Citizen Phaid

The Song of Phaid the Gambler #2

by Mick Farren

Phaid attempts to leave Chrystianaville before fighting breaks out between the humans and the mysterious elaihi

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

234 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Farren was the singer with the proto-punk English band The Deviants between 1967 and 1969, releasing three albums. In 1970 he released the solo album Mona – The Carnivorous Circus which also featured Steve Peregrin Took, John Gustafson and Paul Buckmaster, before leaving the music business to concentrate on his writing.

In the mid-1970s, he briefly returned to music releasing the EP Screwed Up, album Vampires Stole My Lunch Money and single "Broken Statue". The album featured fellow NME journalist Chrissie Hynde and Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson.

He has sporadically returned to music, collaborating with Wayne Kramer on Who Shot You Dutch? and Death Tongue, Jack Lancaster on The Deathray Tapes and Andy Colquhoun on The Deviants albums Eating Jello With a Heated Fork and Dr. Crow.

Aside from his own work, he has provided lyrics for various musician friends over the years. He has collaborated with Lemmy, co-writing "Lost Johnny" for Hawkwind, and "Keep Us on the Road" and "Damage Case" for Motörhead. With Larry Wallis, he co-wrote "When's the Fun Begin?" for the Pink Fairies and several tracks on Wallis' solo album Death in a Guitar Afternoon. He provided lyrics for the Wayne Kramer single "Get Some" in the mid-1970s, and continued to work with and for him during the 1990s.

In the early 1970s he contributed to the UK Underground press such as the International Times, also establishing Nasty Tales which he successfully defended from an obscenity charge. He went on to write for the main stream New Musical Express, where he wrote the article The Titanic Sails At Dawn, an analysis of what he saw as the malaise afflicting then-contemporary rock music which described the conditions that subsequently gave rise to punk.

To date he has written 23 novels, including the Victor Renquist novels and the DNA Cowboys sequence. His prophetic 1989 novel The Armageddon Crazy deals with a post-2000 United States which is dominated by fundamentalists who dismantle the Constitution.

Farren has written 11 works of non-fiction, a number of biographical (including four on Elvis Presley), autobiographical and culture books (such as The Black Leather Jacket) and a plethora of poetry.

Since 2003, he has been a columnist for the weekly Los Angeles CityBeat.

Farren died at the age of 69 in 2013, after collapsing onstage while performing with the Deviants at the Borderline Club in London.

Reviews

[David Mcallister · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s really just an abridged “song of phaid the gambler “
Good though

[Ian Banks · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little more generic than the previous volume but benefits from all the solid plotting work and background detail built up over the previous volume so that there are very few wasted scenes and moments. Phaid’s desperation is convincing as is the contempt that others feel for what he does and says. The idea of a world where people are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic really comes home to roost here and the ending confirms that. Good fun, although it does lose a little in the execution.

[Catalin Calenic · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was one hell of a rollercoaster, just like the first book. I do think he made Solchaim a bit too powerful, but a poetic resolution none the less! And the final chapter felt so deserved and so long awaited. And just like that, Phaid gets to be Phaid again...

[Chad Eagleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Citizen Phaid is the sequel to Phaid The Gambler. This book finds our drunken, gambler hero caught up in a revolution, thrown in jail as a “political prisoner,” and forced to serve as an unwilling pawn in a scheme hatched by an alien mind. The story moves very well and fast but it’s not really an action-filled, heavily-plotted novel if that's what you're looking for. The strength of Mick’s science fiction has always been his world building and his focus on those aspects of life that most science fiction writers tend to ignore: pop culture, art, drugs, sex, revolution, politics, class, and simply the day-to-day aspects of human interactions and relationships. These are all showcased here and, thanks to a slightly less “far out” storyline, make it one of his strongest and most approachable books.

You don’t need to have read the first novel to read and enjoy this sequel, but read together the two books do form a sequence Mick called “The Song of Phaid the Gambler” that offers, I think, a richer experience that demonstrates exactly what he was trying to do.

[SciFiOne · Rating 1 out of 5]

1990 grade F