How to describe a story that can hardly be described. Philip José Farmer's "The Terminalization of J.G. Ballard" is a great parody on the writing style of the British author J.G. Ballard.

Farmer had a lot of fun writing it. It was written years before it finally got published in Pearls from Peoria (2006). The short story refers to Ballard's highly controversial novel Crash (1973). 

A reissue in a chapbook of the novella Rastignac the Devil. General Books published this Print-on-Demand chapbook in 2010 and again in 2012, but with a different cover. Buying the 2012 publication entitles you to a free membership of the Rare Books Club, where you can download the text of this and other stories.

The second addition is a find of another printing (January 1986) of the anthology Sanctuary, with Farmer's story "Spiders of the Purple Mage". Thanks Willem for this one.

Farmer must have had a lot of fun writing the somewhat strange, absurd and funny stories called 'Polytropical Paramyths'. PJF: «They're a form of fun-therapy for me and perhaps for the reader. They're symptoms of something in my unconscious that makes me itch and then scratch. A sort of cerebral athlete's foot. Or, to preserve the birth analogy of parere, a monster delivered with much mirth and some puzzlement. Or a square egg laid by a goose who's laughing because it hurts.»
Farmer wrote six of them, and all were published in The Book of Philip José Farmer (DAW, 1973).

In 1972 was the last of these stories, "The Sumerian Oath", published. Harry Harrison, the editor, included it in his anthology of original stories Nova 2.
As might be expected, this is again an absurd story about why there are doctors in the world. They shouldn't be needed or necessary.

Piper Verlag in Germany published in 2008 the five novels of Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series. The first three of these novels have already been reissued.
The first, Die Flusswelt der Zeit (To Your Scattered Bodies Go) saw two reprints. The second, Auf dem Zeitstrom (The Fabulous Riverboat), and the third novel, Das dunkle Muster (The Dark Design), both had a second printing.
I added these printings on the book pages.

Mike Croteau, publisher of Meteor House and editor of the book, announces the publication in the Spring of 2014 of the anthology The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 4: Voyages to Strange Days.


You can preorder your copy from Meteor House now. See here for the website.

Farmer's first published science fiction story "The Lovers" (1952) was expanded and published as the novel The Lovers in 1961.
The publisher, Ballantine Books, reissued the novel in hardcover with a revised edition (1979). A year later came the paperback edition.

Recently Bill Taylor (Canada) discovered a Canadian edition of the 1980 mass market paperback. He writes: "I'm pretty sure the two previous Ballantine editions will also have a Canadian printing".
I'm very curious if that's true, I never found one of these for sale.
Thanks Bill for the info and the scan!

One of Philip José Farmer's best known novels is To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), first in the famous Riverworld series.
Originally written in 1953 as I Owe for the Flesh, with which Phil won a literary competition sponsored by the small publisher Shasta, in conjunction with Pocket Books. Farmer didn't receive the prize money of $4,000 from Shasta, and the very long novel was never published. The manuscript was filed in Farmer's archives.

In the 1960s Farmer tried again to sell the novel. He got the suggestion from Frederik Pohl, at that time editor of the science fiction magazines Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow, to edit and rework the very long novel in novellas for publication in the magazines.
Something Farmer did. In 1965 appeared "Day of the Great Shout", and a year later "The Suicide Express", both in Worlds of Tomorrow.
The story page of the second one has now been restyled.