A Private Cosmos

© 1968 by Philip Jose Farmer


[major spoilers after the picture]

Imagine yourself to be a “Lord” – a race of near-god-like beings of ten-thousand-year lifespans and a practical knowledge of science so superior as to create your own private universes at a whim. Well, perhaps “at a whim” is a literary flourishment; some sleeve-rolling-up and elbow grease is required; also, the science is not well-understood or well-remembered. Yet you and your brood – it’s unclear whether the Lords are a race of beings or just an extended family – have created a multiverse linked by thousands, if not millions of “gates.” Oh, and this near-immortality and omnipotence has made you all homicidally insane, at least towards each other.

Such is the premise behind Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series, of which this is Book Three (out of Five, I believe, though later books may have peripheral relationships to this series). I reviewed the first and second books here and here. This one, A Private Cosmos, is the length of the previous two combined, so my one wish for a fuller enfleshment of the tale has been fulfilled. Kickaha, a.k.a. Paul Janus Finnegan, a.k.a. the author himself (perhaps) returns as the main character, and is the center of action. All well and good.

But let’s back up a bit. These Lords, in their quest for actual, authentic (as opposed to “all but in name only”) immortality, have created a new form of matter. Shaped like a bell, these … things … have the ability to draw out one’s, er, soul (for lack of a better term) from one body, store it, and download it into a new body. They are called Black Bells, though the actual mechanisms and process remained hazy throughout the novel. So right away there is the moral and ethical problem of these Lords stealing bodies to use to extend their lifespans.

But that is not the crisis of this novel. No – even better – the problem is that these Black Bells, when unoccupied by a Lord-in-transit, unbeknowingly become sentient themselves. Cool, neat. When they take over a body, they are called Black Bellers. Now, early in the story it becomes dreadfully apparent to Kickaha that fifty of these Bellers have escaped the labs of the offending Lords and have spread into this universe, the World of Tiers, shock troops of sorts, an invasion force. The Lord of Tiers, Wolff, Kickaha’s friend, comrade, and ally, is missing. All our hero has to staunch the invasion is Anana, Wolff’s sister-Lord, who may or may not want to kill Kickaha herself, sooner rather than later.

And so Farmer takes us on one of his trademarked adventures. Large-scale battles, tricky escapes, Amerinds, centaurs, Teutonic knights, a detour to Tier’s moon, a palace filled with deadly traps, giant eagles and their Harpy Queen Podarge. A very nice segment dealt with Wolff’s and Kickaha’s attempts to recreate the world of Barsoom, Mars from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tales, a nicely successful attempt at meta-Literature.

However, truth be told, in all the action the rules got a bit confusing. The Beller thing, as I said, wasn’t clearly explained. I found it hard to remember how many there were, how one could take over another host, what one had to do to prevent such takeover, their motivations, their goals, etc. Another thing that was difficult to keep track of was all these “gates”. Apparently, they’re created by putting two crescents together; stepping inside will teleport you somewhere else, depending on which crescents you use. In A Private Cosmos, the action takes place on two different tier-levels, Wolff’s palace, the moon of Tiers, the base ocean Okeanos, and a couple of other locales. Towards the end of the novel, Kickaha is teleporting all over the place. Plus, Wolff set traps and riddles with the crescents, hearkening back to my gaming days (Duke Nukem, Quake) where you had to hit the proper buttons in the proper sequence to open doors, etc. Quite distracting to keep it all in the back of your mind as your reading it.

That grain of salt swallowed, the novel had one of the best endings – and I mean, “ending” in terms of the final sentence – that I have read in recent times.

Grade: B+

[warning! Major spoiler after the pic!]

All but one of the Black Bellers is destroyed, saving the World of Tiers from their cruel domination. The fifty-first Beller has escaped – to a planet quite well-known to both Kickaha and Wolff. Our plucky trickster hero and Anana, the Lord who has now fallen in love with him, suit up and prepare to gate back to Earth of the 1940s …

And that last line of the novel: “Didn’t Wolff tell you? Red Orc is the secret Lord of Earth!”

Red Orc is the shadowy figure of the series, so far only mentioned fragmentarily in a handful of sentences over the past 750 pages … I love that name, how it recalls and hearkens to Tolkien, how Red Orc may very well turn out to be the Sauron of the World of Tiers, perhaps, and how we may be finally let in on the Grand Scheme behind the framework of these here Lords. I must say that I am now quite excited to begin the fourth book.