Inherent in science fiction are a number of contradictory impulses: imaginative wonder and scientific exactness, romance and realism, childish joy and adult seriousness, the desire to escape and the passion to know. No modern writer expresses and explores these contradictions with more intensity than Philip José Farmer. Dreams and contradictions were part of Farmer's life from an early age. He was a voracious reader who developed an early passion for the heroes of Greek and Norse mythology and those of such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, L. Frank Baum, James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and many more. No bookish recluse, however, he had a passion for the physical as well. As he describes himself in an interview in Luna, "I was very strong and swift and was so agile in the trees that my nickname in...