Venus on the Half-Shell

AFTERWORD TROUT MASQUE RECTIFIER NOW IT CAN BE TOLD DIFFERENTLY—THE TRUTH ABOUT TROUT ^{BY JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS III}

Philip José Farmer was meta before meta was cool. Before it was even warm. He was the Christopher Columbus of science fiction in the use of such techniques as metafiction, recursive fiction, parody, pastiche, fictional biographies, real-person fiction, “true” accounts of fictional events and everything between. Or was he the Leif Ericsson of those things, bearing in mind that the Vikings discovered America centuries before Columbus did? Or was he the Saint Brendan of those things, who crossed the Atlantic five hundred years before the Vikings? Or was he even Xog of the Yellow Snow tribe, the first man to walk over the Bering Strait land bridge thousands of years before the Irish existed, of those things; the things I listed above, chiefly metafiction, recursive fiction, parody, pastiche, recursive fiction… Did I mention recursive fiction?

But this is just nitpicking. Xog was infested with nits and picked them all, or most of them, probably. And I am not he. The point is that Farmer was a pioneer, an explorer, an authentic original. He was a serious trickster who liked to juggle with mirrors and sometimes jump through them; and the images in those mirrors were often other mirrors full of other tricksters juggling mirrors or leaping through them. And every time he jumped through a mirror, he always emerged unscathed on the other side, and so did his reflections.

I should know, I, Jonathan Swift Somers III, being myself a fictional author who is a parody of another fictional author, created as a character in a book that supposedly didn’t exist. Right. So, who better than me to give you a brief overview of Farmer’s blatant disregard, if not downright manipulation, of reality?

My story begins, oddly enough, with writer’s block. The best way to deal with writer’s block is to tackle it head on. That’s where the expression “block and tackle” comes from. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Nonetheless it’s true. If you have writer’s block, tackle it!

Farmer did exactly that. He was under pressure from publishers and readers (and let it be noted that these are different kinds of pressure) to write the next book in his renowned Riverworld series (which is fiction about real historical people in an imaginary afterlife), or the next book in his World of Tiers series (which contains characters named from William Blake’s mythology as well as a character with the same initials, P.J.F., as Farmer himself), or the next volume about Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban (pastiches of Tarzan and Doc Savage). Even though all of these novels borrowed playfully from other works in one way or another, Farmer realised that he was stuck and needed a new toy to play with.

At this point I’d like to mention something that Harlan Ellison once said, which is that there are in fact two different kinds of writer’s block. The first kind is the famous kind, where the writer simply has no ideas; but the second kind is worse than that, even though it’s rarely discussed or written about. The second kind is when the writer is full of ideas, bursting with them, has so much choice that he’s paralyzed. He simply doesn’t have the energy to—

Excuse me. I seemed to run out of steam for some reason… But to return to what I was saying earlier… Farmer was stuck.

Enter Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a science fiction writer with mainstream success, or a mainstream writer who used science fiction tropes—it all depends on whom you ask, and how stuffy that person’s contemporary American literature professor was, or how keenly you want to go along with Vonnegut’s own interpretation of events. I’m happy to go along with anyone when it’s easier. In many of Vonnegut’s novels, various things crop up more than once. Firestorms, for example. A bird that goes “poo-tee-weet,” for another. Who knows why? Maybe Vonnegut did.

But anyway… one of the many things that crop up more than once is a character who is himself a science fiction writer; always down on his luck and trod upon, the all-but-forgotten genius Kilgore Trout. More often than not, Trout doesn’t appear in Vonnegut’s novels in person, so to speak, but is instead cited as the author of a wild science fiction story that is then described. Because of Trout’s crooked agent, most of his stories ended up as filler in cheap porn magazines instead of being sold to science fiction markets where Trout might have gained the recognition and wealth he deserved. Mind you, talking about wealth, at the end of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, he is given $50,000 by the Rosewater Foundation, so maybe he wasn’t that unlucky after all. But let’s not nitpick… Me not Xog.

In name, if not circumstance, Trout was based on the real-life writer Theodore Sturgeon, whom nobody seems to have a bad word to say about. But Farmer felt that he himself also had much in common with Trout, to the point that he easily identified with this fictional author. In fact, he identified with him so strongly, he decided to become Trout. At least in name, at least for a while. And let’s remember what Vonnegut claimed the moral of his novel Mother Night was, namely that we are who we pretend to be, so we should be careful who we pretend to be.

Rather impertinently at this point, I would like to inject here the observation that if Kilgore Trout had ever met the writer Greg Bear the stage would have been set for a symbolic wilderness scene of paw fishing that couldn’t ever really happen. Bears do fish for trout, don’t they? Or is it just salmon? Don’t mind me, I’m eccentric.

Anyway, Farmer’s idea was simple, but it was also bold, ingenious and daring. It was this: take one of the novels that the fictional Trout is described as having written and actually write it. Hey presto! Although Vonnegut’s paperback publisher, Dell, loved the idea, gaining permission from Vonnegut was a bit harder. It was almost as hard as escaping from the interior of the planet Mercury in a flying saucer, or traveling the entire length of the universe just to deliver the message, “Greetings!”

After sending many letters to Vonnegut in the days before email but never receiving a reply, Farmer finally got him on the phone. After a long conversation, Vonnegut reluctantly (and presumably curtly or even Kurtly) agreed to let Farmer borrow his creation. Lending creations is always fraught with danger! Will you get them back dog-eared and battered? Or spruced up and bettered? That’s the gamble!

Before we see what happens next, assuming you haven’t already skipped this paragraph like an impatient rascal, let’s back up just a bit. How much? This much, no more, no less. Mind out, paragraph reversing! Oops, crushed a pedestrian in the margins. His mind really is out right now. Anyway, long before Farmer decided to go all out and write a novel pretending to be Trout, he studied the fictional science fiction writer as intently as it’s possible to study a nonexistent personage. He read every novel by Vonnegut, apart from the ones that hadn’t yet been written, and compiled a comprehensive dossier on Trout. Then, filling in the missing data with his own invented “research,” Farmer wrote “The Obscure Life and Hard Times of Kilgore Trout: A Skirmish in Biography” (Moebius Trip, December 1971).

Short term, the result of Vonnegut’s agreement was the immediate obliteration of Farmer’s writer’s block. Farmer knocked out the novel Venus on the Half-Shell in six weeks, but that’s just a figure of speech, because nobody has ever really “knocked out” a prose work of any length, have they? And even if it were possible, why would you want to punch a novel before it was published? Anyway, Farmer had a wonderful time writing the book; laughter could be heard howling up from his basement office, drowning out the sound of the typewriter keys banging away. And a drowned sound isn’t a pretty sight, bloats up bad and bursts… Only joking. Long term, the results were much farther reaching. And if you’re a non-rascal look away now… So you thought you’d skip the last paragraph, did you? Wiseguy, huh?

Talking about “typewriter keys banging away,” did I mention that Farmer was the greatest ever master of Bangsian Fantasy? We’ll return to this later…

Venus on the Half-Shell was touted (trouted?) as the publishing event of the year, the year in which it appeared, naturally. Locus magazine ran an announcement in its April 6, 1973 issue which stated that Venus on the Half-Shell would be written by “(a well-known SF author—not Vonnegut) ((Sturgeon??)).” The April 29 issue contained a follow-up reporting that, “Theodore Sturgeon has denied being ‘Kilgore Trout.’” This was followed by the May 11 issue that contained a letter from David Harris, an editor at Dell, who claimed to have a letter from Trout. This in part said, “As far as that item about me goes, I’m not at all surprised—there are times when I doubt my own reality…”

There was also speculation that Isaac Asimov might be the mysterious “real” author of the book, or perhaps it was John Sladek, another trickster, who had already conceived I-Click-as-I-Move, a robot version of Asimov, who was pretending to be Asimov pretending to be Trout. My own view is that T.J. Bass should have been nominated too and it’s fishy that he wasn’t.

Things settled down until the August 11 issue of Locus where they reported a rumor that Philip José Farmer was Kilgore Trout. This was followed by notices in the September 12 issue where Farmer denied being Trout and another letter by Trout appeared where he said he was flattered that all of these authors were rumored to be him, but that “there must be some way to assert my existence as a real person.” He couldn’t think of a way, though, and neither can I, offhand, and that’s because he wasn’t a real person. So really he was being duplicitous. Or rather, Farmer was being duplicitous on his behalf, which was generous of him really, if you stop to think about it.

But this was just the beginning of the japery. Farmer was an expert trickster at the center of his warm heart, and he couldn’t wait until the publication of the novel to begin having some serious fun. The November 1974 issue of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Forum contained a long and very badly written, badly sppellled, and even worsely punct-uated letter from Kilgore Trout asking for an application so he might join, and also saying that he was looking for a place to live. The letter concluded, “…if you need character references write david harris of dell. dont write to mr vonnegut. he never answers his mail.”

Shortly afterwards, an incident occurred that almost stopped the project before it began. On December 1, 1974 well-known literary critic Leslie Fiedler was on the PBS television program Firing Line, hosted by William F. Buckley. They were speaking of science fiction and both Kurt Vonnegut and Kilgore Trout’s names came up. Fiedler, who was a friend of Farmer’s and knew all about Venus on the Half-Shell, said, without naming Farmer: “What he did is he just wrote a book by Kilgore Trout… Vonnegut didn’t want him to do it, but he said, ‘I’ll go to court and get my name officially changed to Kilgore Trout, and you can’t stop me.’” Vonnegut was angered and withdrew permission for Farmer to write any more novels “by” Kilgore Trout.

Prior to the novel’s publication in paperback, it was abridged and serialized over two issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (December 1974 and January 1975). It was the feature story of the December issue, getting not just top billing, but cover art as well. So it can be rightly said that this was the place and circumstance of my birth, where the world first discovered that Simon Wagstaff—the protagonist of Kilgore Trout’s first work to be published outside of a nudie magazine— had a favorite science fiction author. Me.

Excuse me while I stop for a moment to catch my breath. It always fills me with a strange feeling when I stop to consider that I’m not a living human being, that my father was an author and my mother a magazine. Well, perhaps some of your fathers were authors too, but I bet they didn’t write you into existence, did they? I bet they created you some other way. OK, I’m fine now. Let’s move on.

In the same way that Vonnegut would have his characters describe stories written by Kilgore Trout, Trout, I mean Farmer, did the same with me. Simon Wagstaff, the protagonist of the novel, would tell his companions about stories I had written. And let’s face it, telling readers about fictional stories that haven’t really been written is a shortcut method of laying claim to the ideas in those stories without having to go through the exhausting process of actually writing them. So Trout saved himself a lot of valuable time, and the saving was passed on to Farmer. And we have no choice but to assume Trout passed all that saved time on.

So the stories I, Jonathan Swift Somers III, had written could be summarized even though they didn’t exist; but they could only be summarized if the pretence was maintained that they did exist. Otherwise, they would just be pitches, not proper summaries, and pitching stories is less satisfying than summarizing them, even if they are identical. Does that make sense?

In a similar vein, the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem once published a volume of literary reviews of books that didn’t exist. He did this because he didn’t have time to write the actual books but he wanted to lay claim to the original ideas they contained. Some critics feel this is a lazy approach but I believe it’s ingenious and I only wish that Lem had reviewed my own books. However, Farmer seems to have had more energy than Lem, more energy than one might deem possible, for he was willing not only to imagine and summarize stories that didn’t exist in order to save time; he was willing to later spend that same time writing those stories to match and even exceed the summaries! And let me add that Farmer once reviewed one of Lem’s books, Imaginary Magnitude, a collection of introductions to books that don’t exist. Squeeze my Lem ’til the juice run down my leg!

But to return to the way that I was presented in the Venus novel… In the first instance, the story described (that is, the story I had written) was of less importance in the text of the framing novel and Farmer spent more time describing me. Apparently he didn’t want anyone to have to come along behind him and fill in the details of my life story, as he had to do with Trout. The other stories of mine, however, were more detailed in their summary and were revealing about two of “my” creations. First, there was Ralph von Wau Wau, a genetically enhanced German Shepherd with a 200 IQ and the ability to speak. Farmer states that with the exception of Ralph, all of my protagonists have major disabilities, this being due to my own condition of being paralyzed from the waist down. The second of my characters described is John Clayter, a space traveler whose spacesuit is full of (often malfunctioning) prosthetics.

If a fictional character invents another fictional character who invents another fictional character who invents another fictional character, is there a grading of existability (for want of a better word)? I mean… is a dream within a dream less real than the dream that frames it, or are they both equal in terms of the fact that neither have concrete form? This is a question that has understandably intrigued me for quite some time. If you know the answer, please keep it to yourself, okay? I’m freaked out enough by my condition already.

Anyway, the Dell paperback edition of Venus on the Half-Shell came out in February 1975 (available for the first time without lurid covers!) and the reviews, and controversy, quickly followed. Funny how that happens, isn’t it? Do you imagine, as I do, the book traipsing down the street, followed by a number of reviews that are stumbling to keep up, with controversy close behind, its nose in the rear end of the last review in line? That’s the picture I see in my mind, anyway…

A wildly popular fanzine, Richard Geis’ Science Fiction Review, ran a review of Venus on the Half-Shell in the February 1975 issue. The humorous novel was full of clichés as Farmer poked fun at the genre; after all, he had written the novel he believed Kilgore Trout, a science fiction hack, would have written had Trout existed. Since Vonnegut had for years taken umbrage at being labeled a science fiction writer, and since Richard Geis assumed Vonnegut had in fact written the book, Geis took offense at a novel that seemed to make fun of, and look down on, science fiction because he did not feel that Vonnegut had earned the right to do so (a case of, it’s okay for me to call my sister ugly, but if you do it, I’ll punch you in the nose). Geis’ review wasn’t very gentle. In fact, it came out swinging.

But reviews from the likes of Publisher’s Weekly, The Washington Post, Eastern News, Science Fiction Review Monthly, National Observer, Locus, and the UCLA Daily Bruin were more favorable. In fact, the Bruin reviewer went to great lengths to “prove” that Vonnegut was in fact the author of Venus on the Half-Shell.

The novel was a bigger success than even Farmer could have dreamed. At least, we can assume that it was a bigger success than he could have dreamed. But he was a man with extremely big dreams, let’s not forget! Sorry. Nitpicking again. Related to Xog, I must be… Yes, that’s plausible, for Xog never existed either…

On March 16, 1975, the New York Times Book Review reported Dell had sold 225,000 copies in the first month. Farmer was having a blast. Dell was going to sponsor a “Who is Kilgore Trout?” contest and they had begun forwarding Kilgore Trout’s fan mail to him. Farmer really enjoyed answering these letters, sending replies back from “Kilgore Trout” (several examples of these were published in Farmerphile #5, July 2006). But Farmer wasn’t satisfied with having merely pulled off the biggest hoax in science fiction since Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. He had plans to take things to a whole other level. Farmer loved taking things to other levels and he was extremely good at it. Try reading the World of Tiers series and you’ll see what I mean. Literally.

The March issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction contained “A Scarletin Study,” by Simon Wagstaff’s favorite author, me, Jonathan Swift Somers III. This story, about Ralph von Wau Wau, the hyperintelligent German Shepherd described in Venus on the Half-Shell, was to be the first in a series of stories written by “fictional authors.” In addition to myself, Farmer also wrote stories “by” Harry Manders, Paul Chapin, Rod Keen, and Cordwainer Bird. He further planned to collect these stories in an anthology and began recruiting other writers such as Philip K. Dick, Howard Waldrop, and Gene Wolfe to join in the fun.

While attending Minicon, a science fiction convention in Minneapolis, in April 1975, Farmer was interviewed by David Truesdale, Paul McGuire, and Jerry Rauth for the fanzine Tangent. By now rumors were already beginning to circulate that Farmer was the author of Venus on the Half-Shell. While denying he was the culprit, Farmer laughingly offered up the possibility of Trout being “a collaboration between Harry Harrison and Ted White. Or Joanna Russ and Phil Dick—or Harlan Ellison and Captain S.I. Meek.”

I doubt any of you remember Captain Meek? He wrote a madcap story called “Submicroscopic” back in the early ’30s and followed that with a sequel that was a novella, “Alwo of Ulm.” But I’m digressing again. Forgive me…

However, before the issue with the interview could be published, Dave Truesdale discovered a notice that had appeared in the New York Times Book Review on March 23 about whom the author of Venus on the Half-Shell might really be: “This week, from Peoria comes a letter from a man who asks not to be named, stating that he is its author.”

Even though, after calling Farmer to confirm, he was able to trumpet the news on the cover of the May ’75 issue, “Tangent Hooks Farmer on Trout,” Truesdale was not happy the New York Times Book Review chose to so callously let the cat out of the bag; seriously, how many science fiction authors live in Peoria? In fact, in the editorial where he broke the news, this sums up his reaction: “All I can say is FUCK YOU to the New York Times…” Farmer wasn’t happy either, but there was no point in denying the story now.

Of course, the news was not immediately universally known. In a bit of coincidental timing that could only happen in fiction, when the aforementioned review appeared in the UCLA Daily Bruin “proving” Vonnegut wrote Venus on the Half-Shell, Farmer happened to be at UCLA. He was there as part of an Extension Course which featured a guest science fiction author each week. The day the review appeared, May 20, Farmer revealed to the class that he was, in fact, “Kilgore Trout” and the author of Venus on the Half-Shell. The following week, a correction was printed: “We’ve been had…”

Slowly the word continued to spread. Locus confirmed it in early June, also saying, “Kurt Vonnegut, who went along with the gag at first, has become very annoyed because of reviews and statements made about the book…” Farmer explained years later that half the people said it was Vonnegut’s worst book, and the other half said it was his best. In July, Farmer was the guest of honor at RiverCon I in Louisville, where his speech, “Now It Can be Told” (which also happens to be the title of one of Kilgore Trout’s stories, as described by Vonnegut), was about writing Venus on the Half-Shell. Tragically, no copy of this speech is known to exist. In August, a long interview with Farmer about the affair appeared in Science Fiction Review.

The following year my story, “The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight,” was published in the November issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and then I faded from existence, nearly forgotten. My stories have been reprinted a few times, but that is it. When Venus on the Half-Shell and Others (Subterranean Press, 2007), a collection focusing on Farmer’s fictional-author series, was published, even though I was the most prolific, the most well known of Farmer’s fictional authors, Tom Wode Bellman was invited to write the foreword. And he’s not even a proper fictional author, just a stand-in for Farmer himself!

But I’m not too unhappy about being who I am. I just have one worry that nags at me whenever I lie awake at night unable to sleep (because I don’t exist; whoever heard of a nonexistent entity sleeping?) And that worry is this: I was created as a byproduct of writer’s block. If my father, Farmer, hadn’t had that block at that time, it’s very unlikely I would be here.

Now then, birth is the opposite of death. So if I was created by a block, then what will kill me will be the opposite of that, in other words creative flow. Farmer is no longer with us. He’s on the other side now. And that’s the biggest block any writer can ever have: to have shuffled off this mortal coil. But what if he starts writing again on the other side? Creative flow is the opposite of a writer’s block and the opposite of a block is death to me. If Farmer starts writing again, wherever he is now, I might somehow vanish… I know that’s bizarre logic and an obscure thing to fret about. But I am bizarre. Remember: I’m writing this article even though I’m fictional!

I can almost feel someone walking over my grave right now, even though I won’t have a grave because I don’t have a solid body to bury, but the figure of speech is appropriate; and rather bizarrely I can reveal that its first recorded use in print was in Simon Wagstaff’s A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, published in 1738. The date isn’t an error. This was a different Simon Wagstaff, one of the pseudonyms of the satirist Jonathan Swift. Talk about recursion!

And where is Farmer now, I hear you ask? Well, I don’t know. But I’ll say this: a great many obituaries pictured him waking up along the banks of the million-mile-long river that was one of his most amazing creations in a creative life full of astounding concepts. And yet… As I mentioned earlier, Farmer was the greatest ever master of a type of writing called Bangsian Fantasy. I’d never even heard of Bangsian Fantasy until recently. It’s named after the mostly forgotten writer John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), whose most famous book was House-Boat on the Styx, in which Charon upgrades from his leaky old skiff to a luxurious boat capable of holding many dead people at once, dead people who happen to have been real in your world and not just invented by Bangs.

What if Farmer is a guest on that house-boat right now? What if he has managed to get hold of some writing materials? What if he’s saying to himself, “Hey, Charon, let’s do a collaboration! Why don’t we write a story pretending to be Trout; maybe a story about what happens when Jonathan Swift Somers III dies and wakes up on the banks of a million-mile-long river!”

That’s my worry. Or my hope. I’m not sure which.