‘The Lovers’ was originally published as a novella in 1952, and may well have been instrumental in Farmer winning a Hugo Award for Best New Author or Artist in 1953 (the first year the Hugo Awards were given). It was later expanded to a novel and published in 1961. The Lovers is also credited with introducing “a mature approach to sexual themes” into science fiction. I’ve had a copy on my bookshelves for decades, and while I know I read it back in the early 1980s, I have very little memory of its plot or story details. That copy is now in storage. However, I recently found the book — the same edition, in fact, as the one I own — in a local secondhand sf bookshop, and bought it so I could reread it.
And now I’ve reread The Lovers, it’ll be going straight back to the bookshop. And the other copy I own, when I eventually get it out of storage, that’ll be going to the bookshop too.
I was, I suppose, fortunate I had no strong memories of the book, and so there was nothing there to disappoint or upset in a reread. All too often, books we remember fondly from our young teens turn out on adult reread to be completely shit. The fact The Lovers turned out to be completely shit left me unaffected as I had no fond memories of it.
The Lovers shares a background with The Day of Timestop (1960, USA), also known as Timestop! and A Woman a Day, and also originally published as a novella, ‘Moth and Rust’, in 1953. In the future shared by the two novellas / novels, Martian colonists attacked the Earth with a viral weapon and killed off the bulk of its population. The Martians were subsequently destroyed by missiles. Only some nations on Earth survived, and centuries later they’ve formed blocs which control much of the planet. Both stories are set in the Haijac Union, which was founded by survivors from Hawaii and Iceland. Their enemies are the Israeli Republics. There’s occasional mentions of other parts of the world. The Haijac Union is a theocratic state, ruled by the Sturch, which follows the creed of the Forerunner, Isaac Sigmen, which is some sort of repressive mishmash of Judaism and Islam.
None of this is especially relevant, as the story of The Lovers takes place mostly on an alien world, Ozagen. Hal Yarrow is a linguist, and someone who has not been served well by the Sturch. His relationship with his wife is difficult and his “gapt”, or guardian angel pro tempore, a block monitor in all but name, has repeatedly punished and reported him for religious infractions. Happily, Yarrow is recruited for the mission to Ozagen, which frees him from his wife. But not his gapt.
Ozagen is inhabited by creatures with a technological level around early twentieth-century Earth. The humans call them “Wogglebugs” after a character from L Frank Baum’s Oz books, and the aliens refer to themselves using the same name, for some reason — but the poor choice of name results in a diminutive nickname which is an offensive racial epithet in British English. Why the UK publisher of the book failed to change this is beyond me. Laziness, I expect; or cheapness. Nonetheless, a bad look in 2023.
While on a trip to the interior, Yarrow rescues a beautiful young human woman, Jeanette. He takes her back to Sidoo, the Wogglebug capital, and hides her in his apartment. She is the perfect girlfriend: attentive, loving, an excellent cook, and sufficiently invested in her own appearance to hand-make outfits to better appeal to Yarrow. Of course, he has to keep her secret, because knowledge of her existence would see him arrested and charged by the Sturch.
The point of The Lovers, apparently, is that Jeanette is not only not human, she is a parasitical insect from a race that has evolved over eons on Ozagen to mimic humans. But we only find this out in a ten-page frenzy of info-dumping at the end of the novel. Which includes so much made-up science the novel is in serious danger of being classified as fake news.
To make matters worse, the Sturch mission had planned to eradicated the Wogglebugs, leaving the planet free to be colonised by the Haijac Union. Happily, the Wogglebugs — I refuse to mention the diminutive used throughout the novel, it is offensive — discover the human plan and prevent it. Although not before Yarrow learns the truth about Jeanette. And, unfortunately, not before she dies giving birth to her larvae.
I’ve always wanted to like Philip José Farmer’s fiction more than I do. I’ve not read a great deal of it, perhaps a dozen of the sixty novels he published, but those I’ve read always sounded more interesting than they actually proved to be. A reread a few years ago of the first Riverworld novel, one of Farmer’s most celebrated works, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971, USA), proved less satisfactory than remembered. Farmer had a reputation as a writer who pushed boundaries, not that 1950s and 1960s US science fiction strayed far from the centre in many areas. It’s certainly true that by today’s standards his works are tame. Even The Lovers. There’s no actual sex in it. There’s nothing graphic about its story. The sex is only mentioned in the last fifth of the book, and then dealt with off-stage. If this is “a mature approach to sexual themes”, then what were all those earlier sf novels that actually dealt with sex about? For example, The House That Stood Still (1950, Canada) by AE Van Vogt, although perhaps I’m attributing more implied sexual chemistry to its femme fatale than existed on the page.
Certainly romance was a staple in science fiction. Not just in the planetary romances of Leigh Brackett, or even in the love affair between Princess Juille and Egide in CL Moore’s Judgment Night (1952, USA). The sex, per se, was perhaps lacking. But to judge a mode of fiction by its fidelity to the details of the sex act, and its willingness to include those details, strikes me as a bit, well, weird.
If the 1952 novella of ‘The Lovers’ introduced sex to science fiction, which sounds plausible, the same is not true of the 1961 novel expansion. And yet The Lovers has survived, and prospered, on that reputation. It’s undeserved. It’s a bad book. And it’s mostly not about the topic which has generated its reputation.
If you have a copy, it’s probably past time to take it to your local sf bookshop.
