Strange Relations by Philip José Farmer
Publisher: Baen, 2008
Genre: Science fiction
Sub-genre: Alien encounter
Rating: 2 1/2 pints of blood
For anyone who's unaware, Strange Relations is a collection of two novellas and several short stories, all of which were originally published in the 50s and 60s. At the time, they were considered groundbreaking and incredibly controversial, and they've been said to belong in every science fiction library.
Well, I just so happen to have a science fiction library, so I figured I'd better check 'em out.
The cover makes me giggle a little. The image is appropriate enough considering the content of the stories, but what's with the pink tentacles pulling them in? Ahead of its time Strange Relations may have been, but there aren't any mentions of hentai. (Warning: link is so very not work safe.)
Cover dude has some pretty impressive moobs there. In fact, he may have more cleavage than the alien chick, which just goes to prove her courage. My general rule of thumb is that if his bra has a bigger cup size than mine, it's time to run away, but she doesn't seem to have an issue with it. Perhaps she's just getting what she can before the tentacles eat them alive.
As always, book rating is the overall average of the stories.
The Lovers tells the story of Hal Yarrow, an ordinary man who struggles to make a living in the strict society of future Earth. He marries the woman he's told to, in spite of his personal distaste for her, avoids alcohol, keeps his face covered when he needs to do something so base as to eat a meal, and reports all his failings to the gapt. Anyone whose failings are considered too heavy are sent to H, from where nobody has ever come back. Hal, like all other citizens, lives in constant fear of being sent to H. The only pleasure he takes is in his work, researching linguistics.
Hal is terrified when he's approached by a Urielite, one of the high priests in charge of both religion and politics on Earth. The Urielite, however, has an unprecedented offer for Hal: they have discovered a habitable planet only a few light years away, and they need a linguistics expert to help them communicate with the Ozagenians who live there. If he accepts the mission, he will be gone long enough to justify a divorce, a rare and shameful practice that can only be approved under dire circumstances. Eager to escape his oppressive marriage, Hal agrees.
At first, he finds the voyage uneventful. He studies what little is known of the native language, creating a workable dictionary for the others he travels with. That is, until he meets Jeanette, a beautiful humanoid alien who desperately needs his help. She's escaped from the Ozagenians who took her from her home to study her, and Hal agrees to hide her. He's not supposed to be in contact with any female, and that Jeanette is alien makes his crime even worse. He finds himself unable to deny the powerful draw she has over him, though, and soon she begins to show him the pleasures of life he's always denied himself.
The premise was really interesting, and Farmer spent a lot of time creating both the rigid society Hal comes from and the aliens on Ozagen. There's a lot of detail here, and sometimes it felt like it had just been crammed in. There's a stretch of several chapters that consist almost entirely of a lengthy conversation/explanation of the psysiological intricacies of a particular type of alien and the differences between them and humans. Most of it is relevant to the story Farmer wants to tell, but the infodump is awkward and not all of it was strictly necessary.
Hal starts out as an understandable character, an everyman who feels he has no power over his own mundane life. Once he starts making his own decisions, though, he lost me. I didn't like him anymore, and instead of sympathizing and rooting for him, I felt bad for the secondary characters who had to deal with him. Perhaps this is Farmer's point, though: when we feel nobody is looking, the decisions we would make are selfish, the sorts of choices we wouldn't want others to know we secretly want to make.
Rating: 3 pints of blood
Flesh is the story of an eight-man spacecrew returning back to Earth after their eight hundred year voyage. (Most of that time they spent frozen.) When they land, they find the planet has been devastated, making many countries inhabitable, and society is nothing like what they had expected. Society has, in fact, reverted to a time when violence was acceptable, science was mystical and literacy was something only the very rich can afford to spend time on. Pagan rituals abound, appalling to the Christian sensibilities of some of the astronauts. Complicating matters, the starship captain has been chosen as king and Sunhero, a being considered semi-immortal, and his body is forcibly altered to accomodate the rituals the people put their Sunhero through. Of course, at the end of all the rituals and worship, it's customary for the Sunhero to be killed in horrible ways. As for the others, if they can't manage to become contributing members of society in short order, they'll all be hung.
The premise was an interesting idea, but parts of the story were pretty dated, which is perhaps not surprising considering Flesh was initially published in 1952. It was evidently inconceivable that any of the spacecrew would be female, and the astronauts are shocked to find out how common it is for people to sleep together outside of a marriage.
I have to admit, a few of my squick buttons got pushed, which makes it hard for me to enjoy the story. There's rape and attempted rape, both committed by the astronauts, the "heroes" fo the story who we're presumably supposed to be rooting for. Farmer seems to hold a dark view of humanity, and his characters act accordingly, making them hard to like. I'm honestly not sure if we're expected to like the characters, but we're clearly meant to understand and sympathize with their actions and decisions, but I just found myself appalled by all of them.
Rating: 2 pints of blood
Strange Relations, the book for which the omnibus is named, is a series of short stories about first contact between humans and aliens. They take place on different worlds with different life forms, but each one entails the struggles of man when he comes up against something for which he has absolutely no frame of reference. The results are always perilous and often deadly to one side or the other.
Farmer has a fantastic imagination. Each alien species is unique, not only unlike anything on Earth, but vastly different from each other. Since these are short stories, the alien worlds are not explored as fully as they might have been, but the small details thrown in make them memorable.
Something to be noted is that all the characters are very much a product of the time in which they were written. Every character is middle-class, caucasian, and Christian. Homosexuality is right out. All significant characters are male, with female characters relegated to hysterical young girls, unfathomable aliens, or overbearing mothers. To be fair, the men don't seem dismissive or contemptuous towards women, they're just never the strong adventurous kinds, the way the men are.
Rating: 3 pints of blood
For the record, I can see how these would have been groundbreaking at the time they were written and published. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they remain relevant today. It's perhaps unfair for me to hold something written 50 years ago to today's standards, but I'm not only a modern critter, I'm woman, so my bias is going to be very different from Farmer's. They're not a bad read, and I do admire the different cultures and alien species he's created, but the flavour of the 1950s is so strong in these stories, it's sometimes hard to look past.
Genre: Science fiction
Sub-genre: Alien encounter
Rating: 2 1/2 pints of blood
For anyone who's unaware, Strange Relations is a collection of two novellas and several short stories, all of which were originally published in the 50s and 60s. At the time, they were considered groundbreaking and incredibly controversial, and they've been said to belong in every science fiction library.
Well, I just so happen to have a science fiction library, so I figured I'd better check 'em out.
The cover makes me giggle a little. The image is appropriate enough considering the content of the stories, but what's with the pink tentacles pulling them in? Ahead of its time Strange Relations may have been, but there aren't any mentions of hentai. (Warning: link is so very not work safe.)
Cover dude has some pretty impressive moobs there. In fact, he may have more cleavage than the alien chick, which just goes to prove her courage. My general rule of thumb is that if his bra has a bigger cup size than mine, it's time to run away, but she doesn't seem to have an issue with it. Perhaps she's just getting what she can before the tentacles eat them alive.
As always, book rating is the overall average of the stories.
The Lovers tells the story of Hal Yarrow, an ordinary man who struggles to make a living in the strict society of future Earth. He marries the woman he's told to, in spite of his personal distaste for her, avoids alcohol, keeps his face covered when he needs to do something so base as to eat a meal, and reports all his failings to the gapt. Anyone whose failings are considered too heavy are sent to H, from where nobody has ever come back. Hal, like all other citizens, lives in constant fear of being sent to H. The only pleasure he takes is in his work, researching linguistics.
Hal is terrified when he's approached by a Urielite, one of the high priests in charge of both religion and politics on Earth. The Urielite, however, has an unprecedented offer for Hal: they have discovered a habitable planet only a few light years away, and they need a linguistics expert to help them communicate with the Ozagenians who live there. If he accepts the mission, he will be gone long enough to justify a divorce, a rare and shameful practice that can only be approved under dire circumstances. Eager to escape his oppressive marriage, Hal agrees.
At first, he finds the voyage uneventful. He studies what little is known of the native language, creating a workable dictionary for the others he travels with. That is, until he meets Jeanette, a beautiful humanoid alien who desperately needs his help. She's escaped from the Ozagenians who took her from her home to study her, and Hal agrees to hide her. He's not supposed to be in contact with any female, and that Jeanette is alien makes his crime even worse. He finds himself unable to deny the powerful draw she has over him, though, and soon she begins to show him the pleasures of life he's always denied himself.
The premise was really interesting, and Farmer spent a lot of time creating both the rigid society Hal comes from and the aliens on Ozagen. There's a lot of detail here, and sometimes it felt like it had just been crammed in. There's a stretch of several chapters that consist almost entirely of a lengthy conversation/explanation of the psysiological intricacies of a particular type of alien and the differences between them and humans. Most of it is relevant to the story Farmer wants to tell, but the infodump is awkward and not all of it was strictly necessary.
Hal starts out as an understandable character, an everyman who feels he has no power over his own mundane life. Once he starts making his own decisions, though, he lost me. I didn't like him anymore, and instead of sympathizing and rooting for him, I felt bad for the secondary characters who had to deal with him. Perhaps this is Farmer's point, though: when we feel nobody is looking, the decisions we would make are selfish, the sorts of choices we wouldn't want others to know we secretly want to make.
Rating: 3 pints of blood
Flesh is the story of an eight-man spacecrew returning back to Earth after their eight hundred year voyage. (Most of that time they spent frozen.) When they land, they find the planet has been devastated, making many countries inhabitable, and society is nothing like what they had expected. Society has, in fact, reverted to a time when violence was acceptable, science was mystical and literacy was something only the very rich can afford to spend time on. Pagan rituals abound, appalling to the Christian sensibilities of some of the astronauts. Complicating matters, the starship captain has been chosen as king and Sunhero, a being considered semi-immortal, and his body is forcibly altered to accomodate the rituals the people put their Sunhero through. Of course, at the end of all the rituals and worship, it's customary for the Sunhero to be killed in horrible ways. As for the others, if they can't manage to become contributing members of society in short order, they'll all be hung.
The premise was an interesting idea, but parts of the story were pretty dated, which is perhaps not surprising considering Flesh was initially published in 1952. It was evidently inconceivable that any of the spacecrew would be female, and the astronauts are shocked to find out how common it is for people to sleep together outside of a marriage.
I have to admit, a few of my squick buttons got pushed, which makes it hard for me to enjoy the story. There's rape and attempted rape, both committed by the astronauts, the "heroes" fo the story who we're presumably supposed to be rooting for. Farmer seems to hold a dark view of humanity, and his characters act accordingly, making them hard to like. I'm honestly not sure if we're expected to like the characters, but we're clearly meant to understand and sympathize with their actions and decisions, but I just found myself appalled by all of them.
Rating: 2 pints of blood
Strange Relations, the book for which the omnibus is named, is a series of short stories about first contact between humans and aliens. They take place on different worlds with different life forms, but each one entails the struggles of man when he comes up against something for which he has absolutely no frame of reference. The results are always perilous and often deadly to one side or the other.
Farmer has a fantastic imagination. Each alien species is unique, not only unlike anything on Earth, but vastly different from each other. Since these are short stories, the alien worlds are not explored as fully as they might have been, but the small details thrown in make them memorable.
Something to be noted is that all the characters are very much a product of the time in which they were written. Every character is middle-class, caucasian, and Christian. Homosexuality is right out. All significant characters are male, with female characters relegated to hysterical young girls, unfathomable aliens, or overbearing mothers. To be fair, the men don't seem dismissive or contemptuous towards women, they're just never the strong adventurous kinds, the way the men are.
Rating: 3 pints of blood
For the record, I can see how these would have been groundbreaking at the time they were written and published. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they remain relevant today. It's perhaps unfair for me to hold something written 50 years ago to today's standards, but I'm not only a modern critter, I'm woman, so my bias is going to be very different from Farmer's. They're not a bad read, and I do admire the different cultures and alien species he's created, but the flavour of the 1950s is so strong in these stories, it's sometimes hard to look past.