Sad news: Philip José Farmer dead at 91

Philip José Farmer

Saw this today, but I guess it happened yesterday: Prolific science fiction author Philip José Farmer died Wednesday at 91. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even really know he was still alive.

I remember picking up one of his books from the library when I was in junior high and it blew my mind. It was “Dayworld” and it was the first in a long series (he was famous for his ongoing series). It told the story of a world beset by overpopulation, where the government had “solved” the problem by putting everyone into suspended animation and leting them out only one day a week. If Tuesday was your day, for example, you spent Wednesday through Monday hibernating while six other families used your house, car, job, etc. The novel followed a “daybreaker” who didn’t hibernate (I think he was trying to bring down the government) and who had to keep track of seven different lives — families, friends, careers.

I didn’t quite get how he didn’t age seven times as fast as everyone else, but Farmer tended to skip over things to get on with the storytelling, which was riveting (at least for a junior high student).

I’d like to revist some of his stuff in his honour, now that he’s dead. I think I might start with the Riverworld series. According to Farmer’s obituary:

In his Riverworld series Mr. Farmer imagined a river millions of miles long on a distant planet where virtually everyone who has died on Earth is physically reborn and given a second chance to make something of life. … one of the resurrected is a resentful Jesus, angry that he had been deceived about the nature of the afterlife.

I don’t know where people really go when they die, but that’s a more imaginative ending that I could have come up with.