"Riders of the Purple Wage" (1967) is a science fiction novella by American writer Philip José Farmer. It appeared in Dangerous Visions, the New Wave science fiction anthology compiled by Harlan Ellison and won the Hugo Award for best novella in 1968, jointly with Weyr Search by Anne McCaffrey.
The title of the story is a take-off on Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), a Western novel by the American author Zane Grey. The novella contains multiple stylistic and literary allusions to James Joyce and his works; as with Ulysses (1922), it includes canonic references, journal entries, poem pieces, and standard prose, and the main character's surname is Winnegan, an allusion to Finnegans Wake (1939).
Plot introduction
"Riders of the Purple Wage" is an extrapolation of the mid-twentieth century's tendency towards state supervision and consumer-oriented economic planning.
Related works
A short story called "The Oögenesis of Bird City" (1971) describes an earlier time when the arcologies and the egg-houses were being introduced to society. Of particular interest is a mention in the story that "integration" of communities was a failure and the technology could be used to allow people to dwell "among their own kind".
See also
- Sex and sexuality in speculative fiction