"Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 3 - A Private Cosmos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

structure of the World of Tiers.
To go along with these concepts, Philip Farmer assembled a cast of characters of the sort I enjoy.
Kickaha is a roguish fellow; heroic, tricky and very engaging. Also, he almost steals the first
book from Wolff. The second book is packed with miserable, scheming, wretched, base, lowdown, mean
and nasty individuals who would cut one
another's throats for the fun of it, but unfortunately have their lots cast together for a time.
Being devilish fond of the Elizabethan theater, I was very happy to learn early in the story that
they were all of them close relatives.
A sacred being may be attractive or repulsiveтАФa swan or an octopusтАФbeautiful or uglyтАФa toothless
hag or a fair young childтАФ good or evilтАФa Beatrice or a Belle Dame Sans MerciтАФhistorical fact or
fictionтАФa person met on the road or an image encountered in a story or a dreamтАФit may be noble or
something unmentionable in a drawing room, it may be anything it likes on condition, but this
condition is absolute, that it arouse awe. . тАФMaking, Knowing and Understanding


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W. H. Auden
Philip Jos6 Fanner lives West of the Sun at the other end of the world from me in a place called
California. We have never met, save in the pages of his stories. I admire his sense of humor and
his facility for selecting the perfect final sentence for everything he writes. He can be stark,
dark, smoky, bright, and any color of the emotional spectrum. He has a fascinating sense of the
Sacred and the Profane. Put quite simply, he arouses awe. He has the talent and the skill to
handle the sacred objects every writer must touch in order to convert the reader, in that
timeless, spaceless place called Imagination.
Since I've invoked Auden, I must go on to agree with his observation that a writer cannot read
another author's things without comparing them to his own. I do this constantly. I almost always
come out feeling weak as well as awed whenever I read the works of three people who write science
fiction: Sturgeon, Farmer and Bradbury. They know what's sacred, in that very special trans-
subjective way where personal specifics suddenly give way and become universals and light up the
human condition like a neon-lined Christmas tree. And Philip Jose Farmer is special in a very
unusual way . . .
Everything he says is something / would like to say, but for some reason or other, cannot. He
exercises that thing Henry James called an "angle of vision" which, while different from my own
a.v., invariably jibes with the way I feel about things. But I can't do it his way. This means
that somebody can do what I love most better than I can, which makes me chew my beard and think of
George London as Mephistopheles, back at the old Metropolitan Opera, in Gounoud's Faust, when
Marguerita ascended to heaven: he reached out and an iron gate descended before him; he grasped a
bar, looked On High for a moment, averted his face, sank slowly to his knees, his hand sliding
down the bar: curtain then: that's how I feel. / can't do it, but it can be done.
Beyond this, what can I say about a particular Philip Jose Farmer story?
Shakespeare said it better, in Antony and Cleopatra:
Lepidus. What manner o' thing is your crocodile?
Antony. It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high
as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it; and the elements
once out of it, it transmigrates,
Lepidus. What color is it of?
Antony. Of its own color, too.
Lepidus. 'Tis a strange serpent.