Book excerpt: A South African tycoon attempts to engineer his own Tarzan in a novel that deconstructs the original legend with unparalleled imagination. In a remote African valley, Ras Tyger is the Lord of the Jungle. He lives each day fulfilling his appetites for deadly prey and sexual conquest. But something sinister lurks behind his unspoiled life. He will soon discover the devastating truth: his entire existence has been engineered by a madman. Obsessed with the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, a white South African uses his fortune to turn an English nobleman into the heroically untamed figure. Everything in Ras Tyger’s world—from his jungle home to the “apes” who raised him—is an elaborate lie. But the Tarzan books weren’t very plausible. And the experiment is about to get dangerously out of control . . . Drawing on true stories of feral children, Lord Tyger explores the real-life implications of the Tarzan legend. With ingenious meta-fiction, Philip José Farmer delivers a wildly entertaining sci-fi adventure that critiques popular colonial mythmaking.