The Alley God

The Alley God is composed of three novellas which bring out the best in Philip Jose Farmer. The first is about an anthropology student who discovers that Neanderthal Man is alive and well in the backstreets of America. Although she tries to be scientific and detached about it, the alien mindset of

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her subject makes this impossible. The slow loss of detachment, and the confusion between the effects of social class and those of an alien brain leads us towards the climax of the story.

The second story is a more conventional SF story, set in a world where human colonisation brings problems of science and medicine, against the social problems caused by minority religions using migration as a way to seperate from the world. The super-science of the starships mingles with the historical echoes of Protestant religion in the New World. The mix is credible, and the storytelling fine.

The last story is my favourite. A Classics student goes on a top-secret mission to try and counter an invasion of Illinois of an altogether different type. This is the sort of story that PJF excels at: the whole mission is also an allegory, a quest-journey brought into the Twentieth Century by a classics professor who acquires supernatural powers. I won't describe the ending, because like all quest stories the important part is the journey, but it is superbly done, and foreshadows a lot of the outlook that made the Riverworld series so powerful.

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