Introduction to Tarzan Alive

There are a lot of reasons why Tarzan Alive is a remarkable book, not the least of which is its origin.

Back in the late 1960s, one of the major West Coast sex book publishers started a line of high-quality, even literary pornography. It was called Essex House, it paid about twice the going rate, and it attracted some of the better writers of the era. (Yes, I said writers, not pornographers.) One of them was Philip Jose Farmer, who will go down in history as the man who single-handedly broke down the sexual barriers of written science fiction with his classic “The Lovers,” after which nothing was ever the same again.

Phil wrote some very well-received books for Essex House (which died as soon as the readers figured out that some subversive editorial staffers were trying to give them literature with their porn). One of them was A Feast Unknown, which featured Tarzan (for legal reasons Lord Greystoke became Lord Grandrith) and Doc Savage (who, also to avoid lawsuits, became Doc Caliban). The book was a cult classic upon publication, and is still a cult classic in science fiction circles.

I’m sure most of you are aware that almost the moment a book or a movie becomes a hit, it invariably inspires a porn film or porn novel spinoff. But A Feast Unknown stood tradition on its head, and became the first and only pornographic novel to give birth to four non-pornographic spinoffs. (Well, four and a quarter, actually.) I find that absolutely remarkable, and of course it’s a tribute to the fact that Phil always wrote at the highest level of literary ambition, regardless of category or genre. Whether it was Essex House or one of the great New York publishers, he gave his best every time.

A Feast Unknown was published in 1969. In 1970, Ace Books came out with an Ace Double—remember the old Ace Doubles, bound back-to-back and upside-down?—one half of which featured Lord Grandrith in Lord of the Trees, and the other half starred Doc Caliban in The Mad Goblin. Tarzan Alive came along in 1972, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life in 1973, and there was a wonderful novella, kind of an add-on to Tarzan Alive, titled “Extracts From the Memoirs of ‘Lord Greystoke” in Mother Was a Lovely Beast, an anthology Phil also edited in 1974.

Not a bad slew of progeny from one little sex book.

Phil has always found the notion of Tarzan worth playing with. Along with all the above, he also wrote an excellent novel, Lord Tyger, about a young man being raised to become a Tarzan type. In fact, Phil has spent a considerable portion of his career resurrecting, reinventing, and examining the heroes of his youth, those whose mighty bodies and awesome weapons graced the covers of the pulp magazines when he was growing up.

The most fascinating and impressive of those heroes has always been Tarzan of the Apes. Tarzan Alive is Phil’s tribute to him—but because Philip Jose Farmer was never content to take the easy way out, this is far more than a mere recitation of Tarzan’s adventures. Anyone with the complete works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and sufficient time on his hands could do that. Only Phil could have invented the Wold Newton family.

Over the years, a number of writers have created consistent and all-encompassing (of their own works) future histories. Robert A. Heinlein was the first to make public the timeline in which he set most of his stories. Isaac Asimov wrote two disparate series during his lifetime—the robot stories and the Foundation stories—but toward the end of his life he managed to put them into one cohesive and reasonably consistent future. I myself have set some 25 of my novels and perhaps 15 shorter stories into a future I created back in 1980.

Kid stuff.

Phil has dwarfed all those efforts with the Wold Newtons. I won’t tell you much about it, since he’s going to do so in the pages up ahead. I’ll simply point out that the rest of us were concerned only with putting our own works into our own future histories. Phil has created a family that encompasses—with histories, timelines, bloodlines, and whatever else it takes—just about every fictional character he admires, from Elizabeth Bennett, Sherlock Holmes, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Leopold Bloom, and Bulldog Drummond to Lord Peter Wimsey, Doc Savage, Nero Wolfe, Tarzan, and the Spider. (Personally, I’d pay good money to believe in that family, and even more to be invited to one of its gatherings.)

It’s fascinating stuff, and you don’t have to know every member of the family to admire the work that went into it.

So what about Tarzan (I hear you ask)? After all, that’s what attracted you to the book in the first place.

Well, rest assured that when you finish Tarzan Alive—and it’s easy going—you’ll know almost as much about Tarzan and his 20+ books worth of adventures as Edgar Rice Burroughs did. Phil postulates that Tarzan is alive, and that he is a member of the Wold Newton family, but he never forgets that it is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan who initially attracted his—and your—attention, and he does the apeman justice. You’ll follow him from his birth in a tiny cabin in Africa to the kingship of the apes of the tribe of Kerchak, from his true love to his momentary infatuations with the High Priestess of the Flaming God and the Mad Queen of the City of Gold, from his battle against the Germans on African soil in World War I to his exploits in the Pacific in World War II. You’ll visit the kingdom of the ant men, and the lost land of Pal-ul-Don. You’ll follow the exploits of his son, and even briefly meet his grandson.

But because Phil is far better read and better educated than Burroughs (sorry, Edgar), he also gives you insights not only into the adventures and their chronology, but he puts Tarzan’s world and deeds into their true historical context. Where critics have said certain things were impossible, Phil quotes from the works of Jane Goodall, Joy Adamson and others to prove that far from impossible, many of the seemingly far-fetched suppositions in the Tarzan books were actually quite likely in view of what we’ve learned since they were written.

It’s a hell of a tour de force, half meticulous research, half unbridled imagination.

Which is to say, it’s 100% Philip Jose Farmer.