in the missing time periods from Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. His favorite subjects for this type of work are the pulp heroes Tarzan and Doc Savage.

This has led to a burgeoning of a particular type of this form of fiction which is frequently referred to by reference to Farmer's original premise, the Wold Newton family.

His Riverworld series follows the adventures of such diverse characters as Richard Burton, Hermann Göring, and Samuel Clemens through a bizarre afterlife in which every human ever to have lived is simultaneously resurrected along a single river valley that stretches over an entire planet.

Farmer wrote Venus on the Half-Shell under the name Kilgore Trout, a fictitious author who appears in the works of Kurt Vonnegut.

Farmer's works often contain sexual themes: his collection of short stories Strange Relations was a notable event in the history of sex in science fiction.

His parallel universe series World of Tiers inspired Roger Zelazny's Amber series.

His work sometimes contains religious themes and has included Jesus as a character in both the Riverworld series and Jesus on Mars. (To be specific, Jesus shows up in the Riverworld setting during a short story in Riverworld and Other Stories and is not a character in the primary books of the Riverworld series.)

External links

• The Official Philip José Farmer Home Page
• Philip José Farmer - International Bibliography
• An Expansion of Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton Universe