"Patricia liked to talk about herself, but she also had to have physical activity. After a few hours of spilling emotional contents, she would pace back and forth and then say that she either had to go for a walk or to bed with Gordon."
Philip Jose Farmer's books have been discussed here several times already. He was at best a third tier (heh heh) writer of science fiction, and even though he has his modern champions I think most of his output is best forgotten. I enjoyed his World of Tiers series; Riverworld less so. Much of what he wrote seems to be a pastiche of what other, more popular writers were doing, and there's often an immature sense of sexuality at play in his stories.
In Traitor to the Living, a book I thoroughly regret wasting my time with, a tycoon invents (?) a machine that allows the living to communicate with the dead. It's a solid concept around which to build a science fiction story, but the workings of this machine are never sufficiently explained, and the discussions framed around it involve such leaps of logic that they take the reader right out of the story.
There's also the problem of the female characters in this book, who are little more than objects provided for the male protagonist's amusement. Whether old or young, the first details applied to these female characters is the size of their breasts, other distinguishing sexual attributes, and their willingness to have sex with either the protagonist or men in general. Most disturbing of all, the love interest in Traitor to the Living is the protagonist's first cousin, and his first impression of her is that she reminds him of his own mother.
All of which is a shame, because I think the author was on to something with the concept. In the hands of a better writer the machine could have been a compelling story point, but as it is it's buried beneath a lot of bad writing.
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