World of Tiers

[finarvyn]

I'm reading Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series for the first time. It's one of the Appendix N books that I've often wondered about but somehow never managed to track down until now, and I'm enjoying it so far. (I'm about halfway through book #2, Gates of Creation.)

Anyway, I was thinking that this is the sort of board where folks might have read these books. My current frustration is that there are all of these Lords and I can't keep them straight. A lot of times I will keep a notebook handy and write stuff like this down, but for some reason I didn't do that this time and of course there are quite a few names to follow. I figured that I could just look up a list on Wikipedia, but there seems to be nothing there that lists off all of the Lords. I tried a few Google searches with no success, either.

Does anyone have a list of Lords, along with a short description of what makes each different? I'm afraid that if I stop and go back to piece together such a list I'll lose my momentum in reading the series. )

[GnomeBoy]

What I've read of that series so far, I've read out of publication order.

"Series" was a much looser concept back then. You could read them all as individual books, and I reckon you were more or less expected to -- sure you might get a little more fun out of going in order and knowing everything that came before, but I think it's decidedly not required.

This doesn't answer your question, but maybe it'll ease the pain.

[pecoto]

Phillip Jose Farmer was pretty good about giving you either a quick "memory" from the characters interacting with a Lord, OR you can usually figure out which Lords he is referring to by context....usually Lords are either previously friendly with the character in question OR the character thinks about how he/she just cannot trust ANY of the lords so gives a brief rundown of their previous history. I didn't find it to be a huge problem.....it quickly becomes clear by their actions what is going on....weather they are friend or foe and I get the sneaking suspicion that Farmer just made up individual Lords as he went, just basically knowing HOW they were important to the plot at hand, not necessarily the whole back-history of relationships between the different Lords, as Lords are certainly pretty likely to play friendly one day just to have an upper hand in a future encounter. He presented them as a very two-faced and backstabbing bunch.