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lordofthemoon's review
3.0
This collection of short stories is a showcase of some of Farmer's work, each with a brief introduction from the author. Despite being a big fan of the early Riverworld books, I'm still not entirely sure what to make of Farmer. I enjoyed some of the stories here, and found others not to my taste. In the former category, I include My Sister's Brother, about a Human who encounters a very Human-like alien on Mars and has to deal with his emotions. This was probably my favourite story in the book, dealing with difficult themes in a mature, if sometimes hard to bear, way. On the opposite pole is The Alley Man, in which a researcher from a University spends time with a man who claims to be the last Neanderthal on earth, as he goes about his business, picking up litter from alley ways. I don't know why this story didn't gel for me, but I didn't enjoy it when I encountered it elsewhere, and I mostly just skipped it here.
Elsewhere in the book are a collection of what Farmer calls "Polytropical Paramyths". These are all very short and tend to be written in a mythological style and are often quite fun. The book concludes with an interview with Lord Graystoke (aka Tarzan), a segment from Farmer's famous story Riders of the Purple Wage and a short fictional biography of Kilgore Trout (who would later go on to give his name to the Glasgow SF/F fan group, fact fans).
Elsewhere in the book are a collection of what Farmer calls "Polytropical Paramyths". These are all very short and tend to be written in a mythological style and are often quite fun. The book concludes with an interview with Lord Graystoke (aka Tarzan), a segment from Farmer's famous story Riders of the Purple Wage and a short fictional biography of Kilgore Trout (who would later go on to give his name to the Glasgow SF/F fan group, fact fans).
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