Purple Book

By Philip José Farmer

This collection of stories includes: The Oögenesis of Bird City (1970); Riders of the Purple Wage (1967); Spiders of the Purple Mage [Thieves' World] (1980); The Making of Revelation, Part I (1980);... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0523485298
• ISBN13: 9780523485294
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Pinnacle Books
• Length: 287 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Purple Book IS 'Purple Wage'

An amazing collection! I read this twenty years ago and am very happy to have found it again. As to the reviewer stating that this book "is not The Riders of the Purple Wage", he is in fact thinking of 'The Image of the Beast', another favorite but very much NOT 'The Purple Book'

Shocking "Wage" rates 5 stars, but the rest is just okay

The bulk of this purple volume is Farmer's futuristic masterpiece, "Riders of the Purple Wage", a stunningly creative, explosive, riotous, ribald homage to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Farmer pulls out all the stops, creating a whole new "utopian" social order, truly shocking sexual mores (even for those who thought they couldn't be shocked by anything), and, like Joyce, a richer and more complex language with which to express it all. Chaotic, but carefully structured, the story describes a couple of crucial days in the lives of a handsome but troubled young artist and his eccentric grandfather. Extraordinary as this work is, it certainly isn't for everyone, especially those who are easily offended. Furthermore, the society described in this story is a confusing one at best, and the linguistic experimentation only makes it more difficult to follow what's going on. The story's prologue, "The Oogenesis of Bird City", is no more readily comprehensible, and considerably less fun. The long short story "Spiders of the Purple Mage" is a fantasy about magic, and how a tenacious but seemingly ordinary woman named Masha helps defeat a feared magician. It bears no relationship to the previous story except for the title, and while this is a pretty good story as such fantasies go, there's nothing really remarkable about it. "The Long Wet Purple Dream of Rip Van Winkle" is a trashy send up of Rip visiting the 20th Century. Most notable is Rip's turn as a late-sixties hippie, where his exceptional sexual endowment makes him an immediate favorite. "The Making of Revelation, Part I" is a short (but not short enough) story that shows God hiring Cecil B. DeMille to film the Apocalypse and is every bit as sacrilegiously funny as "Riders" is, but without any redeeming social or human values.As collections go, these stories don't really hang together very well. "Spiders" in particular, isn't humorous, sexy, or heretical, and was obviously included solely because of the title. Still, "Riders of the Purple Wage" is a science fiction classic that shouldn't be missed by those able to handle its brutal sexuality, chaotic violence, and philosophical pontification. The rest of this collection isn't in the same league, but then, not much is.