September 9th 2003:

As we reported last month Phil won the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award at this year's Worldcon. Phil's good friend Joe Haldeman accepted the award for him. Here is a picture of all the winners from Locus Online. Phil asked Joe to say the following: "My deepest thanks to the fans of Science Fiction and to Joe Haldeman for accepting this wonderful award. I wish I could be there myself to speak to you. I had no idea I would ever get this award when I started writing science fiction in 1952. I am deeply touched and warmed."

We have gone ahead and in one fell swoop changed all the small scans to big scans on the Books page (if anyone finds any broken links please let us know). In last month's newsletter we asked for scans of any of the books listed on the Short Stories page, that we don't currently have online. Two big Farmer fans and collectors, Dan Getz and Lee J. Barrie both sent me about a dozen scans. These you can identify, if you take the time, because they are almost the only big scans on the Short Stories page. Anyone else got any scans for us?

Last month we updated the PJF Recommends page but forgot to mention it on the index page. This month we are getting (at least partially) back to science fiction. Phil has given us a list of the books that had the greatest influence on him as a child. There are not too many surprises for anyone who has read much Farmer. The question I have posed for him next month should be full of surprises because I can only imagine what a few of his answers will be. I asked him to name his ten favorite science fiction books, or stories, written since 1952.

And now to the part of the update you've all been waiting for; what new, previously unknown and therefore not on this website, goodie have we found this month. Actually this month our most interesting find only contains two letters from Phil. But then the whole book is mostly made up of letters from science fiction authors so what can we expect? The book in question is PITFCS: Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies. The Institute was basically a fanzine, for pros only, which Theodore R. Cogswell put out in his spare time between 1959 and 1962 (with the final issue appearing 17 years late in 1979) and it was a place for science fiction authors, editors and other insiders to communicate. Check out this website about one of the long running debates carried out in PITFCS to get a better idea of what this was all about. I believe you can buy a copy here and I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history and "behind the scenes" discussions of science fiction. You can read both of Phil's letters on the Letters page, but since they mostly refer to letters that appeared in previous issues, they will only whet your appetite for the whole book.

Also previously unknown to us was the fact that the poem The Pterodactyl, which we always thought was first printed in the July 1965 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, was actually first printed in Sky Hook #16, the Winter 1952-53 issue of a fanzine we have never even heard of! You may be wondering, if this is Phil's official page, why didn't he mention it to us that we had the wrong information? Phil has spent very little time online and has never explored all the nooks and crannies of this web site. Plus he trusts that we have accurate information...ah well, we try.

We have added fourteen new items to the Reviews page, including a positive review of INSIDE OUTSIDE by none other than Theodore Sturgeon, which was sent to us by long time fan and web page contributor Craig Kimber. We have also added a review of VENUS ON THE HALF-SHELL that you may have heard about before. In May 1975, when everyone was still wondering just who wrote VENUS ON THE HALF-SHELL, a review appeared in the UCLA Daily Bruin, where the reviewer claimed that the book had to be written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. It just so happens that one week earlier Phil had been at the school as a guest speaker and had told the audience that he had written the book. The paper had to print a correction.

August 9th 2003:

This month's update is keeping the streak (of finding some new item) alive with yet another review, by Phil, that was not already on the page. I have actually had this fanzine for quite a while but somehow completely forgot about it and never put it online. In Science Fiction Review #39, the August 1970 issue, is the oldest review by Phil that we have found so far.

Speaking of the streak, back in March we reported that our discovery of the month was the poem Job's Leviathan. We also said that this was first printed in the fanzine First Fandom Magazine #4 (in an amazing coincidence just two months after learning that Phil was a member of First Fandom, we found out that he is going to be one of this year's First Fandom, Hall of Fame Award winners). However, the poem was actually first printed in the fanzine JD Argassy #58.

As you may have noticed if you clicked on any of the above image links, the scans that came up were rather large. As has been explained previously this web page began with small image scans of 36 dpi way back in 1996 when I didn't have very much disk space. When Rick came on board with funding for real web hosting, with unlimited disk space, we began adding larger scans (75 dpi) which were only accessible through the thumbnail pages. Click these for examples: Thumbnail, 36 dpi and 75 dpi. What we have done with this update is to start adding links directly to the larger 75dpi scans as we will slowly replace all of the smaller 36dpi scans on the page. Rick wanted to do this from the beginning but I (Mike) resisted because with a dial up connection the 75dpi scans can take a little while to load. However, over the next couple of years I think that 56K dial up connections will become as rare as 9600 baud modems are now. Plus on the smaller 36 dpi scans it is very hard to make out much detail.

Unless we hear cries of protest that for some reason you like the smaller scans, we will be changing the links on the Books, Short Stories, etc... pages from the smaller images to the bigger ones. This is going to be slow as many of the items on these pages will need to be rescanned. This month Rick sent me about twenty scans of magazines and anthologies which have been added to the Short Stories page. Since we already had all first appearances online, these were all for reprints. If any of you fans have a book or magazine that is listed on this page that we don't have a scan of, please send a 100 dpi scan of it to mike@pjfarmer.com. Once we start getting more of these scans we will start adding thumbnail pages to the Short Stories page. Rick also sent me a scan of an Uncorrected Proof of THE DUNGEON Volume 1.

We've also added larger scans to some of the items on the advertising page. We now have both the front and back covers of the many Ballantine paperbacks with Farmer ads on the back. Three of them we got from a long time science fiction collector who is selling off some of his collection on ebay. His user id is abacoan, and he should have more stuff for sale in a couple of weeks, and hopefully he will find more Ballantines to scan for us.

We have also added a few items to the Excerpts page. One is a scan of the magazine Secret Hours, which has an excerpt from LOVE SONG. We have also added a listing for SCIENCE FICTIONISMS, a book which is full of quotes from science fiction authors. I think that I have seen Farmer's quote somewhere before, but I have no idea where. If you know, please tell me!

The most exciting news this month is the announcement of the forthcoming book; CREATIVE MYTHOGRAPHY: AN EXPANSION OF PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER'S WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE, edited by Win Eckert. This is also a hot topic on our PJF Forum.

We did get a little bit of a surge from the fourth airing of the Riverword TV Pilot on the scifi channel. As I type this the hit counter says 54,698 which is 2,907 for the last month, a little more than the 2,000 - 2,500 we usually get.

July 11th 2003 Newsflash:

I just received permission to go public with the news and decided not to wait for the August 9th update. Phil found out a couple of weeks ago that he is one of this year's winners of First Fandom's, Hall of Fame Award. The award ceremony will be held, as usual, at the Worldcon, this year held in Toronto. Phil will not be attending, but the award will be accepted for him by his long time friend, fellow science fiction author and fellow member of First Fandom, Joe Haldeman. Congratulations Phil and thank you Joe!

July 9th 2003:

First of all, if you are on the PJF mailing list, you already know that the scifi channel will be showing the Riverworld TV pilot for the fourth time on July 26th. If you are not on the mailing list, sign up now before you miss something important.

We did it again! Another monthly update, and once again we can report that we have found something to add to the web site, and to our collections, that we previously did not know existed. If you have been reading these updates for a while, you know that while we like to learn of articles about Phil and book and story reprints that we had not seen before, we love to find things written by Phil that were previously unknown to us. This month we discovered a book review, written by Phil, that was printed in the New York Times Book Review. Rather than add this to the articles page, we went ahead and created a new web page, Reviews by Philip José Farmer, and moved a few items over from the articles page to keep it company.

The PJF Recommends page has been updated. I guess Phil enjoyed this month's question because, without any prompting, he also sent us a list for next month: If he was going to be stuck on that island with only ten books (instead of the complete works of ten authors), they would be... you'll have to wait until next month to find out. Sensing from feedback that fans want questions more related to scifi, I have sent Phil some scifi related questions but we will have to wait until September to see what he comes up with.

We finally did a complete overhaul of the Interviews page so that it is now the same format as most of the other pages. We also have seven more interviews listed for a total of eighteen. Reading all those interviews also helped us discover four new events to add to the conventions page. It was a slow month for reviews as we only added nine new ones.

While searching some online databases through my local library's web page I found two newspaper reviews of the play based on Phil's Hugo award winning novella Riders of the Purple Wage. Hopefully we will be able to find more online reviews and articles through these great new resourses.

The New PJF Forum is already bearing the type of fruit we have been hoping for. If you check out the section of Interesting and Rare PJF items for sale you will find the manuscript for The Felled Star available for sale. The two parts of The Felled Star were serialized in Worlds of Tomorrow and eventually became the first half of THE FABULOUS RIVERBOAT, the second book in the Riverworld series.

Speaking of things for sale; if you have not visited PJF's Basement, you might want to do so before we run out of stock. We only have three signed copies left of THE WORLD TIERS Volume 1, and only five copies left of RG Magazine.

For those scoring along at home the hit counter, as I type this, says 51,791, nearly 2,500 in the last month. It will be interesting to see if there is another surge in hits with this months airing of Riverworld.

June 9th 2003:

There are several things to report this month, but we will save the best for last and start with the bad news. The PJF Forum crashed last week and for the time being we have lost all the messages. Rick is working on restoring the old messages in an archive, and replacing the forum with better software. The new program will allow us to create threads so that when someone replies to an old message, it will be more visible and not lost so far down the page that no one notices it. We should also be able to add more features like user id's, avitars, polls and hopefully other fun and useful stuff.

We've talked on this page in the past about how we love discovering things Phil wrote that we didn't even know existed. This isn't quite as good as that, but we do seem to keep finding something new every month. We occasionally come across reprintings of Phil's stories that we didn't know about, but they are usually pretty recent and therefore not listed in any of the bibliographies. British fan Simon Luffrum told me about his copy of the December 1964 issue of Venture, which reprints The Alley Man.

Here is an interesting thing to consider about the above paragraph; you probably read it and either thought "so what" or "I need to find a copy of that". If you thought "so what", you are still sane. If you thought "I need to find a copy of that", you are either a serious collector or on your way to becoming one.

We have added 15 new photos to the Photo Gallery. All of these photos came from Phil and Bette Farmer from their personal collection. We have also added 14 new reviews to the Reviews page. Two of which came from long time fan and contributor to this page Craig Kimber. Don't forget, if you have some reviews that I do not have the text of online, you can type them up and send them to me, and get your name mentioned here.

And now, finally on to the big news of the month. As I describe in some detail on the new PJF Recommends page, this is chance for Phil to share his vast knowledge in all fields of literature. As soon as we get the PJF Forum fixed I will start a thread asking fans for questions to ask Phil. Until then, if you think you have a great question for Phil, just email it to Mike. Since I promised not to bother Phil too much with this, he will only be answering one question each month. This month I asked him to name his ten favorite mystery writers. As you will see, unless someone comes up with a better question, I have already chosen next month's.

Having just spent a week at the beach I had less time to work on the page this month and I have run out of things to talk about. Scouring the used book stores on St. Simons Island, Georgia, I did find a Ballantine printing of FIRST PERSON PECULIAR by T.L. Sherred, which has an ad on the back cover for TIMES LAST GIFT. I have not had time to scan this and add it to the Advertising page, but I will before the next update. That is something else you paperback collectors out there can help me with. If you have old Ballantine paperbacks, look at the back cover, if there is an ad for one of Phil's books, and I don't have it listed please send me a scan of it. Please send a 100 dpi scan as I plan on rescanning all of the items on the Advertising page in the near future and replacing them with larger images.

The hit counter, as I finally finish typing this update, says 49,353, which is nearly 3,000 hits to this index page since the last update.

May 9th 2003:

Wow, two months in a row we've managed to get the web page updated on time (on the 9th), that is something we don't manage to do very often. First, the Official Web Page would like to wish Phil and Bette Farmer a very happy 62nd Wedding Anniversary tomorrow (May 10th). Knowing them, they will probably be out partying all night.

If you go back and look through the What's New Archive, or if you have been visiting this page for years and have a good memory, you will find that when we first became official we promised a couple of new additions to the web page. One was a PJF Timeline and the second was a Photo Gallery. We kept not getting these pages done, and kept saying on these updates, "Maybe next month...", until we finally stopped mentioning them all together and hoped people would forget about them. Last month we finally put the Timeline online, even though it wasn't 100% finished (not that any page is ever finished around here). Rather than do as we should have, and work on the Timeline page for the past month, we finally made enough progress on the Photo Gallery page to put it online!

This is the coolest addition to the page since we started adding thumbnails and bigger scans. Full credit for this page needs to go to Bette Farmer for sharing all these great pictures and memories. The best part is that we are just getting started. We have 36 pictures online right now, but by this time next month the page could be twice as long! If time permits, we might even have more pictures online this weekend.

Well, we thought the big news this month was going to center around the Excerpts page. First I (Mike), finally found a copy of the September 1992 issue of Amazing, which contains an excerpt from THE CATERPILLAR'S QUESTION. Then, just on the chance that there might be a chapter on Phil, I checked out a copy of CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS, edited by Harold Bloom, from my local library. There was no chapter about Phil as this book dealt with much earlier science fiction writers. However, each chapter in the book contains a series of essays and excerpts from longer works about each subject. In the chapter on Edgar Rice Burroughs, there is a short excerpt from TARZAN ALIVE! As we have said in the past, we just love adding items to the web page that we didn't even know existed. Just in case you are new to this web page, it is being run by book (and magazine, and fanzine, and convention program, and ...) collectors. This page began as a visual catalog of my (Mike's) collection and just grew out of hand from there.

We managed to add 15 new reviews to the Reviews page, as well as about a dozen listings for reviews we didn't already know about. The Conventions and Events page has grown quite a bit and now has 36 events listed. If you know of a convention Phil attended and it is not listed on this page, please let us know. If you have a copy of the program book or any photographs, please scan them and send those to us as well. This is one of those pages that we know is not complete and may never be finished.

Last month we auctioned off the last two signed copies of RG Magazine on ebay and they went for $46.07 each. Right now on ebay we have the last seven unsigned copies of RG Magazine for $10 each. This auction will end on May 14th, a little after 8:30 in the morning. As I say in the auction, unless you go to Bermuda and get extremely lucky, this is probably going to be your last chance to find a copy of this magazine.

On last month's update we mentioned how in a usual month we had about 2,000 visitors to this index page. Last month we had almost 7,000 because of the publicity from Scifi Channel's airing of the Riverworld TV Pilot. The exposure continues to be good for us, as I type this the hit counter says 46,414, which gives us 3,714 hits since the last update.

April 9th 2003:

What an exciting month it has been to be a Philip José Farmer fan. Things have been very busy here at the web page, so busy that we've hardly had time to add any content. As mentioned in the special post Riverworld TV Pilot update, a typical month for this web site is about 2,000 vistors to this main page. When we updated on March 11th, we had had 36,059 visitors (since becoming PJF's official web page on October 9th, 2001). As I type this we have had 42,700 visitors, giving us 6,641 for the last 29 days. The TV show has been great exposure if nothing else. As we also mentioned on the 25th, there was a run on Riverworld books at most online book sellers. All ran out of stock but have since gotten more books from Del Rey, so if you gave up trying to find a copy last week, you should have no problem now.

Just in case you missed it, the Pilot will be shown again on Sunday April 13th.

As you can read in this article; SCI FI Sets Ratings Record the scifi channel had it's best ratings quarter ever. Thanks in part to Riverworld; "The two-hour original film Riverworld averaged a 2.2 rating, exceeding the time period average by 86 percent and becoming the most-watched original movie SCI FI has ever aired on a Saturday night (2.74 million viewers).

However, even with such strong ratings, there is at this time, as far as we know, no plans to produce a series. So, please tune in on the 13th. Hopefully from word of mouth, this showing will have higher ratings than the first showing. But that is only going to happen if you watch it (possibly for the third time) and tell all your friends to watch it. Also if you want to comment on the movie, you can do it on our PJF Forum, or the Not For Hire: The Unofficial Riverworld Homepage Forum, or you can go to the Riverworld page at IMDB. But, the place where it will probably do the most good is at the Scifi.com Bulletin Board. Their search engine is not working so you have to hunt around to find the messages that have already been posted. Here are a few pages with posts; Recent Sci-Fi TV MO-Ri, SCI FI Channel 00-00, SCI FI Channel Qu-RO, Recent Sci-Fi Movies NE-wh. There are probably dozens more, but this will get you started. Assuming the people at scifi.com pay attention to what is posted on their bulletin boards, this is where you want to go to tell them you want a Riverworld Series.

This bit of news will only be of interest if you are reading it before 11:00 PM (est) April 10th. On ebay we have up for auction, two signed copies of RG Magazine. Click on the link for details about this very hard to find item that every Farmer collector will want to add to their collection.

We did manage to get a little work done to the web page this month. With so many new visitors to the page, mostly looking for information about Riverworld, we finally got around to updating the Series Page. Instead of just a link to the individual series pages we have added some details to this main series page. Hopefully anyone visiting there to find out about Riverworld will find another series that interests them.

While we did not add any new Reviews this month, we did add links to the reviews page directly from the Books, Books Edited, and Short Story Collections, pages. These links are right next to the thumbnail links for each entry (if we have a review online).

In the works for months and months, and not quite finished, we are finally putting online the Philip José Farmer Time Line. Full of biographical information, this page is a good place to start reading if you are a new fan of Phil's, and will probably contain lots of new information for even the long time fan.

March 25th 2003:

For those of you new to this web site, this index page is usually updated on or near the 9th of the month (the anniversary of us becoming Philip Farmer's official web page). To see what a normal update looks like please take a look at the What's New Archive. This is a special post Riverworld TV show update.

As you probably already know, a pilot for a Riverworld series aired on the Scifi Channel March 22nd. If you missed it, you can see it when it is shown again on April 13th. Reaction from the majority of fans who have posted their comments on our PJF Forum and on the Forum of Not For Hire: The Unofficial Riverworld Homepage have been less than favorable.

This is understandable considering the number of changes made in order to get the Riverworld story to film. A few of the changes seemed completely pointless, such as introducing horses to a world whose only non-human life (not counting Monat and the "ethicals") is fish and worms. Changing the name of Sam's boat to the "Go For Broke", from the "Not For Hire" and having Gwenafra be the only child resurrected on Riverworld.

Some of the changes made sense in that they helped move the story along. Having staggered resurrections allowed us to skip over the ten years it had taken for Valdemar's army to get to it's current state and the six years it took Sam to build his boat. Having the, mostly unseen, "ethicals" mysteriously take care of instantaneous language translation means we didn't have to watch the characters struggle with that barrier.

The biggest complaint seems to be the substitution of the uninteresting astronaut Jeff Hale for Sir Richard Francis Burton, hard driven explorer of the Nile and translator of 1001 Arabian Nights. As some astute fans have pointed out, Jeff Hale is actually replacing both Burton and Peter Jarius Frigate, alter ego of Philip José Farmer and the character who gives the modern perspective of events.

Most fans would, of course, have rather seen the movie stay true to the books. A 2-hour pilot could have been made of the first half or so of TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO, the first book in the Riverworld series. Instead the pilot actually tried to cram the entire first two books of the series, BODIES and THE FABULOUS RIVERBOAT, into too short a time and had to make too many changes to do it.

Some fans, and Phil Farmer himself, once they get past the changes, are pleased with the movie. Four people that I know of, that have not read the books, enjoyed it very much. The best thing about the show is that it has brought the attention of Phil's writing to the TV generation. This web site had a 48-hour period that had as much traffic as an average month. Amazon.com had sold out of the latest edition of TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO by noon Sunday, putting it as their #35 best selling book at the time, it has since fallen back down to #2985 due to lack of available copies. THE FABULOUS RIVERBOAT, THE DARK DESIGN and THE MAGIC LABYRINTH are now all out of stock, and all three made it into the top 200 ranking Sunday or Monday. GODS OF RIVERWORLD did not have a sales surge because it was already out of stock and for some reason it is not listed on Amazon's Riverworld Page.

ABEBOOKS.COM, the best web site for finding used books, had over 1000 copies of TO YOUR SCATTERED BODIES GO available last week, they now have only 342. All in all we are pleased that Riverworld has finally made it to television. The next step is to hope that the pilot is picked up and made into a series. If you think it should be, please go to scifi.com and let them know.

The hit counter, as of 10:15 on March 25th, says 40304, that's 4245 hits higher than it was on March 11th.

March 11th 2003:

Just in case you did not visit this site in the last month, this is the current big news around here:

Riverworld Will Air March 22nd!

If you click on the Scifi.com schedule, you will see that the movie is being shown twice, at 9:00pm and at 11:00pm on March 22nd! You can also check out scifi.com's Riverworld Page. Sunday I sat through what is probably the worst science fiction movie of all time, Flash Gordon, on the scifi channel just in case they might show a commercial for Riverworld. They did and it was worth it.

Back in September 2002 we reported here that we had discovered an article by Philip José Farmer that no one seem to know existed. "Report" appeared in Luna 6 and is now listed on the Articles Page. Then in October 2002 we reported that, previously unknown to us, exerpts from LOVE SONG had been printed in two different adult magazines. That information was added to the excerpts page. This month we are thrilled to report that we have once more added to the site information about a work by Phil that no one seem to have known existed. This time the work is a Poem titled "Job's Leviathan", which appeared in the fanzine First Fandom Magazine #4, June 1961.

If you know of any item by or about Phil that is not listed on this web page, please tell us! Back when I started the Unofficial page in 1996 people constantly emailed me information about things that I did not have listed on the web site. Phil has contributed so many articles to so many fanzines over the years it is has been really hard to find them all. Until I received my copy of First Fandom #4 in the mail, I had no idea that Phil was a member of that organization. Now I have to keep my eyes open for more copies of that fanzine, which are very rare because they were only distributed to members.

We have two new pieces of Fan Art on the page, the Snoligaster and Batwing. Both are drawn by Mario Zecca and both were inspired by THE STONE GOD AWAKENS. It has been a while since I read this book and I don't remember the Snoligaster. However the Batwing is pretty much how I'd pictured it and reminds me of some the pictures Roland Trenary did in his fanzine Normal Bean.

Once again Zacharias, webmaster of the The International Bibliography typed up a bunch of reviews for us. Rias also gave us information on another where another 31 reviews can be found in British magazines and fanzines such as Paperback Inferno, Paperback Parlour and Vector.

Speaking of Zacharias, he first reported on his web site that ibooks is reprinting the 6 book Dungeon Series in three volumes. They are also reprinting THE ULTIMATE DRACULA, THE ULTIMATE FRAKENSTEIN and DANGEROUS VISIONS.

With numbers once again probably swollen from people coming to the page everyday since the 9th looking for this month's update, the hit counter now says 36059.

February 12th 2003:

It seems that in my case, at least this month, fortune favors the busy. I was not able to update this index page on the 9th and when I finally had time set aside to do it this morning I get an email from John Thompson telling me that the Not For Hire :: The Unofficial Riverworld Homepage has some big news:

Riverworld Airdate Finally Announced!

As you can see on the Scifi.com schedule, the movie is being shown twice, at 9:00pm and at 11:00pm on March 22nd! I would have updated the index page earlier in the day but I wanted to call Phil and Bette to get their reactions. Bette answered the phone so I told her first, she was very excited and said "You couldn't have said anything that would have made me happier". Phil who has been made cynical about Hollywood over the years said "It certainly makes us happy, if it comes true. I'm steeling myself for it, I imagine they made some changes". Even with an airdate announced only 39 days away, Phil won't believe it until he sees it.

Also at scifi.com you can find the complete text of The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World at their Classics Page. This much reprinted story, which was originally published in 1971, is the prequel to the Dayworld trilogy. There is also a link to the story from their Archive Page.

The big news this update was going to be that we have added over 120 new reviews to the reviews page. As usual several of them were typed up by Zacharias at The International Bibliography and he also found several more online reviews that we have linked to. The bulk of the reviews came from Craig Kimber from such periodicals as; Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Voice of the youth advocates, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and School Library Journal. These make for very interesting reading as they come from outside the "science fiction community". I was a little surprised at the mostly really positive reviews of NOTHING BURNS IN HELL, a story that has been mostly ignored by the science fiction world, because of course, it is a mystery novel.

Because the reviews page is now getting so big, if the time can be found this month, it will be split up into individual pages. We will also add links to the reviews page, directly from each entry on the books page. Eventually these individual pages for each book will contain more information about the book, such as back cover and dust jacket blurbs and listings for more comprehensive articles about the book. However, much like Phil himself, we never seem to have the time to do all the great ideas we have.

In celebration of Phil's 85th birthday on January 26th, about a dozen of Phil's fans pitched in to get a star named Dantes Joy. If the meaning of this name escapes you, drop everything right now and go read NIGHT OF LIGHT. Just like everything else around here, it was sent to him late, but he should be getting the certificate today or tomorrow. There was some controversy surrounding this gift and the fact that only the companies who sell the star names keep records of these purchased names, and actual astronomers ignore them. But we felt that Phil would get a kick out of the gift anyway.

With numbers probably swollen from people coming to the page everyday since the 9th looking for this month's update, the hit counter now says 33650.

January 9th 2003:

There are a couple additions to the web page to report this month. The first is a page we mentioned last month, Introductions to Farmer's books and stories, by him and other authors. We have put this page online even though it is not complete, we will be adding to it as quickly as possible and hope to have it done by the end of the month.

The next biggest addition to the page is our longest piece of fan fiction yet. For God and Country is John Thompson's second Riverworld story. Unlike his first story, this one does have some famous characters from history. With General George Armstrong Custer, Vlad the Impaler and a band of Zulu warriors, this story is full of battles and adventure, much like Farmer's own Riverworld novels.

There are lots of new reviews, and again many of them were typed up by Zacharias at the The International Bibliography. We also have some links to online reviews of the more recent books, these also were found by Zacharias. I just heard from longtime fan and contributor to this web page, Craig Kimber. He has amassed over 100 reviews located in periodicals that we normally wouldn't have access to. While I am happy to snap up copies of Locus, Science Fiction Review and other sicfi fanzines, he will be getting reviews from the likes of Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Voice of the youth advocates, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and School Library Journal. It may be a few months before he can type them up, but we are really looking forward to all this extra data.

We don't normally mention individual scans of bookcovers that have been added to the page, but we did get a couple of interesting ones this month. Science Fiction Review #28, November 1968 was bought on ebay for $9.99. I (Mike) have been looking for a copy of this fanzine, which contains the text from Farmer's 1968 Worldcon Guest of Honor Speech, for several years and this is the first one I have ever seen. I am very fortunate that the person selling this fanzine didn't take the time to list the contents. Had he taken 5 minutes and mentioned some of the names of the contributors I know I would have gotten into a bidding war with at least five other Farmer collectors (including Rick, the mostly silent partner at this web page) and this item might have cost over $100. In fact, that was my maximum bid, I was so worried that at least one of the Farmer collectors out there new about this auction.

The second hard to find book cover scan was sent to me by a Farmer fan named Sam who lives in Australia. I had never seen a copy of the British paperback printing of RED ORC'S RAGE before. The cover art is from the back cover of the Tor (US printings) dust jacket.

Last January Alex Proyas announced that the Riverworld TV pilot would air in January 2003. So far there has been no airdate announced at scifi.com. Email inquiries to Alliance Atlantis just told us to ask scifi.com. Email inquiries to them resulted in an automated messages telling us to search their programming grid. Big help. If you hear or see any news about this, please let us know!

The hit counter, for those who care, says 31022.

December 9th 2002:

Unlike last month we have actually gotten a lot of work done on the page this time around, but as usual not everything we had hoped for. We have added the text of 22 reviews to the reviews page. Ten of the reviews were typed up and sent to us by Zacharias Nuninga, webmaster of the The International Bibliography. For those of you who have ever wondered about any ill feelings between our two seemingly competitive web sites, we (Rick and Mike) have nothing but respect for the great job Rias has done on his site. We email each other several times a month and share lots of information. The reviews added since the last update have next to them. We will remove these graphics by the end of this week when we start adding more reviews online. So, as we said last month, if you have a magazine or fanzine with a review in it, please type it up and send it to us!

The biggest news of the month is that Mark Brown's Wold Newton Chronicles has moved and is now being hosted here at www.pjfarmer.com. If you have never looked at these Wold Newton web pages (see the three links on the left), set aside a weekend and dive in. The amount of work that these WN Historians have put into their theories and stories is just remarkable.

There is a new page in the Written about Philip José Farmer section which is unfortunately short at this time. The subject is parodies of Farmer's work. The first two items are short parodies of the Riverworld books by Walt Leibscher that appeared in Moebius Trip in the early 1970's. I (Mike) only have the second one and would love to get my hands the first one. So if you have any copies of Moebius Trip I would probably be interested in buying them (I only have #s; 6, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 22). Or if you know Walt Leibscher please let him know that we would like to see a copy of the first parody To Your Battered Scotties Go, if he still has a copy.

The final entry on the parodies page is more exciting because unlike the very hard to find Moebius Trips, it is easily available. Ed Lisic first told me about his scifi parody, STAR WARPED in May, 2000 when we added a sample chapter to the fan fiction page. Ed was nice enough to send me a copy of the book so I could read the whole thing. I just finished the book and I have to say that the more I read, the more I liked it. The book just kept getting funnier. With everything and everyone in science fiction and fantasy to choose from the book continually surprises. For a little more information read my description of the book on the parodies page. Is this book a must have for the Philip José Farmer completist? Quite possibly. One thing for sure is that if you enjoy Farmer's books, you probably have a good sense of humor which means that you will not regret spending the $16.95 cover price for this book (plus shipping of course).

All available signed copies of RG magazine have been sold. We are still waiting to receive payment from a few people, but if they decide not to buy the magazine, we have three people on a waiting list for their copies. We have 10 copies of the magazine that are not signed. These will be made avaible for $10 each shortly. If you want to get on this list, email Mike now.

Last month we greatly expanded the Articles About page and this month we have continued to add listings, scans and descriptions of the articles. It isn't until you slowly scroll down that page that you begin to realize just how much has been written about Philip José Farmer and his works. And this page doesn't include a lot of items that can be found on other pages. We had hoped to have online a web page listing introductions (etc) to Farmer's books and stories, by Farmer and other authors, but it is not yet completed. It should be online by the next update.

Once again for posterity; the hit counter now says 28836.

November 12th 2002:

Well, this is the latest update we have done so far. By latest of course I mean that we missed the deadline of the 9th of the month, which we do manage to hit most of the time. Since we are so late, we need an excuse, which also gives us an excuse to talk a little about what goes on behind the scenes. Rick and I (Mike) are both married (not to each other), have two kids each and full time jobs. In other words, we have lives outside the web site, which do demand some of our time. I usually manage to not let my job interfere with the more important tasks waiting here at the web page but sometimes it can't be helped. As is often the case, I had planned to spend all night Friday (the 8th) working on the web page, then putting the finishing touches on the index page and uploading it Saturday morning. Friday night, just after eating supper I was called back into work because of major computer problems (I could add at this point that I had been up since 5:00am, been sick all week and still spent almost 60 hours at the office, but that might sound like whining). I worked on the problem from about 9:00pm until 1:00am when I had to stop and let some other people get a little work done. Then I went back to work and finally finished around 2:30am. At that point I decided to sleep at the office so I would be there at 8:00am to make sure everything was working correctly when Saturday's shift started. It wasn't. But by 10:00am it was, so then I finally drove home and slept the rest of the weekend. At least it seems like I did.

Also behind the scenes is the work of getting Phil to sign the copies of RG Magazine we have sent him, and sending them to me so I can mail them to the fans who have reserved a copy. The first batch was sent out a few weeks ago and the second batch left Peoria for Atlanta on Saturday. If you have not yet reserved a copy I think there are only two left! If you want one of these two, email Mike now. I will put you on the list and let you know if there is a copy available after all the orders are filled. There is also the chance that someone who requested a copy will change their mind and theirs will become available. I don't expect these to last long so get on the list quick.

Sticking with our "behind the scenes" theme, we have a new page called About this web page. Not a major addition, but it does tell the story of the evolution of this web site and Phil's role in it.

The biggest news this month comes from outside the web site. Alliance Atlantis has a Riverworld TV Trailer at their web site. If you can find a computer with a high speed internet connection, the high speed version is much better. This is to be expected of course, but the low speed version is pretty terrible, you can hardly see anything.

In the last two updates we were able to announce that we had found some new PJF writings that we had not previously known even existed. No such luck this month, but we are in the process of a major update to the Written about Philip José Farmer section of the web page, especially the Articles page. When the Articles About page was first started, back in the Unofficial days, I was running out of web space so I did not do many scans of these items. Since I didn't have the fun of scanning them, I wasn't very dilligent about adding them to the page. Once again Zacharias' International Bibliography is pushing us to get off our butts and try to do a more complete job. Hopefully by the next update there will be a lot more scans and information on all of the web pages in the Written about Philip José Farmer section of the page.

We have added more text to the Reviews page, we now have 33 reviews online. Starting today we will add next to the reviews as we add them. We will remove all of "new" graphics and start over each month when we update the index page. This page is probably going to get so long that we will break it up into individual pages with links from the Books page similar to the links to the thumbnail pages. Here is a way you can help with the web page. If you have a magazine or fanzine with a review of one Phil's books, type it up and email it to us.

Not that it matters because this update is so late, but the hit counter now says 26882.

October 9th 2002:

Today is the one year anniversary of the Officialness of this web page. Here are a few statistics for the last year; As of this afternoon we have had 24,389 hits to the index page, which gives us an average of 2032 hits a month or about 68 hits a day. In the 6 months the search has been available we have averaged about 8 searches a day, and the forum has more than 360 messages in it's 9 months.

We are lucky enough to be able to celebrate the anniversary with a major announcement: A short story written by Philip José Farmer in 1955, The Good of the Land, has just been published for the first time anywhere! It has been printed in RG Magazine, in Bermuda of all places, along side an article by Roger Crombie about the 50th Anniversary Celebration of The Lovers. The really exciting news is that we will have copies of the magazine, signed by Roger Crombie and signed by Philip José Farmer available here, for only $20! Quantities are very limited, so if you want a copy email mike to hold one. The cost is $20 + $3.85 for priority mail shipping (in the USA). All $20 will be going to Phil, Roger is thrilled just to have his article appear with Phil's story, and isn't taking a penny.

If you buy, and of course enjoy, Roger's article, you might also want to consider buying his book, THE BERMUDA FACTORY. It is a collection of the first 30 monthly columns he has written for RG Magazine. This book is laugh out loud funny and is highly recommended by the staff here at the Official Philip José Farmer Home Page, as well as Phil himself.

A special addition to the page this month is a very short mpeg movie of Phil. The link is just below the picture of Phil on the left side of this page. The 50th Anniversary Celebration of The Lovers web page (see link above) has a longer mpeg of Tracy Knight reading one of the letters sent to Phil for the Anniversary.

Just like last month we have added something to the page that we never knew existed! Way back in 1997 a fan named Keith W. Dilbone told me about an excerpt from Love Song appearing in an adult magazine titled Late Date. I hunted for the magazine but did not add it to the web page because back then the page was really a graphical listing of my collection. It wasn't attempting to be all inclusive as it is now. What reminded me of this excerpt is that Roger Crombie (that guy again!), emailed me to say that he had just found an excerpt from Love Song in an adult magazine titled Secret Hours. Both of these listings have been added to the excerpts page with scans to hopefully follow soon.

We are in the process of adding the text from more reviews to the reviews page, all from a large lot of Luna magazines. These should all be up by the end of the week. Win Eckert has put the text online from four more Wold Newton items. Check out; The Lord Mountford Mystery, From ERB to YGG, A Language for Opar and The Monster on Hold. In other PJF related web page news, the Riverworld TV Series Page, Not for Hire has moved to a new address and has added some recent news.

Another new feature we have added this month is the Official Philip José Farmer Mailing List. If you would like to be notified of changed to the web page and any other PJF news, please join.