This website, the Philip José Farmer - International Bibliography, came online at the end of December 1998. I prepared and worked at it for nearly a year before I published the site online.

So, we have here our 15th Anniversary of the PJF-IB. It is maybe hard to believe that I have been working for more than 15 years on the contents of the bibliography. The site started with about 100-150 pages, it has now more than 400 pages. I'm still not finished with all the information, the redesigning of the story pages, and the other ideas I have.

Most of the bibliography is based on my own huge collection of Farmer items: book editions and printings, magazines, fanzines, anthologies, indexes, critical works about, etceteras. New or unknown publications are still found after all these years, so I'm not yet ready.
Maybe the PJF-IB will never really be completely finished. But as long as I can and want I'm going on with it. Hope you stay tuned!

In the current issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, February 2014, Robert Silverberg writes in his column "Reflections" about "Rereading Philip José Farmer". His whole, lengthy column goes about that first published science fiction story of Phil, "The Lovers".

Silverberg: «When the August 1952 issue of Startling that featured "The Lovers" appeared, I began reading it at once. And read on and on, awed, overwhelmed, even, by the vigor of its prose, the ingenuity and inventiveness of its concepts, the headlong energy of Farmer's storytelling, and—yes—the unabashed frankness of the erotic content.
And now, after sixty years, I've reread Farmer's pathbreaking story—the original magazine novella, not the novel that he made out of it long afterward. I was afraid it wouldn't stand up to my youthful memories of it. But it did. It certainly did.»

See the website of Asimov's Science Fiction for ordering a copy of the issue, or reading Silverberg's essay online.

This week Titan Books published the last of their books by Philip José Farmer. It is the eleventh book in a period of less than two years, books in the Wold Newton and Grand Master series.
The last one is Venus on the Half-Shell, a Grand Master Novel. First time published by Dell in 1975 under the pseudonym of a fictional author, Kilgore Trout.


The new edition from Titan Books has five extra pieces, all previously publihed. Three essays by Philip José Farmer, and a, somewhat updated and expanded, essay by Christopher Paul Carey. Finally a funny afterword, "Trout Masque Rectifier (Now It Can Be Told Differently—The Truth About Trout)", written as by Jonathan Swift Somers III.

As the title says this essay gives 'the truth' about Kilgore Trout, under which byline this novel originally appeared.
But what is the truth about Jonathan Swift Somers III, who has written the essay? Farmer had used this pseudonym in the 1970s. Farmer isn't with us anymore, the piece was published before in 2012 (see here), so PJF could not have written it. Then who did?

With the publication of the collection Venus on the Half-Shell and Others in 2008, was a foreword by Tom Wode Bellman. He was presented as a real-life author and friend of Farmer. It became clear very soon after publication that Tom Wode Bellman was another pseudonym of Farmer. See here for the story of my discovery.

And again this time I discovered who the real author behind 'Jonathan Swift Somers III' is. The essay was co-written by Michael Croteau, webmaster of The Official PJF Web Page, and the British author Rhys Hughes.

With the restyling of the story page of "Strange Compulsion", see the previous entry, I discovered a publication of the story in an Ukrainian omnibus.

This omnibus, Там, по ту сторону... ИПФ - 1, contains the translations of a novel, Там, по ту сторону... (Traitor to the Living) and the three stories of the collection The Alley God.
These publications are added on the book pages and the story pages.

Only recently, more than fifty years after it's last publication in the US in the collection The Alley God (1962), was this story reprinted.
It was first published in 1953 in the magazine Science-Fiction Plus with the title "Strange Compulsion", but was later published under the title "The Captain's Daughter". The reprint in September this year from Armchair Fiction in a double novel, see the column at right, came again with the title "Strange Compulsion".


This is a story about a spaceship captain's daughter with a strange disease, a disease that threatens the health of the entire galaxy.

Anthony R. Cardno has done a great and very interesting interview with Win Scott Eckert. He is the co-author of The Evil in Pemberley House and the sole author of its sequel The Scarlet Jaguar. Win also co-edited the recently published Tales of the Wold Newton Universe.


Especially his plans to write more in the Pat Wildman series: «... Well, I do plan on at least three or four more Pat Wildman novellas. These would bring Pat through the 1970s and into the early 1980s . . . which, not coincidentally, is about when the unfinished Monster on Hold occurs....», and «...I also plan on writing a Sherlock Holmes novella for Meteor House...».

There is more interesting news. Read the interview online here.

A few days ago Fred Fischer came with the information about the second printing of Lord der Sterne (Knaur, 1980), the German translation of A Private Cosmos.

This find "made me assume that there are second printings of the rest of the series too", according to Fred. He noticed he had a copy of the second printing (February 1980) of Meister der Dimensionen, translation of The Maker of Universes.
I added this one on the bookpage.

At the same time I deleted an other German entry on this same page, and moved it to its own story page. It is an extract, "Meister der Dimensionen", of the novel.