Through me you go to the grief wracked city; Through me you go to everlasting pain; Through me you go a pass among lost souls. Justice inspired my exalted Creator: I am a creature of the Holiest Power, of Wisdom in the Highest and of Primal Love. Nothing till I was made was made, only eternal beings. And I endure eternally. Abandon all hope — Ye Who Enter Here.

–Dante, from The Inferno

Just this week I was in Dublin, and in my exploration of the city (i.e. Guinness drinking) I learned some things about traditional Irish mythology. For one, did you know leprechauns are cruel little sprites with dreadlocks and unkempt beards? Or that the quaint ritual of the wishing well derives from attempting to bribe sinister residents of the underworld into cooperation? Literally: people screaming into holes in the ground at imagined fairies and demons, throwing money, begging them to relent in their systematic destruction of lives in the human world. As it happened, my discovery of this very literal understanding of the planet’s theological geography coincided with a book I’d just finished reading, Philip José Farmer’s Inside Outside.

Inside Outside is about a place called Hell, the most nightmarish science fiction world I’ve yet encountered. This isn’t to say that it’s the scariest, most imaginative, or exotic: rather, it has the logic of a dream, a strange distribution of detail and texture that gives a half-formed, lucid impression of place. We meet Jack Cull (i.e. Jackal), who lives in Hell. His only food is made of mashed arid desert plants, supplemented by a sticky Manna that falls from the sky. The city he lives in is a cyclopean construction of basalt populated by immortal humans and sniggering, opaque demons. Paper is made of human skin, and Cull works at a weird Borgesian office called “The Exchange,” with sloping walls and tiered rows of stone desks that stretch to the ceiling. His trade is in religious gossip: he barters hope, myths, and origin stories to help Hell’s citizens get through the day.

In Inside Outside, magic is a palliative, religion a technique to allay an incomprehensible reality. But just as even the jolliest human myths have sinister origins (viz. leprechauns, who will make you dance until you drop dead), nothing here is as it seems. A Jesus figure roams Farmer’s Hell in dark sunglasses and white robes, disappearing whenever people glom onto him. The question that hangs pregnant in the air is this: are they dead, or is Hell a real place? If so, why does no one remember how they got there? Jack Cull—incidentally, the Jackal, archetype of cleverness in countless myths–is determined to find out.

As it turns out, Cull accesses Hell’s underworld not by yelling down a well but through its sewers. The technicalities of the Hell-world are manifold and perverse; it’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting in space, and Cull’s journey as it unfolds is a medieval spirit quest through the physical underworld, owing as much to Dante as it does to fantasy. Cull discovers that he doesn’t live on a planet, or in a protoplasmic afterlife. Rather, it’s a hollow metal sphere with artificial gravity and a sun in the center. Like in some cosmic version of the Poseidon Adventure, Cull tunnels down out of the city, hits the edge of the sphere, and peers out a porthole into space. Then the real implications of his situation echo: he isn’t dead.

Perhaps, though, he never lived.

The novel is a heady allegorical journey from early-career Philip José Farmer, part of the excellent Avon “Rediscovery” series, which incidentally brought me face-to-face with my first Farmer collection, Strange Relations. It’s not really a good book, per se: not one character is likable, anyway, and the story is basically just a woozy set piece until the last ten pages, in which all the truth of Inside Outside is artlessly revealed. It feels more like a hastily scribbled articulation of a dream, like Farmer tried to get it all down before the memory ebbed back into his subconscious. In that sense, it reads like J.G. Ballard; it has the same kind of unapologetic surrealism, the sense of personal mythology.

The conclusion of the novel indicates that a sufficiently advanced alien race might be indistinguishable from God, and a sufficiently advanced tinkering from said race tantamount to Creation. Farmer seems to accept implicitly this fairly advanced esoteric concept: that heaven and the cosmos are the same thing, that the medieval picture of celestial spheres, as jewels nestled in aether, is closer in spirit to the indifferent reaches of outer space than some cloudy, harpy invention of man.

This book is about alien sex.

Not imperialist, colonial sex, with human male astronauts dominating winsome green-skinned babes à la Captain Kirk. Nor is it bestial. This is real mutual discovery and understanding between sentient beings. It’s not something you see much in science fiction — in Tiptree’s short stories, admittedly, and to a lesser extent with Heinlein and Delany, although that’s mostly human-on-human stuff. Not that I’m a connoisseur.

In Strange Relations, a little collection of early, thematically related short stories by Philip José Farmer, man loves plant, man caresses worm. On a perpetually dusky planet named Baudelaire, a shipwrecked spaceman named Ernie Fetts is tentacularly absconded into the roomy womb of a plant-like gastropod. Recognizing nothing, feeling nothing but the soft warmth of fleshy walls and various holes from which warm liquids pour and sweep, he learns to communicate with his captor. A she. Marooned on a Mars base, Cardigan Lane meets an alien biologist, pink and symbiotic with an ungainly worm, who houses and feeds him deep underground. A she.

I am wowed by the honesty, the sheer get-to-the-pointness of these stories, because what is our anxiety w/r/t the alien about but sex? If intimacy, pleasure, and reproduction make up the evolutionary (and hence primitive) core of our psyche, then we must necessarily desire to be familiar with those aspects of an alien before we could truly know it. Or love it. Or make love to it.

In the 1950s, when Philip José Farmer was starting out, these ideas were nauseating, even to heads. Today, there’s alien-human sex in Avatar. Alien reproductive systems, though never presented winningly, are a common science-fiction trope — babies hatching out of human chests in Alien, the writhing cesspool of reptilian eggs in the remade V series. What this implies, I’m not sure; perhaps we’ve become more comfortable with sexuality in general, or less rigidly puritanical about our own bodies and choices. Because the idea of becoming intimate with an alien being necessarily implies a certain level of self-knowledge, and free will.

And, of course, since the alien has always, in some way or another, been a placeholder for the “other” (communists, gays, women, etc), maybe it just means that we’re more tolerant, more aware that the oppressed and marginal have sexual lives like the rest of us — and that they’re almost certainly more interesting.

In any case, I feel like it’s really important. Imagine encountering a completely alien being — in Farmer’s world, maybe a mountain-sized gastropod, or a five-legged football sized thing with beaks — and spending enough time with it to eventually overcome your deep-set revulsion towards it. That’s what the characters in this collection of short stories do: stranded with only the company of an alien, they come to know, understand, then love, their partners. They manage to take that herculean conceptual step away from themselves, to know the other as equal, in the only real way. They face the anthropocentric prejudice deep within themselves and prevail over it. They go native. And it gets to an incredibly sensitive, raw place after that because to love something is to lose a little of yourself to it.