Up the Bright River

Edited by Gary K. Wolfe.

Subterranean Press is proud to present a new, roughly 120,000 word gathering of Philip Jose Farmer’s singular tales!

This first posthumous collection of the short fiction of Philip Jose Farmer is a celebration of the impressive variety of his prodigious output, from the space adventures he published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s through the 1970s, to his acerbic satires of religion and medicine, to his fictional biographies and memoirs, to his beloved Riverworld.

Appearing for the first time in a Philip Jose Farmer collection are his last three “Riverworld” stories — featuring characters from his own family history — as well as the “memoir” of Lord Greystoke which he claimed to have merely edited. Other highlights include “Attitudes,” the first of the Father Carmody stories; “The Two-Edged Gift,” which introduces the fictional science fiction writer Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor; “Toward the Beloved City” (about which its original editor said he had never before really understood the Book of Revelations); and “Father’s in the Basement,” a little-known Gothic horror tale which is also a satire of the writing profession.

Farmer created some of the most famous worlds in science fiction, but he also wrote in many worlds, and readers familiar only with his best-known classics may find a few surprises among these tales.

Contents:

• Attitudes
• How Deep the Grooves
• The Blasphemers
• A Bowl Bigger Than Earth
• Down in the Black Gang
• The Voice of the Sonar in My Vermiform Appendix
• Father’s in the Basement
• Toward the Beloved City
• Skinburn
• The Sumerian Oath
• Extracts from the Memoirs of Lord Greystoke
• The Two-Edged Gift
• Saint Francis Kisses His Ass Goodbye
• Crossing the Dark River
• Up the Bright River
• Coda