Escapando de la tiranía religiosa de una Tierra del siglo 31 por una asignación fortuita al planeta Ozagen, el lingüista Hal Yarrow descubrió que lo peor de la Tierra lo había seguido: Porsen, su ángel guardián personal, atento a cualquier evidencia de pecado o pensamiento erróneo.

...what did I just read? ( )

[The Lovers] - Philip José Farmer
The lovers was originally a novella published in 1952 in the pulp science fiction magazine Startling Stories. It was Farmer's first literary success winning the Hugo award as 'most promising new writer' I read the expanded novel length 1961 version.

Farmer's novella was praised as one of the first stories in the pulp market genre to treat sex in a more responsible non-prurient way. The centre piece of the story is the seduction by an alien female of a human male, but Farmer fleshes out (no pun intended) his story in the expanded version to make it more credible. Hal Yarrow lives in a totalitarian society on Earth sometime in the future. Power lay in the hands of a religious sect based on the Forerunner a man who could literally travel through time. This is an assessment of him from the writings that he left for his followers

"He said that the Forerunner’s biographies and theological writings revealed him to an objective reader as a sexually frigid and woman-hating man with a Messiah complex and paranoid and schizophrenic tendencies which burst through his icy shell from time to time in religious-scientific frenzies and fantasies.".... A society based on fear, ignorance and repression."

Hal has problems coming to terms with the society that controls his every action. From cradle to grave he will be under the supervision of a person higher up the food chain who will have access to his apartment and to his actions via reports from his wife, colleagues and friends who tell of any infringements or unreal actions. If his moral chart reaches a low enough level he will lose his place in the hierarchy and possibly face a spell in a house of correction. Hal was assigned a wife for procreation, he has never seen her naked, they are under pressure because she has not conceived and their life in the tiny apartment is fraught with arguments and fights. Earth is overcrowded: pressures on individuals to toe the party line are intolerable and so when Hal has the chance to join a space exploration team he does not hesitate. The destination is a planet that has been earmarked for colonisation, currently inhabited by an insect race whom Farmer has cheerfully called the Wogglebugs (he tips his hat to Frank Baum creator of the Land of Oz). There is however remnants of an ancient humanoid race and poor repressed Hal is soon out of his depth with one of the females.

There are surprises in store for Hal and not just in the bedroom and the novel works through these well enough. The insect race which Farmer cannot resist calling the Wogs are shown to be one step ahead of the exploration team, both in terms of human qualities and actions and the female humanoid is able to tease out the real Hal from underneath his repression. This all happens far too quickly as characters are only lightly sketched, but Farmer avoids the inherent racism and sexism which was a feature of much 1950's (60's, 70's, 80's) science fiction. An impressive start to Farmer's writing career in the genre and so 3 stars and worth a look. ( )

My first PJF book may be my last. We'll see...

The Lovers is a novella from 1952 about a human male who falls in love with a humanoid female on a distant planet. While the story may have been fresh at the time it was published, it has not aged well. The sci-fi elements and the romance elements are ridiculous unless you appreciate the finer points of a space rocket with lots of paper files (in triplicate!) or a female protagonist who will do anything to please her man as long as he keeps her supplied with booze. Sometimes ridiculous can be good, but not here.

To be fair, I thought The Lovers was interesting as a meta-read; there are books on my shelf that are only there because of when they were published, allowing me a chance to triangulate the cultural distances between historical eras. ( )

Hal Yarrow is a linguist sent to the newly discovered planet Ozgan, where another sentient species lives. He has led a repressed and unhappy life. But on Ozgan, he realizes that his tyranical religion and way of life are illogical, and breaks free to find love amongst the natives.

The writing is lazy. There are countless instances of Farmer forgetting what came mere pages ago. For example, on the first page, Yarrow tells a fellow passanger what a "joat" (jack-of-all-trades) is. Not five pages later, the book tells us what a joat is--using the exact same explanation, almost verbatim! Or, on page 147, the book tells us "[Yarrow] had had no intention of saying he loved her. He'd never told any woman he loved her, not even Mary. Nor had any woman ever told him." What pathos--except that a hundred pages earlier, Yarrow was whining that Mary constantly told him that she loved him, and demanding he tell her that he loved her. It took me all of three seconds to find textual evidence: page 14, during a fight with Mary, "'But I do love you,' [Yarrow] said for what seemed like the thousandth time since they had married." C'mon, Farmer! The book is only 219 pages long--surely it wouldn't have killed him to keep his main character's motivations straight!

Another thing that killed me was the language. Yarrow is a linguist, on the planet to learn the natives' languages. And so initially, we get whole paragraphs like this: "Cnosider the tense system. Instead of inflecting a verb or using an unattached particle to indicate the past or future, Siddo used an entirely different word. Thus, the masculine animate infinitive dabhumaksanigalu'ahai, meaning to live, was, in the perfect tense, ksu'u'peli'afo, and, in the future, mai'teipa. the same use of an entirely different word applied for all the other tenses. Plus the fact that Siddo not only had the normal (to Earthmen) three genders of masculine, feminine, and neuter, but the two extra of inanimate and spiritual..." Except as soon as he's on the planet, everyone communicates without problem! There are no mistranslations, or problems of a concept not existing in one language. No one needs Yarrow's help translating anything--they all just know each other's language. And the aliens and humans not only speak each others' languages with colloquial ease, but the aliens use expressions like "in the arms of Morpheus" to say they're going to bed. After only a few months of knowing humanity? I really doubt it!

The alien planet is hardly alien--they have apartments, automobiles, bars that are just like 20th century Earth bars. Farmer put no effort into the world building at all! Nor did he put much effort into the science of his science-fiction. Despite pages upon pages of infodumps, all of it is just completely made-up and arbitrary. His infodumps are particularly impressively out of place--in a single scene Yarrow is discovered to be a heretic, told he's going to be tortured and killed, then watches as all the humans on the planet are killed, then told his love Jeanette is actually a parasitic insect, and then told that she's dying because she's bearing his young. Then there's a 15 page monologue by Fobo about how Jeanette's biology works (all of which is totally nonsensical), to which Yarrow's response is simply to ask what would happen if she had multiple lovers. Then they talk about what would biologically happen when her kind is gang-raped! WTF? That's the worst example, but far from the only one.

All that said, the idea underpinning the novel-- that of a parastic race that survives by latching on to humans and making them love them isn't terrible, though the sexism (of so noticably the kind popular in the 20th century Western Europe&America) in the assumptions of how it works kinda ruins it a little. And Yarrow's emotional life is well written; Farmer is on firm ground there. But when it comes to plot, or sf elements, it's all very unstable and poorly done. ( )