Phone rang at 7:15 local time this morning; it was my mom, and I was certain she was going to tell me a beloved relative had just had a stroke. Rather, she almost gave me a stroke by telling me that Penguin/DAW had sent back my SASE, containing a letter saying that Papillon has passed Round #1 of reading. Now there’s Round #2, and then the Final Round. My book has moved from something like a 0.1% chance of being published to a 1% chance. It’ll take months to get through the next round. But, I’m one step closer to publication!

So, yeah, I didn’t go back to sleep this morning.

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CNN has the article; Philip Jose Farmer passed away yesterday in his sleep, at the ripe age of ninety-one.

Ninety-one is a long time to live, and I have no doubt that PJF felt pretty satisfied with his run. (Compared to, say, Harlan Ellison, who explained in the introduction to Angry Candy that death infuriates him.) He predicted his death - sort of - in the Riverworld series as happening in 2008, and he was only two months off.

… I sound banal because I’m trying to put a name to the way I feel. It’s sad when anyone shuffles off this mortal coil. PJF wasn’t writing anymore, and he had a lengthy and fruitful career, with a comfortable living and a mantle covered with trophies - two Hugos and a World Fantasy Award, at least. I would’ve liked to have met him. From his writings I got the impression of a wise and funny man. I’m grateful for the experience of reading his novels, and grateful that there are truckloads more I have yet to read.

I first read Farmer about fourteen months ago, when I began my project to expand my familiarity with the genre in which I hoped to write. I would go to the Half-Price books and grab any title by an author whose name I’d heard (in a positive context). Fortunately, PJF rewards random selection, and the title on which I first laid hands contained “Riders of the Purple Wage,” the 1967 novella that won his first Hugo. My mind was repeatedly blown, until only ribbons of flesh dangled from my cratered skull. The story changed the way I thought of science fiction, of writing, of life. At the time I was making my first timid forays into genre lit, and was worried about breaking the rules; “Riders” showed me that PJF had broken them forty years ago. And then some.

The collection continued to impress me. “One Down, One to Go,” at first seeming a pointless exercise in nihilism, stuck with me, and eventually the wry wisdom of the piece arose through its harshness. “The Oogenesis of Bird City” made me roar with laughter; in that story, as in some others - “The Voice of the Sonar in my Vermiform Appendix,” for example - he put forth the quintessentially Farmerian style of layering obtuse yet hilarious jokes over an absurd yet interesting plot, tying it all together with unexpected profundity, told with ease and charm. I wrote four short stories last August - “Killipedes,” “A Surfeit of Eels,” “Lunacide,” and “Planetworld” - and I consider them all exercises in the Farmerian form. (”Killipedes,” dear reader, will be published soon in the pages of Space Squid.) Finally, “Osiris on Crutches,” which I consider the finest of his works in this form, told me new things about the artistic pursuit and divinity, with such poise and refinement that it brought tears to my eyes, in the space of twenty pages. What a story!

The “Riverworld” series rightfully stands as his greatest accomplishment. I started the six-volume cycle last February, and burned through it in three months. PJF takes the whole span of human history, the breadth of human accomplishment, as his topic, and does the subject justice. He writes eloquently on sociology, philosophy, adventure, chemistry, physics, the ends of human evolution, and himself, in the form of Peter Jarius Frigate, a steel mill worker-cum-novelist from Peoria, Illinois. If the duty of a writer is to stare into the face of reality and not flinch, PJF succeeded admirably with these titanic novels.

His sense of adventure, his love of fiction, his zest for writing and his appetite for life, his utter irreverence, his frankness in discussing sex and God and the sex lives of gods - PJF’s legacy deserves only to grow. I’ve read eleven of his books; I’m grateful that I have almost thirty to go. I’m also grateful that so many of them have naked people on the covers. Some have naked people in the company of snakes.

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It’s coming along.
Let’s see. Mystics of Islam is down for the count. (Hey, you can read it for free right here!) A reference in that book to Neo-Platonism made me think, “I better find out what this Neo-Whatinism is, once and for all!” So I broadened the scope of my research into this “philosophy” of which I’ve heard so much. I’ve been laboring at Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, the first and hopefully the last book on philosophy that I’ll ever have to read. Russell’s wit and grace make for an easy and engaging read, but I still plod along at about twenty pages per hour (”pph”), as compared to fiction, where I usually clock 45-70 pph. The only way I’ve gotten as far as the early Medievals is by constant effort; I’ve been reading this tome for four or five hours a day for the past four days, which has tried my patience and my ability to sit still for long periods of time. (Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks, describing a portly gentleman: “He had an inexhaustible power of sitting still.” Heh.) But I’ve gleaned some understanding of this field. Philosopher Joel’s dismissal of philosophy as “90% bullshit” has proven largely accurate. There are some nuggets of wisdom dispersed like sweet corn in this tide of offal, though. Plotinus’s treatment of Plato forms part of the DNA of Christianity, and, by extension, Islam. I gain a broader understanding of the formation of world religions, which are the warp and weft of history.

All this will inform my next book. I hope. Or I’m just wasting time!

I represent to you one of these nuggets. The facts belong to history, the conclusions are my own: Saint Augustine was a brilliant man, a philosophical genius, and unfortunately monstrous in his opinions. How, one may wonder when perusing the millennia of Christianity, how did we go from the peace, love, and understanding of Christ to the brutality of the medieval Church, to the mirthless, sexless rigidity of the Puritans, to the modern inflexible sapless Baptists and Methodists? Augustine!
The saint was preoccupied - “obsessed” is almost an applicable description - by sin. Seven chapters of his Confessions (which I read last fall, and even understood some of) are taken up with his hand-wringing over a harmless boyhood prank. When a child, he stole some pears from a neighbor’s orchard. He was not hungry, and he had better pears at home. This crime was conceived of pure wickedness, and he loved it. He goes on to demonstrate that even infants at their mothers’ bosoms are “limbs of Satan” - when the mother is tired of nursing, and withdraws her breast, the infant greedily cleaves to it, thus committing gluttony before he can even walk. This, Augustine says, is because of Adam. Adam had free will, but forfeited it when he ate of the Tree - essentially, when he chose to exercise his free will. Sin entered his soul, polluted it, and that sin is transmitted to us, damning us before we are born. We have no right to complain of this, being wicked creatures.

Augustine wrote at the very end of the Roman Empire, and he passed this gloomy preoccupation of sin on to the barbarian kingdoms that later became Europe, transmitting guilt to Catholicism, where the founders might have intended joy. So much for free will!

To say nothing of sex! Augustine famously prayed for God to grant him “chastity and continence, but not yet”. For August loved a clench an’ wriggle as few saints do! He had a mistress for many years, he had the rich young man’s run of Rome in the pagan days; he had no obstacles in indulging his ferocious passions, and it was this indulgence, aggravated by and further aggravating his insane notions of sin, that kept him from Christianity until his adulthood. This passion, denied, turned to revulsion, and, through his important, influential, and rhetorically brilliant writings, entered Catholicism and cemented Christianity’s aversion to sex. It was Augustine who first said that sex, which is the subduction of the will, is permissible within marriage only to procreate - and only if it’s not enjoyed. All of you who, in your youth, were denied the pleasures of some young paramour on religious grounds, have Augustine to thank. Christ himself is mute on the subject; Augustine is verbose. For Europe’s pre-modern aversion to sexuality - the misogyny of medieval Catholicism, the invention of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy (alive and well in modern America); for America’s neurosis of sex; for its contradictory love of it in media and its damnation of it in a million megachurches, its calumny over the slightest nudity in our media; for every modern guilty sex hang-up on religious or moral terms, on what is after all a function of biology - we have Augustine to thank!

And no amount of further familiarity with his views has ameliorated my stance; if anything, it has aggravated it. The more I learn, the more repulsive his philosophy becomes.

Oh, and he invented the concept of a “just war”. And God knows that has brought much happiness into the world.

Suffice to say, in my book he occupies the position of “least favorite saint.”

To digress!

I had time to tuck away The Medieval Soldier, which was occasionally helpful, mainly in its minute description of medieval weaponry. Are you interested to know how the shape of the bosses on Saxon shields changed over the Dark Ages? The author certainly is! There were also descriptions on medieval ships, an area in which my knowledge was hitherto scanty.

I’m looking forward to the works of the historians-lovers Frances and Joseph Gies: Life in a Medieval Village and Life in a Medieval Castle. I think I will find that the average human of the Middle Ages enjoyed material prosperity, freedom from disease and superstition, and the availability of diverse resources for self-education. Or maybe I’m thinking of something else.

When I have time, I’m reading Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book of his four-book “New Sun” cycle. Sometimes, I become so inundated with books and pages and paragraphs and sentences that I begin to forget that words have power; Gene Wolfe shatters that illusion. Every sentence is a gem.

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I’ve been reading the “Arabian Nights” (or “The Thousand and One Nights,” or, in the more literal translation that I can’t decide is retarded or coolly archaic, “The Thousand Nights and a Night”) as research for my next novel. The frame story, for those who don’t know, is thus: the Sultan, to take revenge on womankind, takes a new bride every night, “enjoys” her, and then cuts off her head in the morning. Scheherazade saves her neck by telling the Sultan a story every night, ending it just when it gets most interesting.

So, I propose, one should endeavor to write. Imagine that if your book cannot hold the reader’s interest, someone willchop off your head. Who could have writer’s block in circumstances like that? (Neil Gaiman wrote an excellent poem on this that you can read right here.) I once thought of putting a picture of my hated boss over my writing desk, to remind me why I’m working; Jack London posted his bills over his typewriter; I’m going to put up a sign reading “THE BLADE IS AT YOUR NECK.”

Alternate, or, rather, complement: the Samurai method for building discipline. Paraphrased from The Way of the Samurai: “The true samurai’s focus should be so great that, even if his head is separated from his body, his body will go on [typing].”

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I’m reading “The Mystics of Islam” as research for my next novel. It reminds me of a section of the “Riverworld” series. The characters find a mysterious tower, built by the extremely ethically advanced builders of Riverworld. The door is protected by an “ethical barrier” through which only people of their extreme ethical development can pass. Among the protagonists, only the Sufi is able to pass through the barrier, indicating his extreme ethical development.

… wouldn’t it be easier to use a keypad? A thumbprint scanner? Voice recognition? Retinal scanner? Hell, a padlock would do the job. “The combo is 8-15-24. Don’t tell anyone who’s not highly ethically advanced.”

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I do sell stuff from time to time. My heartwarming inspirational tale “Killipedes” will appear in august Austin publication “Space Squid” at the end of the month.

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So, in the week we’ve been back, I put away the Sword and Scimitar book, the Templar book, and The Terror. Sword was a very good, fairly unbiased history of the Crusades. Brief but thorough. The Templar book was longer - 350 pages versus 200 - and had disappointingly little information on the Templars. The author was attempting to hew away the myth that surrounds the order, but it seems that in doing so he pared it a little lean. There are brief passages scattered throughout on their Rule, their modus vivendi, their equipage, etc., but most of the book is simply a history of the Crusades - more exhaustive than Sword’s, granted - with frequent mentions of the Templars and what they were doing at any point in time. I wanted something unbiased, but the book didn’t quite deliver what I was after. It appears that I need some blatant mythmongering after all.

The Terror was superb. A historical novel, a thriller, fantasy - it succeeds on all counts. The book is an epic in praise of suffering. Page one gives us horrible, horrifying conditions, and every page steadily worsens the situation until you really don’t feel like reading the book anymore. But you do, because it’s just that good.

That said, I’d recommend Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos before this one. The Terror is 950 pages long, but it only adds up to about 500, 600 at the most. After reading certain lengthy books - Bleak House, American Gods, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle - I find myself thinking, “If I were the author, and I had taken 600/800/1350 pages to tell my story, I would wish I’d accomplished more.” The Hyperion books are equally massive, and they have much more to say. There are still scenes in The Terror that only Simmons could write, thrilling scenes that spark with energy, horrific scenes that make you want to put down the book and keep reading at the same time.

I’m steadily making notes for my next novel. There’s a bunch of loose ideas and threads of plots and characters. I love this point, when the novel’s wide open and it could come out any which way. I’ve got: secret societies. Immortality. Epic battles on the dusty plains. Bearded ascetics in mail. The embalmed head of Christ. Giants. The end of the world, but in a good way.
I’m looking forward to writing this one. It’s going to be more ambitious than Papillon, more difficult - for me and for you, dear reader -more demanding, more complex, and, if I can pull it off, much much better.

One writer, can’t remember who, said, “Make sure that you really want to be a writer. There are much easier ways to be miserable.” I can’t tell you how many times that quote has made my stomach hurt with doubt. There is misery. There are days of agony over plots and characters, days spent juggling wholly imaginary figures and ideas, the motives, wants, and needs of other (imaginary) people, trying to make them all fit together into a consumable, entertaining whole. Hundreds of hours staring at a blank screen. Hundreds of hours deleting and rewriting your last sentence, a hundred times. Never mind the misery of the road to publication.
But I often find myself in my spare time wanting to play video games, read more science-fiction, comics, even watch television. And I think, “Ah, I could do all those things if I didn’t have to write!” So there you have it - I have to write.

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