Tulkinghorn on a strange tribute to an odd writer

The Guardian eulogizes Philip Jose Farmer on its book blog, with an essay that reads like a discarded forward to Dangerous Visions or New Worlds: a sixties-style paean to SF as a low rent vehicle for radicalizing the young. Farmer was central in the creation of an alternate culture out of the scraps of Edwardian and Depression-era boys' fiction: leading, it could be argued, to Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and thus almost the entire male half of today's non-alternate pop culture..... Seems more important to me than a couple of dated short stories about alien sex.

But, as is often asked, what do I know?