 Philip José Farmer's web site reports the death of the author peacefully in his sleep in the morning of 25 February 2009. Born 26 January 1918 in Terre Haute, Indiana, Farmer won three Hugo Awards (Most Promising New Talent, 1953; Best Novella ["Riders of the Purple Wage"], 1968; and Best Novel [To Your Scattered Bodies Go], 1972), the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Grand Master Award (2001), and the World Fantasy Award's Lifetime Achievement Award (2001).
Farmer's first short story, "O'Brien and Obrenov", appeared in Adventure in March 1946. In 1950, after a twelve-year hiatus (and a break to wash out of the Army Air Corps flight training program), he received his BA in English from Bradley University. In August 1952, Startling Stories published his first science fiction story, "The Lovers".
Farmer's first published novel was The Green Odyssey, which Ballantine released in 1957. In 1953, however, Farmer's I Owe for the Flesh won the Shasta prize novel contest. And though the prize was never paid, the book was the first in what would become his iconic Riverworld series. That series posits that "everyone who has ever lived on Earth, from cavemen to 1984, is resurrected along the banks of a million mile long river. A character dying along the river simply wakes up somewhere else the next day." In these stories, Farmer has characters from any point in history meeting, interacting, and frequently fighting.
Farmer also wrote the Dayworld series, in which overpopulation requires that people be placed in suspended animation for six days out of seven, each living but one day, and sharing their homes, jobs, and lives with six other people. Then, of course, there are daybreakers, who live different lives each day of the week. And his World of Tiers series introduced the idea of Pocket Universes, which have different physical laws.
In the 1970s, when Farmer was suffering from writer's block, he turned his efforts to writing other people's novels; specifically, he wrote Venus on the Half-Shell by Kurt Vonnegut's fictional Kilgore Trout. He also wrote as Ralph vvon Wau Wau, who came to life on his own when Spider Robinson had him appear in Callahan's Bar.
Farmer is survived by his wife, Bette (whom he married in 1941), as well as children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
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