Classic science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer died at 91.
He created the novel series Riverworld and World of Tiers. He's most famous for his Wold Newton stories, where he established relationships between unconnected stories and characters through information already existing in their stories.
He posited that Tarzan and Doc Savage, among a zillion others, were all related. He wrote a fun, crazy adventure novel with thinly-disguised versions of Tarzan and Savage in A Feast Unknown. The excellent Myths of the Modern Age is all about the Wold Newton stories. Buy it. You'll like it.
Farmer's stories are unashamed high adventure, superhero comics in book form. Farmer created complex, exhaustive continuity decades before comic-book universes tried it.
Farmer said in a 1998 interview to be the writer of the first science fiction story containing the word "orgasm."
"He wrote A Feast Unknown, one of my favorite sci-fi novels, which is also one of the weirdest I've read." -- Bryan Crowson
* * * * *
"The Riverworld books should be required reading." -- Matt "KaosDevice" Cowger
* * * * *
"On the Word Balloon podcast with Captain America and Daredevil writer Ed Brubaker, he called Farmer "the first
fan-fiction writer," and of course he meant that it the best possible way." -- Van Plexico
His book Tarzan Alive claims, like Edgar Rice Burroughs did, that Tarzan was a real guy. Here is an interview with Farmer from a Tarzan documentary.
Farmer says he talked on the phone with Tarzan and was "deeply moved." Awesome.