(Blanchard’s cover for the 1960 edition)

4/5 (collated rating: Good)

Blanchard’s abstract vaginal cover for the 1960 first edition of Philip José Farmer’s Strange Relations (1960) hints, just obliquely enough to avoid being explicit, at the collection’s radical and groundbreaking contents.  Nothing else existed like this from the 50s!  Having exploded onto the scene with the “transgressive” (SF encyclopedia) novella “The Lovers” (1952) (later expanded to novel length), Strange Relations (1960) collects a further five short works from the mid-50s and later on similar themes — theology, sex, xenobiology, Freud, and social satire.

Each work revolves around a particular Freudian scenario, a Freudian fantasy.  One can imagine that authors such as Barry N. Malzberg Continue reading →