Short term, the result of Vonnegut’s agreement was the immediate obliteration of Farmer’s writer’s block. Farmer knocked out the novel Venus on the Half-Shell in six weeks, but that’s just a figure of speech, because nobody has ever really “knocked out” a prose work of any length, have they? And even if it were possible, why would you want to punch a novel before it was published? Anyway, Farmer had a wonderful time writing the book; laughter could be heard howling up from his basement office, drowning out the sound of the typewriter keys banging away. And a drowned sound isn’t a pretty sight, bloats up bad and bursts… Only joking. Long term, the results were much farther reaching. And if you’re a non-rascal look away now… So you thought you’d skip the last paragraph, did you? Wiseguy, huh?
Talking about “typewriter keys banging away,” did I mention that Farmer was the greatest ever master of Bangsian Fantasy? We’ll return to this later…
Venus on the Half-Shell was touted (trouted?) as the publishing event of the year, the year in which it appeared, naturally. Locus magazine ran an announcement in its April 6, 1973 issue which stated that Venus on the Half-Shell would be written by “(a well-known SF author—not Vonnegut) ((Sturgeon??)).” The April 29 issue contained a follow-up reporting that, “Theodore Sturgeon has denied being ‘Kilgore Trout.’” This was followed by the May 11 issue that contained a letter from David Harris, an editor at Dell, who claimed to have a letter from Trout. This in part said, “As far as that item about me goes, I’m not at all surprised—there are times when I doubt my own reality…”
There was also speculation that Isaac Asimov might be the mysterious “real” author of the book, or perhaps it was John Sladek, another trickster, who had already conceived I-Click-as-I-Move, a robot version of Asimov, who was pretending to be Asimov pretending to be Trout. My own view is that T.J. Bass should have been nominated too and it’s fishy that he wasn’t.
Things settled down until the August 11 issue of Locus where they reported a rumor that Philip José Farmer was Kilgore Trout. This was followed by notices in the September 12 issue where Farmer denied being Trout and another letter by Trout appeared where he said he was flattered that all of these authors were rumored to be him, but that “there must be some way to assert my existence as a real person.” He couldn’t think of a way, though, and neither can I, offhand, and that’s because he wasn’t a real person. So really he was being duplicitous. Or rather, Farmer was being duplicitous on his behalf, which was generous of him really, if you stop to think about it.
But this was just the beginning of the japery. Farmer was an expert trickster at the center of his warm heart, and he couldn’t wait until the publication of the novel to begin having some serious fun. The November 1974 issue of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Forum contained a long and very badly written, badly sppellled, and even worsely punct-uated letter from Kilgore Trout asking for an application so he might join, and also saying that he was looking for a place to live. The letter concluded, “…if you need character references write david harris of dell. dont write to mr vonnegut. he never answers his mail.”
Shortly afterwards, an incident occurred that almost stopped the project before it began. On December 1, 1974 well-known literary critic Leslie Fiedler was on the PBS television program Firing Line, hosted by William F. Buckley. They were speaking of science fiction and both Kurt Vonnegut and Kilgore Trout’s names came up. Fiedler, who was a friend of Farmer’s and knew all about Venus on the Half-Shell, said, without naming Farmer: “What he did is he just wrote a book by Kilgore Trout… Vonnegut didn’t want him to do it, but he said, ‘I’ll go to court and get my name officially changed to Kilgore Trout, and you can’t stop me.’” Vonnegut was angered and withdrew permission for Farmer to write any more novels “by” Kilgore Trout.
Prior to the novel’s publication in paperback, it was abridged and serialized over two issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (December 1974 and January 1975). It was the feature story of the December issue, getting not just top billing, but cover art as well. So it can be rightly said that this was the place and circumstance of my birth, where the world first discovered that Simon Wagstaff—the protagonist of Kilgore Trout’s first work to be published outside of a nudie magazine— had a favorite science fiction author. Me.
Excuse me while I stop for a moment to catch my breath. It always fills me with a strange feeling when I stop to consider that I’m not a living human being, that my father was an author and my mother a magazine. Well, perhaps some of your fathers were authors too, but I bet they didn’t write you into existence, did they? I bet they created you some other way. OK, I’m fine now. Let’s move on.
In the same way that Vonnegut would have his characters describe stories written by Kilgore Trout, Trout, I mean Farmer, did the same with me. Simon Wagstaff, the protagonist of the novel, would tell his companions about stories I had written. And let’s face it, telling readers about fictional stories that haven’t really been written is a shortcut method of laying claim to the ideas in those stories without having to go through the exhausting process of actually writing them. So Trout saved himself a lot of valuable time, and the saving was passed on to Farmer. And we have no choice but to assume Trout passed all that saved time on.
So the stories I, Jonathan Swift Somers III, had written could be summarized even though they didn’t exist; but they could only be summarized if the pretence was maintained that they did exist. Otherwise, they would just be pitches, not proper summaries, and pitching stories is less satisfying than summarizing them, even if they are identical. Does that make sense?
In a similar vein, the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem once published a volume of literary reviews of books that didn’t exist. He did this because he didn’t have time to write the actual books but he wanted to lay claim to the original ideas they contained. Some critics feel this is a lazy approach but I believe it’s ingenious and I only wish that Lem had reviewed my own books. However, Farmer seems to have had more energy than Lem, more energy than one might deem possible, for he was willing not only to imagine and summarize stories that didn’t exist in order to save time; he was willing to later spend that same time writing those stories to match and even exceed the summaries! And let me add that Farmer once reviewed one of Lem’s books, Imaginary Magnitude, a collection of introductions to books that don’t exist. Squeeze my Lem ’til the juice run down my leg!
But to return to the way that I was presented in the Venus novel… In the first instance, the story described (that is, the story I had written) was of less importance in the text of the framing novel and Farmer spent more time describing me. Apparently he didn’t want anyone to have to come along behind him and fill in the details of my life story, as he had to do with Trout. The other stories of mine, however, were more detailed in their summary and were revealing about two of “my” creations. First, there was Ralph von Wau Wau, a genetically enhanced German Shepherd with a 200 IQ and the ability to speak. Farmer states that with the exception of Ralph, all of my protagonists have major disabilities, this being due to my own condition of being paralyzed from the waist down. The second of my characters described is John Clayter, a space traveler whose spacesuit is full of (often malfunctioning) prosthetics.