THE LOVERS never won a Hugo. -Farmer- won the 1953 Hugo, the
first year they were awarded, for Best New Writer (an award
that morphed into the Campbell a couple of decades later.)
It was more of a long novella than a novel when it apperared
in Startling Stories. Phil lengthened it quite a bit for the
paperback.
-- Mike Resnick
> Hi Ele, you are operating under a false assumption. Farmer's The Lovers
> was a novel, not a short story, which may explain why you have been having
> difficulty finding it. It has been published in softcover several times.
> It was one of the first science fiction stories with a significant sex
> angle (prior to the '50s, most SF was pretty sexless). The thing that
> added to the disgust was that the female alien's larvae would eat her from
> the inside as part of the birthing process (something which does occur in
> some insect species, but such a species would not likely to able to
> reproduce with a human).
>
> Farmer continued to inject sex occasionally into his SF work, including
> FLESH, a novel about the last fertile man in a world populated by women,
> and his novel about a sexual Tarzan among others.
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Ele Meux <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Friday, March 6, 2009 10:12:32 AM
> Subject: [SF-LIT] "The Lovers"
>
> My local newspaper carried an obituary of Phillip Jose Farmer on March
> 1. It mentioned that "his first success came in 1952 with a story called
> The Lovers about a man seduced by an alien. The story was rejected by the
> two leading science fiction editors: both said that its graphic
> description of interspecies sex made them physically ill." And, that the
> story went on to win Farmer his first Hugo.
> I searched the anthologies I have, and a collection of Farmer's stories
> ("The Book of..."), but couldn't find it. I looked in the ISFDB, but
> according to what I could see, it has never appeared except in August 1952
> Startling Stories.
> Does anyone know if this story has been anthologized? Surely, in some
> Hugo collection?
> Ele Meux
>
>
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