I put Basket Case and Second Hand Souls on my library list. The World definitely needs more fun. 
World of Tiers features a constructed planet shaped like a layer cake and ruled by Thoans, super human beings with a god complex and decided lack of empathy for ordinary humans or for the part-human creatures they construct for their amusement. The bottom layer, for example, is populated with immortal humans kidnapped from ancient Greece and monstrous constructs based on Greek myth. Robert Wolfe, amnesia victim and scholar of ancient Greek, ends up there when a wall in a closet in a tract home in Phoenix opens up and he steps through to escape the police and his wife.
Farmer was highly regarded among sci-fi aficionados back in the day. He influenced other writers of the day and Stranger in a Strange Land was dedicated to him. Farmer is best known for Riverworld but he wrote many fine shorter pieces and he anticipates tropes found in modern writers like China de Mieville. He also writes sexy without the leering, wink, wink, nudge, nudge quality typical of 50's pulp writers. During the 70's he wrote a novel, Venus on the Half Shell, under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout, which seriously pissed off Kurt Vonnegut. Critics praised it thinking Vonnegut had written it. . Some of the sci-fi from that era is as dated as Mickey Spillane but Farmer has worn very well and he's still worth reading.
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