When I was in college, you couldn't walk into Adam's Bookstore at the Augustana Student Union or Readmore Book World downtown without seeing a dozen sci-fi novels by Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009) on display. Bright, colorful paperbacks with amazingly muscular hunks on the covers, sometimes nude, and stories inside that sounded fascinating.Sometimes they were.
There were three main types:
1. The World of Tiers: The Maker of Universes (1965), A Private Cosmos (1968), etc. A man from our world is trapped on a multi-plane world occupied by various human, alien, and mythical beings. He kills lots of bad guys and falls in love with a girl. Yawn.
The first book is great, but it takes three more before anyone solves the mystery, and then it's a complete let-down: "So this was what all the fuss was about?"
Still, it was nice to imagine every person who has ever lived standing around naked, including Genghis Khan, William Shakespeare, and my high school history teacher,
The Jules Verne hero Phineas Fogg meets aliens (The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, 1973).
Dorothy's son returns to Oz (A Barnstormer in Oz, 1982).
Also, in Flesh (1960), the good guy mass-murders a tribe of gay-stereotype Elves.
The picture labelled "Tahmoh Penikett", is actually Jamie Bamber from an episode of Battlestar Gallactica.
ReplyDeleteI've always been surprised by SF beefcake. Fantasy beefcake, sure, barbarians, Tarzan types, thieves who somehow get Flanderized into loincloth-glad muscle...
ReplyDeleteScience fiction beefcake always surprised me, though the raygun gothic movement had plenty of examples. (Seriously, look at the number of times a but is wearing shorts, boots, and a fishbowl in his head. Spoiler warning: Do NOT dress like this in space.
A Feast Uknown sounds interesting...Boris Vallejo who is the Tom of Finland of science fiction art did the the cover for the top book on the post- you should do a post about him Boomer- I think he is straight but his art is very homoerotic
ReplyDeleteVallejo and his wife Julie Bell both have produced many paintings of scantily-clad men and women with excellent physiques—both were active bodybuilding enthusiasts in their younger years. In fact, I think that book cover was one of the paintings where he used himself as the model. I do not know if either of them has expressed awareness of their gay audience.
ReplyDeleteJust discovered your site and loving it. Sci-fi and horror are always my go-to for perving on beefcakes
ReplyDelete