Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer, the popular (and prolific) science fiction author who “shocked readers in the 1950s by depicting sex with aliens,” has died at the age of 91 at his home in Peoria, Illinois. A New York Times obituary by Gerald Jonas says that Farmer “passed away peacefully in his sleep,” citing “his official Web site” as the source. Farmer wrote some 75 books, and liked to write iin series. As Jonas notes, “In the Riverworld series, for example, Mr. Farmer resurrected not just historical personages like Samuel Clemens and the explorer Richard Francis Burton but legendary figures like Odysseus and Gilgamesh.” Not everyone thought so highly of his work: He once wrote a book called Venus on the Half Shell under the pseudonym of Kilgore Trout — a fictional underappreciated science fiction created by Kurt Vonnegut who appeared in several of Vonneguts novels. According to Jacobs, “Vonnegut was not amused to learn that some reviewers not only concluded that he had written Venus on the Half-Shell but that it was a worthy addition to the Vonnegut canon.”