Seekers of Tomorrow (52 page)

"One of the most extraordinary and significant things about science fiction is its almost total lack of sex, even of fake sex—except, of course, in the 'mad scientist's' operating-chambers particularly prominent in the movie versions," states G. Legman (called "without any reservations whatev-er—the principal living specialist in erotic folklore") in
The Horn Book, Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography
(University Books, 1964).

As a generality, Legman's point was valid, except that his investigations into science fiction prior to taking up residence on the French Riviera in 1949 were superficial and he appar-ently has lost contact with it altogether since that time. If he had not, he could scarcely have remained oblivious to the impact of a midwesterner with the regionally appropriate name of Farmer on the field of science fiction with a short novel,
The Lovers
(startling stories, August, 1952), which fathered a brief but traumatic revolution contributing toward the maturation of science fiction.

An introductory blurb, "Entrance Cue," by Samuel Mines, editor of startling stories, said of
The Lovers:

"We think this story is a delicate and beautiful, yet powerful and shock-ing piece of work. . . . We think that Philip Jose Farmer is the find of the year." To his readers, in the department "The Ether Vibrates," he made a further telling point: ". . . we think
The Lovers
is an important story. Important not necessarily because it is great literature but because it will make a lot of fine writers sit up and be quoted as blurting: 'My gosh, I didn't know we could do anything like that in science fiction!' or words to that effect." He was, from the vantage of hindsight, 100 per cent right.

The revolutionary approach in
The Lovers
grew from the following story line. An Earth ship lands on a planet where the manlike dominating species has evolved from insect forms. A "human" race once lived there, too, infiltrated by a parasitic form of insect that grew into the precise form of a woman. These parasites, the lalitha, were all female and could breed only by mating with a human male. After preg-nancy, the mother would die and the larvae would feed off her flesh until mature enough to emerge. It was discovered by the lalitha that the heavy drinking of a foul-smelling liquor made from beetle juice, prevented pregnancy. When an Earthman, Yarrow, unaware of the true nature of the lalitha, enters into an affair with one named Jeannette he becomes so fond of her that he waters her beetle juice, to cure her of what he thinks is a leaning toward alcoholism. The result is conception and her death. This love story was clothed in unparallelled richness of background and related with a fascinating, absorbing literary technique. The old saw, "If you borrow from one author it's plagiarism, but if you borrow from many it's research," has an application here. Farmer owes a debt to easily a score of writers, but what he does with the elements he utilizes be-comes singularly and uniquely his own. The smoothly handled incorporation of sex in the story he may have picked up from L. Sprague de Camp, whose work he admired and whose
Rogue Queen,
describing the methods of procreation and social mores in a humanoid society pat-terned after the bees, had appeared in a Doubleday book in the spring of 1951. Many of the characteristics of the Wogs, the dominant insect race of the alien planet, were taken from L. Frank Baum's
The Marvelous Land of Oz,
which had a famed character named The Woggle Bug. Further evidence of the Baum influence is apparent in the planet's name: Ozagen. The treatment of the alien creatures owes much to Stanley G. Weinbaum. The stylistic modernity and the care-ful build-up of future civilizations is reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein. To say all this is no more disparaging than to say that Bradbury exhibits a paradoxical blend of the styles of Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, for what Bradbury has done with his method is distinctly his own, and what Farmer has homogenized from his sources represents a per-sonal achievement.

Not unexpectedly, it was not the end result that other science-fiction writers admired in Farmer, but merely the sensationalism of his using biological sex as his central theme. This represented to them the breaking of a barrier and their reaction was immediate.

A California author, Sherwood Springer, reading
The Lov-ers,
rushed a story he had written over a year previously to editor Mines. It was published as
No Land of Nod
in the December, 1952, thrilling wonder stories and concerned the problem of the continuation of the race when the last man and woman on Earth are father and daughter. The decision is eventually made by the daughter as it was by Lot's offspring in Genesis.

The reverse situation appears when the last woman on earth, pregnant, realizes she must have a boy if the race is to continue, in a story by Wallace West, appropriately titled
Eddie for Short
(amazing stories, December, 1953).

From that point on, science-fiction writers decided to be-come really daring. At the forefront was Theodore Sturgeon, with
The World Well Lost
(universe science fiction, June, 1953) in which two lovebirds from another planet turn out to be homosexuals; and, for good measure, he con-tributed
The Wages of
Synergy,
(startling stories, August, 1953) which starts with the shocked reaction of a woman whose lover dies while they are amatorily involved. Some years later he would write
Affair with a Green Monkey
(venture science fiction, May, 1957) which was little more than an adroitly phrased dirty joke. It is possible that the field was moving in that direction anyway, and that
The Lovers
merely was the first of an inevitable trend. Alfred Bester's
The Demolished Man
(galaxy science fiction, January-February-March, 1951) had made it very clear that the world of tomorrow would know what sex was all about, and Richard Matheson, in his novelette
Lover When You're Near Me
(galaxy science fiction, May, 1952), had centered his story around the tele-pathic seduction of an Earthman by an alien female physical-ly abhorrent to him.

Yet, despite this, science fiction is surpassed in prudery only by the Frank Merriwell stories. Even in hard-cover books, where a higher price made an adult audience certain, sex has not been too common in science fiction. It does appear as a prime motivator in S. Fowler Wright's novel
Deluge
(1928), where surviving males, after a worldwide inunda-tion, battle for the possession of females. It probably con-tributed as much to the sale of
Brave New World
(1932) by Aldous Huxley as the author's philosophy, what with the encouragement of erotic play in children, the feelies replacing talking pictures and the popular pastime of Orgy Porgy. Even the philosophy of the novel was deeply concerned with sex as related to reproduction. Far more serious and philosophical, Olaf Stapledon's
Last and First Men
(1931) projected the history of mankind's future for hundreds of millions of years to come, and made a point of detailing the sexual changes and mores in the evolving race. Later, in
Sirius
(1944), Stapledon uses a tragic relationship, between a mutated dog of human-level intelligence and a girl, as a moving alle-gory. However, even as early as 1930, hard-cover books no longer represented the mainstream of science fiction, but were already on the fringe. The body of science fiction, the real area of development, was in such magazines as amazing STORIES, WONDER STORIES, and ASTOUNDING STORIES, in which everything was rigidly puritanical. The female of the species, when present at all, was usually a professor's daugh-ter whose prime function was to be captured by and be rescued from some bug-eyed monster. Some psychologists have tried to read sexual implications into that plot device, but it is probable the readers were more correct than naive when they assumed that the beast was hungry.

Among the rare and "racy" moments that diligent research might uncover was an episode in
Via the
Hewitt Ray
by a woman author, M. F. Rupert, published in the Spring, 1930, science wonder quarterly. A ray takes Lucille Hewitt, daughter of its inventor, into the fourth dimension. There, the dominant civilization is entirely female, except for a few males permitted to live for breeding purposes. A little ques-tioning, however, reveals to Miss Hewitt the scandalous fact that "the males whose intelligence average was below our mental standard but who had physical beauty were made sterile by a special process and housed on the thirteenth tier."

"But you don't need these sterile men," Lucille Hewitt points out. "Why do you keep them?"

"We changed a lot of things," she is candidly told, "but we were unable, without danger to the future of our race, to change the fundamentals of natural instincts. When we wom-en have borne two children to the race we are not allowed to reproduce a third time. Nevertheless the old biological urge returns and then we find use for the sterile male."

"But that is downright immoral," Lucille objects.

Her guide refuses to be trapped in a discussion on morality and finally puts her down with the reply:

"Well, to you, with your present standard of morals it isn't right, but to us it is a highly efficient manner of settling our difficulties."

There were no repercussions from science wonder quar-terly readers to that "salacious" exchange, possibly because it comprised only a few paragraphs in an issue that otherwise lived up to the highest standards of Fred Fearnot.

The renamed wonder stories quarterly didn't get away with a "zippy" approach a second time, when it published a gay satiric frolic by Don M. Lemon,
The Scarlet Planet,
in the Winter, 1931, number. Thousands of girls inhabit a scarlet planet on which an Earth ship lands, and thousands more rest in underground vaults in suspended animation. Some of them are blood-sucking vampires, others half-snake and half-women manufacturing a narcotic gas from the evaporation of their tears. The Earthmen don't care; they romp around the world with a leer in their eyes and some very obvious banter on their lips. Despite the fact that they make honest women out of two of the girls at the end of the novel, the readers didn't take to men who
thought
that way. Don M. Lemon had contributed fantasies to periodicals like all-story magazine since 1905, but this was to be his first and last appearance in a science-fiction publication.

Apart from a few test-tube babies, the magazines steered remarkably clear of sex until the entrance of marvel science stories, with its first number dated August, 1938. The editor, Robert O. Erisman, gave the field one of the finest underground civilization novels of all time,
Survival
by Arthur J. Burks, but he also had decided that the opportunity was present for a bit of titillation. Henry Kuttner, who was eventually to become a major modern shaper of science fiction, had submitted several action potboilers. Erisman told him he would take them if some risque passages, in the manner of horror tales and terror tales, which mixed sex and sadism, were interpolated. Kuttner revised to this formula four stories under his own and pen names in the first two issues. The howls of protest were such that all sex was dropped with the third issue of the magazine and the name of Henry Kuttner was so discredited in science fiction that it took him five years to reestablish his standing, and then under pen names.

When the competition of a flood of new science-fiction magazines in 1939 put marvel science stories into finan-cial trouble, it changed its name to marvel tales with the December, 1939, issue and switched to a straight formula of sadism and sex. Again the policy lasted only two issues, published six months apart, and the magazine altered its title to marvel stories and a "no funny business" policy with its November, 1940, issue.

There were those who felt that the ban on sex was wrong. Writing in the December, 1945, fantasy times, Thomas S. Gardner, Ph.D., said: "Sex should be incorporated into science fiction as a standard life pattern and treated from all phases just as political systems are discussed. . . . But just mention sex and one has not only a figurative fight but a literal fight on his hands. Sex is very, very tabu, and can cause the most violent disagreements possible. Just why that is so is hard to understand." G. Legman, erotica authority, presented his theory. "The reason for this (omission of sex from science fiction) is neither due to oversight nor external censorship, but the fact that the largest percentage of the audience for the
echt
-pulp science-fiction literature is composed of adolescent boys (who continue reading it even after they are grown up), who are terrified of women, sex, and pubic hair." The foregoing might explain the policy that kept sex out of science fiction, but it fails to explain the absolute rejection of such material until Philip Jose Farmer's
The Lovers.
The answer most probably is that science fiction is a literature of ideas. The people who read it are entertained and even find escape through mental stimulation. Sex, vulgar or artistic, is available to them in countless forms if they wish it, but the type of intellectual speculation they enjoy is presented only in science fiction. Farmer's stories were scientifically based on biology which happened to involve sex. The stories could not have been written without the sexual elements. Not only was the sex integral to the story, but the concepts were entirely new. Because the presentation of thought-provoking speculation, sex or otherwise, is a legitimate function of science fiction, Farmer succeeded. In doing so, he established a precedent and thereby became one of the prime movers of modern science fiction.

The author of
The Lovers
was christened Philip Jose Farmer after his birth, January 26, 1918, in North Terre Haute, Indiana. The "Jose" was the first name of his father's mother and the change to "Jose" was made by Philip him-self, who resented being labeled for a woman and correctly decided it would lend color to the drabness of his last name, Farmer. Actually, his father was born George Park, but he adopted the last name of a relative who raised him. The father was an electrical power engineer by profession, a practicing Christian Scientist of Irish, English, and Dutch extraction. The mother, Lucille Theodora Jackson, was of German, Cherokee, Scotch and English background and be-came a Christian Scientist after marriage. One of five children, Philip had a happy and normal childhood. Even during the Depression, the family was ade-quately fed, clothed, and housed. His problem was that, despite participation in high school dramatics and the fact that he was outstanding at football, track, and the broad jump, Philip suffered from a distinct inferiority complex and an extra-rigid puritanical streak.