Book description
In Peril on an Alien Planet...
Alan Green was not a hero - he liked the quiet life as much as the next
man. Not that he was exactly afraid of the fearsome hound, Alzo, or his
hot-blooded owner, the Duchess Zuni. After all, one expected violence on
this primitive planet and a man could manage to stay alive, provided he
was alert twenty-four hours a day.
But when he heard of a spaceship about to leave for Earth, Alan
persuaded the merchant-captain of a windroller to take him to it. And
hence to the peaceful green hills of home.
He had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the
'travelling islands', the rascally captain, and various peculiar local
flora and fauna - all of which, it seemed, regarded Alan with unnerving
malevolence... Philip José Farmer (1918 - 2009)
Philip José Farmer was born in Indiana in 1918. Although he once said
he resolved to become a writer in the fourth grade, it wasn't until 1952
that his first SF was published - the novella 'The Lovers', which won
him the Hugo Award for Most Promising New Author. Although best known
for his Riverworld sequence, beginning with the Hugo Award-winning To
Your Scattered Bodies Go, Farmer also pioneered the use of sexual and
religious themes in SF and wrote several novels reworking the lore of
celebrated pulp heroes such as Tarzan and Doc Savage. He also wrote the
tongue-in-cheek Venus on the Half-Shell using the pseudonym 'Kilgore
Trout', a character who appeared in several Kurt Vonnegut novels. Philip
José Farmer won three Hugos, a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement
and the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. He died in 2009.
For more information see www. sf-encyclopedia.
com/entry/farmer_philip_jose
