And the Winner is ...

Philip Jose Farmer.

After a bit of thought, I settled on PJF for my literary experiment. Now, I have no discipline to read a single author for a year straight. Even one as noble as Shakespeare (that hop lasted eight plays over three months). But my goal is for the first six months of 2013, to read this dude.

I’ve read a couple of his books over the years. The Lovers, perfect in its short length, had an M. Night Shamylan twist that literally gave me goosebumps. The Stone God Awakens and The Wind Whales of Ishmael created rich and vastly detailed worlds that overcame standard run-flee-fight-rinse-repeat plots. Dayworld led me through a world where you only get to live one day out of the week – and how much thematic potential is there in the simple feat of saying “screw you!” to that system and avoiding the Man as you journey through an entire week. (Though I think the plot involved a hunt for a killer who lived on random days – it was a long time ago I read this.) Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, not completed, made me doubt what was fiction and what was fact … if anything was, or is, in this “literary biography.”

But what forced the decision was the fact that I have never read a single word of the man’s two acclaimed series: Riverworld and the World of Tiers. Riverworld consists of a half-dozen novels written over a twelve-year period. There are also several compilations of short stories that take place in this universe. The World of Tiers is also a six-book series, only composed over a 28-year period. That’s about a million words (not counting the short stories), some of which are award-winning and award-nominated, all of which are worshipped in the SF nerd-geek pantheon.

I am very curious about this buzz.

I am also curious how this author will affect my own science fiction writing.

Especially since Farmer is noted for blending fiction with reality, literary characters with real-life historical figures, treating make-believe as history and, maybe, vice versa.

So, that’s the plan: January 1, 2013 to June 30, 2013.

Then, maybe I’ll explore the runner-up, Zelazny.

After, of course, penning a story where me and PJF travel to, say, oh, the Saturnian satellite Titan in an alternate universe to rescue a Space Princess and free Ulysses S. Grant, Pythagoras, and Victor Frankenstein from the Titanians’ icy time prison …