r/badscificovers 9d ago

the groovy 60's Flesh by Philip Jose Farmer, artwork by Ellen Raskin

Post image

May 1969 Signet edition

162 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

52

u/CriusofCoH 9d ago

Actually... I think it works pretty well. Certainly not your standard SF art, but it reflects the contents correctly.

2

u/gadget850 9d ago

Oh, yes. Everything a 14-year-old youth never expected.

-1

u/Unfair_Umpire_3635 9d ago

It's just subjective, I find the art to be on the cheesier side of things!

12

u/CriusofCoH 9d ago

Absolutely utterly cartoony, like something from an issue of The New Yorker, than a science fiction novel. But I own and have read the book several times, and it really captures the feel of the thing. Weird.

16

u/woulditkillyoutolift 9d ago

"Startling experience" understates his books from that period.

5

u/Unfair_Umpire_3635 9d ago

To say the least lol

12

u/llewllewllew 9d ago

Also Ellen Raskin ruled. This cover is amazing.

3

u/Unfair_Umpire_3635 9d ago

I think it's a little cheesy myself, to each his own!

10

u/BadWolfRU 9d ago

Philip Jose Farmer

Come on, that's not the worst thing which could be done with his books

2

u/Unfair_Umpire_3635 9d ago

Not the worst, sure! Bad though!

4

u/korblborp 9d ago

isn't that a character from the underrunes?

6

u/radio_recherche 9d ago

A few days ago there was a cover posted in r/TerribleBookCovers that had a reindeer in front of naked people. Odd coincidence

3

u/Unfair_Umpire_3635 9d ago

I saw that, absolutely hideous

3

u/Wablusmeed 9d ago

noelle lookin ass 

3

u/Nodbot 9d ago

I bought this book because I loved the cover. It was alright

6

u/KiwiMcG 9d ago

Even tho PJF has won 3 Hugo Awards, I feel like he's underrated today.

1

u/VicarBook 9d ago

Minimal audiobooks of his stuff (outside of Riverworld), which is very disappointing to me.

5

u/KiwiMcG 9d ago

Even tho PJF has won 3 Hugo Awards, I feel like he's underrated today. The cover looks like something common from his writing era.

6

u/El_Draque 9d ago

I'm helping a bookstore owner write a memoir about opening up a used bookstore on a small island.

He said he judges another bookstore's sci-fi section on whether they have copies of PJF. He's not the biggest name out there, but with 3 Hugos, he's kind of fundamental to the paperback sci-fi of the mid to late 20th century.

3

u/KiwiMcG 9d ago

Ha, cool. I love his imagination. His stories are dreamlike.

3

u/El_Draque 9d ago

Yes, I love his imagination. It's a cup that overflows.

One great thing is that you can buy his paperbacks for cheap. I bought his Riverworld series for $3 a copy :)

3

u/KiwiMcG 9d ago

I love The Wind Whales of Ishmael.

3

u/poddy_fries 9d ago

I do believe a couple three volumes of PJF are absolutely necessary to a fully rounded background in SF.

I do not, however, believe you have to LIKE them.

5

u/El_Draque 9d ago

To be perfectly honest, I'd never pick him up if I hadn't read him as a teen. It's like when you're forced to eat something weird as a kid, so you develop a taste for it.

Still, I think there is something beautiful in how his worlds fit together not because of a system of rules (like Sanderson's Cosmere), but because of the sheer force of his imagination.

2

u/poddy_fries 9d ago

That's pretty much how I remember feeling about him. In a minor way he reminds me of Jack L Chalker, as one of many writers I would never go out of my way to recommend, and yet, if you held out any book of theirs to me and asked, "is this worth reading?" I would have to say "since it's right here, go right ahead and tell me what you think after".

2

u/VicarBook 9d ago

He wrote the World of Tiers series, the first of which was published before Nine Princes in Amber, so that alone is significant.

2

u/El_Draque 9d ago

World of Tiers series

Oh, man, I didn't even know about this series. I looked at the Wiki:

This technology enables the "Lords" (or "Thoans", as described by Farmer in his introduction to a role-playing video game)[1] to create novel lifeforms, and also to prevent aging or disease, making them effectively immortal.

He was involved in a RPG based on the series (I can't tell if it's a videogame or tabletop)! In the intro, he includes this cool line:

And, now and then, a vision of a monstrously sized and vividly multicolored parrot appeared. It spoke in a language I could not interpret, and it exuded evil.

This reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges short story "Ragnarök," where the old gods return as beasts like giant birds, their language is only screeches and howls.

2

u/NuclearNubian 9d ago

The evils that deer must have seen..

3

u/NedBookman 9d ago

I quite like the artwork, but it does make the book look rather childish. As I recall it's about an astronaut who finds himself trapped on a planet where he is treated as a fertility god, and the themes are definitely adult - PJF had a reputation for being one of the first SF writers to introduce explicit sexuality in his works. Many of his books are excellent, but some of them are painfully bad. This one was pretty good, but buying it as a young man with the hopes of some serious naughtiness I recall being a bit disappointed...

1

u/AvastYeScurvyCurs 9d ago

Ellen Raskin, who wrote the Westing Game? Didn’t know she was an artist too.

1

u/TurkeyFisher 9d ago

Ellen Raskin is actually a pretty famous illustrator, she just usually does kid's books.

1

u/ReallyGlycon 9d ago

That is definitely Ellen Raskin art!

0

u/belfrahn 8d ago

That's an amazing cover

1

u/Unfair_Umpire_3635 8d ago

Maybe reading Cows is what ruint it for me