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The Green Odyssey

by Philip Jose Farmer

Cover artist: Richard Powers

Publisher: Ballantine

Pub year: 1957

Cover price: 35¢

 

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Book detail for The Green Odyssey

Cover tagline

Rollicking science-fiction adventure

Back cover text

Philip Jose Farmer created a furor — and an important name in science fiction — with the publication of his very first story, The Lovers.

To his first eager audience, and to the many followers he has gained since then, he now brings a full-length novel — and it happily fulfills his reputation for the unexpected.

The Green Odyssey is an uproarious, hell-bent adventure story, combining fantasy, imagination and science, with a liberal dash of humor. It is in the best tradition of adventure science fiction, a swashbuckling tale of a resourceful spaceman who is, however, uneasily aware that he may have been miscast. Fortunately, he has the assistance of a large, gorgeous, energetic and adoring female who is supremely confident of his ability to handle all comers. With her help, that is.

The tale of their adventures is reading for sheer fun.

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Interior text

Danger! Thrills! Adventure!

Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy, hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the Duchess Zuni — who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke). After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours a day.

And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful, demanding Amra — and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was tired. And homesick.

So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the "travelling islands," the rascally captain, and various flora and fauna peculiar to this planet — all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan with unnerving malevolence.

And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra won.