#jack l chalker

[the-walrus-squad]

I have officially passed the halfway point in my quest to collect all the books represented in Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials:

The thrift store also had the entire 70s/80s first editions first printings of Chalker’s Well of Souls:

[lilli-sturmreiter]

Jack L Chalker was a very fucked up and kinky author who I am utterly convinced was either a deeply closeted trans woman or the biggest chaser who ever wrote a book.

every single chalker story involved gender bending. almost always some magic or alien tech forcefem that involve hypnosis/brainwashing to make the character's mind match her new body. even the tamer stuff like the well world books were pretty erotically charged, but then there's the web of the chozen(which i probably should not have been allowed to read at 13, the sex scene of the main character, after having been transformed into a female goat-alien thing, going into heat and being taken by a male, definitely left some kind of early psycohsexual imprint on me) or the soul rider series, are basically porn.

there is so much weirdy kinky shit in the soul rider series. one of the main characters is literally transformed into a squishy fat shortstack sex godess. i'm talking comical proportions. she gets shrunk down to 4 feet and her tits, ass, and belly get inflated to the point where she can barely walk. this is important to turn her into an ontological anchor, a reality focus to keep an area of primordial chaos in a stable state for people to live in.

i cannot fucking *believe* i was allowed to read this growing up. like, my dad just had these books in the family library and i was able to take them off the shelf, take them to my room, and read them with no consequence. you know, aside from them irrevocably changing who i am as a person.

[spacenoirdetective]

Tim White, cover art for "Jungle of Stars" by Jack L. Chalker, 1994

[le-tas-d-art]

Cover art by Richard Powers for Jack L. Chalker's "The Four Lords of the Diamond" omnibus (detail)

[paulgadzikowski]

MIDNIGHT. AT THE WELL

[judgeitbyitscover]

Dance Band on the Titanic by Jack L. Chalker

Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet

Ballantine, July 1988

Jack L. Chalker is an acknowledged master of the science-fiction series but from time to time, he has also turned his talents to the short fiction form. Here, for the first time in one volume, are the complete short stories, including two never before published, by one of science-fiction's most popular authors.

[swordofsun]

Okay, so, one of my favorite genres of fiction is 70s & 80s space opera. I will be the first to admit that it hasn't always aged well, but damn did they try to be progressive for their time. This happens, you gotta roll with it for the sake of the story sometimes. (We have no idea what we're going to look back on in 2045 and cringe at.)

But there were a lot of space opera and pulpy sci-fu authors who were doing some really interesting things and I don't think they get acknowledged enough.

Philip José Farmer's Riverworld books have a lot going for them and some really interesting ideas despite the weird misogyny baked into them. He was trying to be progressive and it just did not age well. Sadly the two attempts at adapting them have been...bad.

Anne McCaffrey had a lot of weird ableism and iffy takes on queer people, but I'd love to see an updated adaptation of the Planet Pirates or Pern series.

But the author I'd really love to see someone take a stab at adapting is Jack L Chalker. This man had some really out there ideas. And was also what we'd call today a monster fucker. I'm pretty sure Well World was just an excuse to come up with new monsters to imagine fucking.

Seriously, monster fuckers and people into extreme (and not always consensual) body modifications should pick up some Chalker. Like it's never even the point of his books, it's just there. Well World is about what if the universe was created by an ultra advanced species that decided they took the wrong evolutionary path and created a great experiment to find the correct one and now people are stuck on their planet sized laboratory trying to get off and also Chalker has to come up with dozens of non-human species (and yes, they fuck).

(Although, seriously, I love the Well World books. They are unhinged in the best way.)

Basically I desperately want adaptations of the Well World books and the Quintara Marathon books specifically, but honestly his stuff would be great. And so weird.

[retroscifiart]

Art by Darrell K Sweet ('The Demons at Rainbow Bridge' by Jack L Chalker, 1989). From the book Infinite Worlds by Vincent Di Fate (1997)