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A review by lukerik
Flesh by Philip José Farmer
adventurous
dark
funny
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Hugely entertaining. I would have five starred it but for several artistic failures. None of these failures affect the main artistry of the book though, which is a fantastic meld of theme and story. The themes are sex and religion.
A spaceship with an all-male crew returns to earth after eight hundred years to find that climate change has caused the civilisation that launched them to collapse. Society is now matriarchal and practices a fertility cult constructed out of a number of elements from religions past and present. We’re in dying-and-rising god territory. There are too many examples to go into where the story explores the intersection of sex and religion, but in the main plotline the captain of the spaceship is unfortunate enough to match the matriarchs’ concept of the son/lover who must fertilise the earth each year before dying. They enact this drama in literal terms by doing something particularly horrid to the captain. The captain is a ridiculous satire of a manly man and there’s some entertaining/worrying (depending on if you’re a male or female reader) gender reversal where the captain, no matter how manly, is still not good enough and must be sexually augmented in order to come up to spec.
A spaceship with an all-male crew returns to earth after eight hundred years to find that climate change has caused the civilisation that launched them to collapse. Society is now matriarchal and practices a fertility cult constructed out of a number of elements from religions past and present. We’re in dying-and-rising god territory. There are too many examples to go into where the story explores the intersection of sex and religion, but in the main plotline the captain of the spaceship is unfortunate enough to match the matriarchs’ concept of the son/lover who must fertilise the earth each year before dying. They enact this drama in literal terms by doing something particularly horrid to the captain. The captain is a ridiculous satire of a manly man and there’s some entertaining/worrying (depending on if you’re a male or female reader) gender reversal where the captain, no matter how manly, is still not good enough and must be sexually augmented in order to come up to spec.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexism, Violence, Alcohol, Animal death, Murder, Gore, Rape, Religious bigotry, Body horror, Death, and Injury/Injury detail