Farmer had both critical champions and detractors. Leslie Fiedler proclaimed him "the greatest science fiction writer ever"Stoler, Peter (1980), “’Riverworld’ Revisited”, Time, July 28. and lauded his approach to storytelling as a "gargantuan lust to swallow down the whole cosmos, past, present and to come, and to spew it out again."Fiedler, Leslie A. (1972), "Getting into the Task of Now Pornography" The Los Angeles Times, April 23. (Reprinted in slightly different form as "Thanks for the Feast: Notes on Philip Jose Farmer," In: Farmer, Philip Jose (1973), The Book of Philip Jose Farmer, or the Wares of Simple Simon's Custard Pie and Space Man, New York: Daw Books, Inc, pp 233–239.) Isaac Asimov praised Farmer as an "excellent science fiction writer; in fact, a far more skillful writer than I am...."I, Asimov. Isaac Asimov. Bantam Books. p. 504. 1994. But Christopher Lehmann-Haupt dismissed him in The New York Times in 1972 as "a humdrum toiler in the fields of science fiction."
