The Maker of Universes

© 1965 by Philip Jose Farmer


Imagine, if you will, yourself as an old man, with far fewer years ahead than those trailing behind, wondering what it was all about. Your marriage has grown stale; your wife a passive-aggressive storm of hate and disappointment. Then, one day during the inevitable shopping for a down-sized home, something in the basement of one house makes you put your foot down. Yes, you think, this is the house to buy. And all because of that hallucination you saw when you opened that basement closet door.

Does this have something to do with the strange circumstances of your early childhood – “found” in the woods by kindly older parents named Wolff? With your uncanny ability to master languages? With your lifelong passion with fencing, despite decades as a meek and mild-mannered community college professor?

Is The Maker of Universes a Philip Jose Farmer novel?

You bet.

When Wolff steps into that “hallucination” in his basement closet – with the aid of a … magical? alien? supernatural? flute – the adventure begins. Being a PJF science fiction slash fantasy novel, you know it will be fast-action rollercoaster with literary-mystical themes developed and just-touched-upon.

For instance, the first creatures Wolff meets (the first benevolent ones, I need to correct myself) are hinted to be the actual participants in the Trojan War, stolen / hijacked / kidnapped / abducted by some “Lord” who has seemingly omnipotent powers and a malicious temper. These childlike entities, often in perfect and beautiful bodies but sometimes in warped parodies of nature (the “zebrilla,” a black-and-white furry gorilla who’s probably the only mature being Wolff encounters), live in an Edenic paradise at the base of a 30,000-foot mountain.

This mountain is actually a world – the World of Tiers, each tier representing a continent peopled with radically different societies and cultures. There’s medievalish Dracheland, where knights joust and dragons prowl. There’s Amerind, prehistoric North America, where mounted war parties battle to the bloody end, for being captured always entails a fate worse than death. There’s Atlantis, modeled by this Lord on Earth’s fabled island – or was that mythical land modeled on this one?

During Wolff’s adventures as he scales the World of Tiers, he meets a kindred spirit – Kickaha. Now, Kickaha is a veteran here, famous and infamous on many levels. Kickaha he is known to the Indian tribes of Amerindia, but he, too, like Wolff, was once of Earth. There he was known as Paul Janus Finnegan (note the initials), and the two set-off on Wolff’s quest to find his True Love, even if it means scaling all tiers to reach the apex – the domain of the maniacal Lord. And, more than once, Wolff has the uneasy thought that Kickaha might be the omnipotent despot slumming it …

For 170 pages we travel with our heroes as they battle orc-like nasties, double-crossing Teutonic knights, Hasidic warriors, merciless centaurs known as Half Horses, primitive rain forest tribes, vicious intelligent eagles with thirty-foot wingspans, and a teleporting race so far advanced they’ve forgotten how to build the very technology they use to make their universes.

The Maker of Universes is Book One of PJF’s five-volume series The World of Tiers. Like all of his adventures, I’m discovering, I wish it had more “depth”, wish the ideas were more fleshed out and explored, wished characters who – though completely realistically sketched out – would stay with the story a little longer than their quick violent deaths often yank them away. Those 170 pages could have at least been double, with no sacrifice to the pacing of the tale, in the skillful hands of a writer as good as Farmer.

Grade: B-plus.