On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, bonham15 wrote:
#the temerity! how dare you attempt to derail the pc/mac/linux/blah/blah/blah
#holy war! for this insult, we are sending Mario after your hard drive -_^
Speaking of (ahem) whom, and thus reminded of identity issues...
I recently started rereading Philip Jose Farmer's _Riverworld_, and had
a d'ohhh moment as I realized something that I don't remember realizing
on my first read many years ago. (Hang in there, I promise this will be
on topic.)
For those of you who don't know, the (somewhat simplified) premise of
this book and its sequels is that after a disaster has killed off
humanity, everyone who ever lived on Earth finds themselves resurrected,
with a physiological age of about 25, on a planet whose entire surface
has spparently been formed into the valley of a single gigantic river.
The hero and POV character is Sir Richard Burton, the 19th-century
British adventurer, explorer, diplomat, fighter, translator of the
Arabian Nights, and master of many more accomplishments. Farmer likes to
go into considerable expository detail about the earthly biographies of
his characters, who include also a Mrs. Alice Hargreaves (ne'e Alice
Pleasance Liddell) and Hermann Goering. One of Burton's companions
is a 20th-centurian named Peter Jairus Frigate. In his pre-Resurrection
life, Frigate was fascinated with Burton's life (and tells him how he
became so), and seems to know all that the historical record has to tell
about him; he is a significant supporting character, but is also the
author's mouthpiece for a lot of Burton's biography.
What suddenly hit me was the initials:
Peter Jairus Frigate
Philip Jose Farmer
D'ohhh! Frigate is Farmer's self-insertion! At least, P.J.Frigate is
likely telling us how P.J.Farmer became so fascinated with Sir Richard
that he chose to make him the hero of this book.
And it's not as if I hadn't known about Farmer's use of initials before.
I don't remember which book it's in -- maybe a Riverworld sequel, or
maybe something unconnected -- but he makes a major character of (the
fictional?) Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne's _Around the World in
Eighty Days_, and at the end, still speaking as author/narrator IIRC,
points out that the author and the hero are both P.F.
Now, who do we know who sometimes attaches "P.J.F." to his name?...
-- Mark A. Mandel, The Filker With No Nickname
http://mark.cracksandshards.com/filk.html
Now on the Filker's Bardic Webring!