This volume collects what I consider to be representative selections of his best work from the years 1952 to 1964, years that saw the publication of several important longer works and collections, including The Green Odyssey (1957), Flesh (1960, revised 1968; a novel which gives new meaning to the term father-figure), A Woman A Day (1960, also revised 1968), The Lovers (expanded and published in 1961 and revised again in 1979), Cache from Outer Space (1962), Inside Outside (1964, a major work), and Tongues of the Moon (1964).

Outstanding examples of his best work since 1964 will be included in a future volume in this series. For now, we offer you such stunning stories as “Sail On! Sail On!,” based on a recurring dream Farmer had in which he says “I saw the tiny galleon of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator (A.D. 1394-1460). It was sailing along in a heavy sea and on a dark night. A small building was on the poopdeck; in it sat a very fat monk. He had earphones on and was tapping out a coded message, in Latin, on a spark-gap transmitter…”

“Mother” contains many of the themes and obsessions mentioned earlier, including some of the underground passages that are partially responsible for his reputation as a Freudian, and the family relationships that were so important in all his early work. The story later became the centerpiece of his collection Strange Relations (1960).

The remarkable “The Alley Man” is one of the best pre-historic-man-in-modern-times stories ever written. It finished a close second to Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” in the voting for the Hugo Award in 1960. One of the many amazing features of Farmers career is the incredible number of series he has sustained—his ideas are simply too big for even very large novels.

“The King of Beasts” is a gem of a short-short, while “The God Business” is one of those stories that is much better read than discussed.

If you have not encountered Farmer or these stories before you are in for a treat. In the words of Leslie Fiedler, “Thanks for the feast.”

FRIAR SPARKS SAT wedged between the wall and the realizer. He was motionless except for his forefinger and his eyes. From time to time his finger tapped rapidly on the key upon the desk, and now and then his irises, gray-blue as his native Irish sky, swiveled to look through the open door of the toldilla in which he crouched, the little shanty on the poop deck. Visibility was low.

Outside was dusk and a lantern by the railing. Two sailors leaned on it. Beyond them bobbed the bright lights and dark shapes of the Nina and the Pinta. And beyond them was the smooth horizon-brow of the Atlantic, edged in black and blood by the red dome of the rising moon.

The single carbon filament bulb above the monk’s tonsure showed a face lost in fat—and in concentration.

The luminiferous ether crackled and hissed tonight, but the phones clamped over his ears carried, along with them, the steady dots and dashes sent by the operator at the Las Palmas station on the Grand Canary.

“Zzisss! So you are out of sherry already… Pop!… Too bad… Crackle… you hardened old winebutt… Zzz… May God have mercy on your sins…

“Lots of gossip, news, et cetera… Hisses.‘… Bend your ear instead of your neck, impious one… The turks are said to be gathering… crackle … an army to march on Austria. It is rumored that the flying sausages, said by so many to have been seen over the capitals of the Christian world, are of Turkish origin. The rumor goes they have been invented by a renegade Rogerian who was converted to the Muslim religion… I say… zziss … to that. No one of us would do that. It is a falsity spread by our enemies in the Church to discredit us. But many people believe that… “How close does the Admiral calculate he is to Cipangu now?

“Pop… This will kill you… Two Irish mercenaries by the name of Pat and Mike were walking down the street of Granada when a beautiful Saracen lady leaned out of a balcony and emptied a pot of… hiss!… and Pat looked up and… Crackle… Good, hah? Brother Juan told that last night…

“PV… PV… Are you coming in?… PV… PV… Yes, I know it’s dangerous to bandy such jests about, but nobody is monitoring us tonight… Zzz. … I think they’re not, anyway…”

And so the ether bent and warped with their messages. And presently Friar Sparks tapped out the PV that ended their talk—the “Pax vobiscum.” Then he pulled the plug out that connected his earphones to the set and, lifting them from his ears, clamped them down forward over his temples in the regulation manner.

After sidling bent-kneed from the toldilla, punishing his belly against the desks hard edge as he did so, he walked over to the railing. De Salcedo and de Torres were leaning there and talking in low tones. The big bulb above gleamed on the page’s red-gold hair and on the interpreter’s full black beard. It also bounced pinkishly off the priest’s smooth-shaven jowls and the light scarlet robe of the Rogerian order. His cowl, thrown back, served as a bag for scratch paper, pens, an ink bottle, tiny wrenches and screwdrivers, a book of cryptography, a slide rule, and a manual of angelic principles.

‘’Well, old rind,“ said young de Salcedo familiarly, ”what do you hear from Las Palmas?“

“Nothing now. Too much interference from that.” He pointed to the moon riding the horizon ahead of them. “What an orb!” bellowed the priest. “It’s as big and red as my revered nose!”

The two sailors laughed, and de Salcedo said, “But it will get smaller and paler as the night grows, Father. And your proboscis will, on the contrary, become larger and more sparkling in inverse proportion according to the square of the ascent—”

He stopped and grinned, for the monk had suddenly dipped his nose, like a porpoise diving into the sea, raised it again, like the same animal jumping from a wave, and then once more plunged it into the heavy currents of their breath. Nose to nose, he faced them, his twinkling little eyes seeming to emit sparks like the realizer in his toldilla.

Again, porpoiselike, he sniffed and snuffed several times, quite loudly. Then satisfied with what he had gleaned from their breaths, he winked at them. He did not, however, mention his findings at once, preferring to sidle toward the subject.

He said, “This Father Sparks on the Grand Canary is so entertaining. He stimulates me with all sorts of philosophical notions, both valid and fantastic. For instance, tonight, just before we were cut off by that”—he gestured at the huge bloodshot eye in the sky—“he was discussing what he called worlds of parallel time tracks, an idea originated by Dysphagius of Gotham. It’s his idea there may be other worlds in coincident but not contacting universes, that God, being infinite and of unlimited creative talent and ability, the Master Alchemist, in other words, has possibly— perhaps necessarily—created a plurality of continua in which every probable event has happened.”

“Huh?” grunted de Salcedo. “Exactly. Thus, Columbus was turned down by Queen Isabella, so this attempt to reach the Indies across the Atlantic was never made. So we could not now be standing here plunging ever deeper into Oceanus in our three cockle-shells, there would be no booster buoys strung out between us and the Canaries, and Father Sparks at Las Palmas and I on the Santa Maria would not be carrying on our fascinating conversations across the ether.

De Torres opened his mouth, but the priest silenced him with a magnificient and imperious gesture and continued.

“Or, even more ridiculous, but thought-provoking, he speculated just this evening on universes with different physical laws. One, in particular, I thought very droll. As you probably don’t know, Angelo Angelei has proved, by dropping objects from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, that different weights fall at different speeds. My delightful colleague on the Grand Canary is writing a satire which takes place in a universe where Aristotle is made out to be a liar, where all things drop with equal velocities, no matter what their size. Silly stuff, but it helps to pass the time. We keep the ether busy with our little angels.”