Keywords: lyrical, absurd, profane.
I chose Riders of the Purple Wage (ROTPW) for my first long blog entry because it’s the one story that I can’t stop thinking about lately. When I first encountered it more than 25 years ago, I found it shocking and challenging to read. I don’t think I would have said back then that it was in any way relatable. Yet, here it is lodged in my brain all these years later and I’m starting to see echoes of ROTPW in our conversations about AI and universal basic income. Rereading it now, I find it to be as prescient as it is absurd.
One of the more hilarious and ironic aspects of the story is that it reads at times like it was written by an AI. The first few pages are especially hard to parse until you realize the word salad your wading through is a dream sequence. I remember a friend of mine gave up on the story several times until I told him just to skip those pages and come back to them later. I stand by this advice. I also fully understand that this is not a story for everyone. It’s so chockablock with triggers that I don’t think I could sum them up in a warning. Rather than attempt a warning, I’ll offer this pithy summary:
If ROTPW had been written by ChatGPT, the prompt input would have been something like this: Write a story about a future society where everyone receives universal basic income so in place of work people spend their time taking drugs, gambling, and fornicating in every way imaginable. Make the main character a young artist whose 120-year-old grandfather lives in the walls. Oh, and write it in the style of James Joyce, but pepper it with puns and innuendo.
Perhaps the craziest thing about this story is that it wasn’t written by AI. Just shy of a novella, ROTPW is surreal and shocking both in its subject matter and its style. Imagine if James Joyce took acid and then decided to ponder the future of the world. It’s the kind of wild, unpredictable narrative that AI could never generate. The sort of batshit strange that can only come from the human mind – in particular, a human named Phillip Jose Farmer.
Phil Farmer was such an interesting character because everything you read about him is that he was a great guy. A dad and grandad who played college football and joined but ultimately “washed out” of the Air Force, he was as all-American as you can get. He wrote Riders of the Purple Wage when he was in his late forties, and it first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967. Ellison is effusive in his praise of the author, and one can’t help but go into the story thinking, “He seems like the kind of guy who’d offer you a hard candy while discussing H.G. Wells.” Once you start reading, though, it’s hard to imagine that this futuristic sex fever dream came from the same sweet midwestern grandad.
I don’t want to sell Ellison’s volumes short by lumping all the stories together, so I will say that some of the dangerous ideas captured are thoughtful and academic like Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. But where Le Guin’s story reads like a field study and a parable, Riders of the Purple Wage is more like a pantomime. It’s a grotesque and exaggerated drama of people living in a society that has completely thrown off the shackles of conformity and taboo to let it all hang out, both literally and metaphorically.
I get that many people read ROTPW, look at Mr. Congeniality Phil Farmer, and they imagine that he’s moralizing to them through the story. It’s certainly easy to view it from our current time period where every bigot wants to tell you about how anything other than hetero sex between a married man and a married woman inevitably leads to pedophilia. Still, I believe that those associations were the farthest thing from Farmer’s mind.
Take the main character, Chibiabos Winnegan (Chib), who is young, artistic, and left-leaning in his views and stands in contrast to his Grandpa Winnegan, a man of another generation who serves as a translator to readers who don’t come from a time when nothing is forbidden. We mostly see Chib’s sex life through the eyes of his grandfather, who seems to watch over Chib rather than ogle him in a voyeuristic manner.
Grandpa Winnegan describes Chib as “sexually ambivalent,” which implies that rather than being openly attracted to both sexes, Chib doesn’t seem to have strong feelings one way or the other. Or maybe Grandpa’s being critical by suggesting Chib is just confused. However, later, grandpa remarks, “He [Chib] and Omar Runic still blow each other occasionally, and why not? They love each other.” Ultimately, grandpa seems to be primarily concerned with the relationship between love and sex rather than the genders of the people involved. By the end of the story he advises Chib to “hold fast to the belief that there are others out there who will love you just as much as I did” and to “love them as much as they love you.” Farmer, through Grandpa Winnegan, reminds the reader that it doesn’t matter who you love as long as they love you back.
Grandpa Winnegan certainly does wax judgmental at times, for example, when he opines, “Mr. and Mrs. Everyman sit on their asses all day, drink, eat, and watch Fido*, and their brains run to mud and their bodies to sludge.” Yet, he crucially stops short of retrofetishizing the capitalist past, saying, “Other ages would regard ours as a delirium, yet ours has benefits others lacked.” Those benefits? Small communities, complete freedom, and a lack of want —these things haven’t entirely made a utopia. “A Golden World in some respects; a nightmare in others,” grandpa tells us, but again, he comes from a different time and is thus able to compare and contrast in a way that Chib is incapable of.
In another passage, Grandpa Winnegan remembers the formation of the Purple Wage. He recalls that everyone believed that, without having to work to survive, the vast majority of people would turn to art and education to fill their time. Philip Jose Farmer’s imagined reality turns out to be quite different. Although some people pursue art and education for their own sake, the vast majority prefer to be passive consumers of media. We also discover that even those who dedicate their lives to art have taken it in a pervertedly obsessive direction, searching for meaning and formulating theories about the most minuscule details of any given creation.
The tendency to dig deep and look for meaning in art is personified by my favorite character in the story, Rex Lucus, an art critic who lost an eye in a televised brawl over the merits of Rembrandt. Through Rex, Farmer can explore what it might look like to elevate art and artists above all other pursuits. In a world where we no longer live to work or work to live, is it so hard to believe that ambitious intellectuals would turn metaphorically cannibalistic, feeding off the ideas of others? Farmer portrays Rex Lucus as a raconteur who delights in engaging in linguistic battles with other art critics and savagely cutting them down with his own clever theories.
One section of the story begins with a groan-worthy Rex Lucus theory, “Excretion is the bitter part of valor,” to which another character exclaims, “Are we to understand that everything is a big pile of shit but that art makes a strange sea-change, forms it into something golden and illuminating?” Perhaps the story itself is just this question in long form: In a world where everything has gone to shit, can the arts still save us? I sure hope so. Like Grandpa Winnegan from beyond the grave, I hear the voice of Grandpa Farmer in my head, echoing back, “I hope so too, kid.”
*fido is a bit like telephone and television combined, so a bit like the internet. Once again, not a bad prediction PJF!