Mother Was a Lovely Beast: A Feral Man Anthology

by Philip José Farmer, Gene Wolf

The Hugo-award-winning sci-fi author edits this collection of 9 tales, both factual & fictional, about humans raised by animals, each with a Foreword by Farmer & a Bibliography in rear. From a single-owner collection, this is a FIRST EDITION, First Printing hardcover, SIGNED BY AUTHOR on full title page. Both book & DJ are nearly perfect, BUT book shows very light dampstaining to exterior page edges & outer edges of white linen boards. Does NOT impact interior, but downgrades book to VG+, & significantly lowers your price! Otherwise completely clean, binding tight & square. Absolutely NO writing, highlighting, or underlining, NOT ex-lib. Unclipped DJ (with orig. $6.95 price) shows some yellowing to white areas & very mild rubbing to extremities; beautifully protected in archival mylar cover since purchased new. Please see our photos! AMZ is using part of OUR PHOTOS #1 & #2 as their "stock" image; see others right next to our listing. This is the EXACT book you will receive only from us! Description & photos copyright Gargoyle Books 2020. Same Day Shipping on all orders received by 2 pm Weekdays (Pacific time); Weekends & holidays ship next business day.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Anthologies, Short Stories

246 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Philip José Farmer was an American author, principally known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, but spent much of his life in Peoria, Illinois.

Farmer is best known for his Riverworld series and the earlier World of Tiers series. He is noted for his use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for and reworking of the lore of legendary pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters.

Reviews

[Fishface · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun collection of stories edited by Philip Jose Farmer, all written on the Tarzan theme -- the vast majority of them about people raised by various non-human creatures. My fave was the one about the WWI fighter pilot who was raised by Condors.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fun anthology that doesn't live up to its nifty title. Granted, that would have been hard to do, but still... The theme of feral children has been popular in literature ever since Rome was founded, so I thought much better selections could have been presented. Novel excerpts are included from William L. Chester and Olaf Baker when it would have been better to just list them in a recommended reading page, and the two more modern stories, those by Gene Wolfe and Mack Reynolds, rely too much on humor rather than following the theme. I also thought there was way too much of Farmer's own Wold-Newton material, and the piece by T.L. Jones left me cold. There's a Tarzan short story by Burroughs, and my favorite was Scream of the Condor by George Bruce. It's a fun book, there's nothing wrong with it, but it could have been so much more.

[Andres Borbon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genial colección de relatos de ciencia ficción que abordan el tema de seres humanos criados por criaturas de otra especie. Sorprendentes. Ingeniosos. Perturbadores.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my all-time favorite book title. Along with the image on the cover, I find this book impossible to resist. I loved all of Farmer’s own writing that he contributed to it. And his enthusiasm for the subject fueled my own lack of enthusiasm through one or two of the weak stories here that I otherwise might have skipped.

* The God of Tarzan, by Burroughs: Outstanding!
* Extracts from the Memoirs of “Lord Greystroke”, by Farmer: Also excellent.
* Tarzan of the Grapes, by Wolfe: A trifle - very short and forgettable.
* Relic, by Reynolds: Very good, almost seems inspired by Farmer’s own Wold Newton stuff.
* One Against A Wilderness, by Chester: This isn’t a feral person story. It’s a small society, hunter-gatherer story, sort of like Jean Auel’s books. It didn’t fit the theme of the collection, and as an excerpt of a larger novel didn’t stand on its own very well. It’s the only story here that I didn’t enjoy.
* Shasta of the Wolves, by Baker: Beautiful writing! I’m surprised this author isn’t well known. It makes me wonder if Pynchon named the character from Inherent Vice after this character. Great story.
* Scream of the Condor, by Bruce: I adore the absurd premise of this story. I don’t think it necessitated being stretched out to 50 pages though. I still absolutely loved it though.
* The Man Who Really Was Tarzan, by Jones: I’m pretty sure this story was a hoax, which made it all the more hilarious that Farmer followed it up with a critical dissection of it to correct the details in this hoax using details of his own hoax. Very fun stuff.
* The Feral Human in Mythology and Fiction, by Farmer: An excellent, enthusiastic overview of the subgenre with lots of great pointers to other stories. I only wish Farmer had been able to compile a second collection of such stories.

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mother Was a Lovely Beast by Philip Jose Farmer. Now who can resist a title like that? Certainly Farmer, whose The Gate of Time was the only work I've read of his so far, knows how to rope in his audience. Which, in this case, would be teenaged boys from fifteen to seventy-five; I write this with no sarcasm--Farmer's selections range from the cerebral to the pulpy. The book is a fine selection of eight short stories and/or excerpts from literature's most intriguing and money-making genres, the feral child. I say intriguing since surely, some of those stories must have been based on real life incidents? That ingenious premise is exactly what Farmer has done here: his Extracts from the Memoirs of "Lord Greystoke" is passed off as an actual memoir, one which Farmer has merely "edited." The result is a very human ("When I saw J step out of the boat, I was thrilled. I had never seen anything so beautiful except for my foster mother, and that was a completely different kind of beauty, of course. I also got an erection."), even clinical take on the "legend" of Tarzan. As this book was published in 1974, readers then would have had limited resources to confirm the memoirs' authenticity. Still, Farmer wasn't the first writer to explore this particular angle on the evolution of the Lord of the Jungle, as Thomas Llewallan Jones wrote his fascinating take on The Man Who Really Was...Tarzan in 1959. Of course, no book of stories on the feral child is complete without an entry by Tarzan's creator Edgar Rice Burroughs where, in search of the Creator, our eponymous hero waxes philosophical and theological, even existential--ultimately revealing his humanity, in The God of Tarzan.

As your read through, banishment of disbelief is encouraged, because the rest of the entries are a hodgepodge of stories best visualized in comic book/graphic novel form. Such as an aged, archaic, antsy Tarzan, feeling a tad irrelevant in the dystopian future (Relic by Mack Reynolds), flower-power Tarzan wannabes picked off Haight-Ashbury (Tarzan of the Grapes by Gene Wolfe), and feral kiddos raised by bears, wolves, and gasp--CONDORS! (Scream of the Condor by George Bruce is one colossal, glorious tale I'm unlikely to forget.)

* Surprisingly, there is no excerpt on Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli from The Jungle Book (1894), whose adventures preceded those of ERB's Tarzan (1912) by almost two decades. Mowgli is only mentioned in Farmer's afterword, The Feral Human in Mythology and Fiction, where he gives the reader a brief trajectory of the feral child in fiction and myth.

Three and a half stars.