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  • December 13, 2010

Win Scott Eckert © 2008-2010

Farmerphile no. 11

Paul Spiteri and Win Scott Eckert, eds., Michael Croteau, publisher, January 2008

Trunks and Branches: The Wold Newton Family

by Win Scott Eckert

Long time Farmerphile readers will recall the first issue in which I reviewed the origins

of Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Family, covered the Wold Newton meteor strike in 1795

which exposed nearby coach passengers to ionized radiation, and discussed Phil’s genealogical

researches into the amazing descendents of those coach passengers, a group of supermen and

superwomen known collectively as the “Wold Newton Family” (“A Nova of Genetic Splendor,”

Farmerphile no. 1, July 2005).

Phil also included extraordinary characters who pre-date the meteor strike under the

umbrella of the Wold Newton Family, adding them as antecedents of the coach passengers. One

such is Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane. Another character who Phil included in the extended

Family, but is not directly descended from the coach passengers, is H. Rider Haggard’s famous

hunter, Allan Quatermain.

Some better-known characters in Phil’s Wold Newton Family, as outlined in Tarzan

Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, include Captain Blood (another pre-meteor strike

ancestor); The Scarlet Pimpernel (present at meteor strike); Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife,

Elizabeth Bennet (present at meteor strike); Harry Flashman; Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis

Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Phileas Fogg; The Time Traveler; A.J. Raffles;

Professor Challenger; Arsène Lupin; Richard Hannay; Bulldog Drummond; the evil Fu Manchu

and his adversary, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; G-8; The Shadow; Sam Spade; The Spider; Nero

Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; and Travis McGee.

Adding characters to the Wold Newton Family is an entertaining exercise. It is also a

messy and creative process; the criteria are not nearly as clear-cut as when determining whether

a crossover story is valid for purposes of Wold Newton Universe continuity.

First and foremost, one must ensure that the addition to the Family is directly descended

from at least one carriage passenger Phil identified as being present at the meteor strike. For me,

more often than not, this means making a graphic family tree to ensure I’m not missing anything.

Also pay attention to the timelines of the characters, ensuring that it makes chronological

sense to hook them together as parents and children. One should look for genetic traits in

common, such as many of the Family members’ trademark gray eyes, and yet not fall into the

trap of only including characters with gray eyes, or hanging the entire genealogical connection

on gray eyes.

For instance, Chuck Loridans identified one of The Avenger’s aides, Nellie Gray, as a

daughter of Tarzan (“The Daughters of Greystoke,” Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José

Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, MonkeyBrain Books, 2005). He was careful to make his

identification on a variety of factors: Nellie’s gray eyes; her physical prowess, such as the ability

to swing through the jungle from tree to tree; and Phil’s theory that characters’ biographers use

code names as subtle clues to character’s real identities. In this case, the last name Gray was a

clue connecting Nellie to the Greystokes. While Loridans was careful, a critique of his theory

was not, attempting to debunk it because Nellie was described as having blue eyes. In Nellie’s

first appearances in the Avenger pulps, she was described as having gray eyes. Only later did

they change to blue. Loridans did his homework in expanding the Wold Newton Family.

Another guideline in adding members to the Family is avoiding oversimplification. For

instance, William S. Baring-Gould theorized that Nero Wolfe was the son of Sherlock Holmes

(Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and Nero Wolfe of West 35th Street). This theory has been

criticized on the basis that Wolfe must, instead, be the son of Sherlock Holmes’ brother,

Mycroft, since both Nero Wolfe and Mycroft Holmes are fat. In this oversimplification, fat

characters can only be the children of other fat characters. The logical conclusion is that Sherlock

and Mycroft Holmes cannot be brothers. But they are—that relationship comes from the original

stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The lesson here is that different phenotypes—tall and lanky,

stocky and fat, etc.—are certainly possible, and should not be the sole basis for disqualifying a

candidate from membership in the Family or in a particular line.

Perhaps the grossest oversimplification when adding Family members is placing all

characters with the same last name in the same branch of the Family, without regard to any other

qualifying characteristics. One can imagine this trap is magnified a thousand-fold with very

common last names, such as Smith. I faced this dilemma when expanding on the relatives of Sir

Denis Nayland Smith (the hero of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series), who Phil originally

identified as a nephew of Sherlock Holmes.

In “Who’s Going to Take Over the World When I’m Gone?” (Myths), I addressed the

conundrum by adding other Smiths from the works by Conan Doyle, thus expanding the

thematic connection Phil began. I also chose Smith characters who were detectives or secret

agents (like Nayland Smith), or had connections to Egyptology and archaeology, common

themes in the Fu Manchu books. Some of Nayland Smith’s more prominent relatives include

Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective, the Continental Op; Algernon Heathcote “Smitty”

Smith from the Avenger pulps; and Professor Horatio Smith, from the 1941 Leslie Howard film

Pimpernel Smith. In my expansion of the Family tree, and as implied by the film’s title, Horatio

Smith is also descended from Sir Percy Blakeney, The Scarlet Pimpernel, whom Phil identified

as one of the carriage passengers at the Wold Newton meteor strike.

With some of this background in mind, what follows is an overview of other character

additions to the Wold Newton Family, focusing on descendents of those irradiated at the meteor

strike, without going into exacting detail on the precise line of descent.

Dennis E. Power can claim the first genealogical post-Farmerian speculation on the

internet. He added the famous detective Charlie Chan to the Family as the son of Fu Manchu,

who was, according to Phil, the son of the prolific Sir William Clayton. William Clayton was the

son of one of those irradiated at Wold Newton. Chan fits in well in the Family by balancing out

the yellow peril stereotype perpetuated by his father. The essay incorporating Chan was revised

for publication in Myths for the Modern Age as “Asian Detectives in the Wold Newton Family.”

Power also added John Henry as the son of Sir William Clayton and Bafia, a female

Waziri slave who accompanied Clayton on his African expedition. Here, Power blended the

Wold Newton Family with American folklore and provided a basis for incorporating African-

American characters such as Jim from Tom Sawyer. This addition also linked the Caucasian

descendents of Long John Silver, as described in Phil’s Greatheart Silver, with those descended

from Long John Silver’s wife, whom Robert Louis Stevenson described as an old woman of

African descent. Power’s article on this branch of the Family, “The Wold Wold West: Hammer

of Freedom—The Henrys,” is at his website, The Wold Newton Universe: A Secret History < http://www.pjfarmer.com/secret/secret.htm>.

In addition, Power added Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli as a half-brother to Tarzan, in an

essay adroitly reconciling Phil’s novels The Adventure of the Peerless Peer and The Adventure of

the Three Madmen (“Jungle Brothers, or, Secrets of the Jungle Lords,” Myths). He also

proposed, on his website, that Leslie Charteris’ modern Robin Hood, The Saint (Simon

Templar), is the son of E.W. Hornung’s gentleman thief, A.J. Raffles, and thus is part of the

Wold Newton Family.

Rick Lai added John Buchan’s Andrew Lumley (The Power-House) and Dominick

Medina (The Three Hostages) as members of Professor Moriarty’s family. Lai was also first to

propose an additional person at the Wold Newton meteor event, a young medical student named

Sebastian Noel. Noel went on to father Dr. James Noel, a master criminal seen in “The Suicide

Club” from R.L. Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. Lai also related Dr. Noel to the Moriartys. All

of these additions to the Family are in Lai’s essay “The Secret History of Captain Nemo”

(Myths).

In addition to Nellie Gray, Chuck Loridans’ identified another daughter of Tarzan.

Nellie’s mother was the love of Tarzan’s life, Jane Porter, but during one of Tarzan’s infamous

amnesiac blackouts, he succumbed to the wiles of La of Opar. Their daughter was orphaned, and

eventually became the criminal-turned-secret agent Modesty Blaise (“The Daughters of

Greystoke,” Myths).

Brad Mengel’s favorite contribution to the Wold Newton Family is Detective Robert

Goren from the television series Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Mengel proposes that Goren is

the great-grandson of Sherlock Holmes (“Watching the Detectives, or, The Sherlock Holmes

Family Tree,” Myths). Mengel has also proposed that Robert B. Parker’s Boston P.I., Spenser, is

the nephew of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (“The Land Family,” The Wold Newton

Chronicles website < http://www.pjfarmer.com/chronicles/index.htm>).

One of Wold Newton researcher Matthew Baugh’s favorite characters is Myra Reldon, an

agent of The Shadow who often poses as a Chinese woman named Ming Dwan. I included her as

a granddaughter of Fu Manchu in “Who’s Going to Take Over the World When I’m Gone?”

(Myths). In the same essay I postulated that two of James Bond’s adversaries, Dr. No and Ernst

Stavro Blofeld, were Wold Newton Family members. Dr. No was the grandson of the

aforementioned Dr. James Noel. Dr. No’s maternal grandfather was Fo-Hi, from Sax Rohmer’s

The Golden Scorpion. Blofeld was the great-great grandson of Sir William Clayton.

Cheryl Huttner built upon a small clue in Phil’s family tree to add occult detective Jules

de Grandin, and while she was at it also managed to include Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian

sleuth Hercule Poirot (“Name of a Thousand Blue Demons,” Myths).

Mark Brown, in a short piece in Myths, added a notable female detective to the Family,

Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, as a daughter of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer (“D is for

Daughter, F is for Father,” Myths). Additionally, Brown’s “A Look at the Wimsey Family” (The

Wold Newton Universe website ) adds Mack

Bolan to the Family as a son of the pulp hero The Spider (Richard Wentworth) and Nita Van

Sloan.

Expansions of the Wold Newton Family are not restricted to non-fiction articles. Chris

Roberson’s story “Penumbra” (Tales of the Shadowmen, Volume 1: The Modern Babylon, Black

Coat Press, 2005), expertly hinted that The Batman might be The Shadow’s son. Another story in

Tales of the Shadowmen, Volume 1, my own “The Vanishing Devil,” added martial arts expert

Shang Chi as a grandson of Doc Ardan (Doc Savage), albeit in an unusual way. The original

Marvel Comics Shang Chi stories had already established him as Fu Manchu’s son.

Jean-Marc Lofficier, noted French SF and comics writer, and editor of the Tales of the

Shadowmen series, also maintains the French Wold Newton Universe website < http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/wnu1.htm>, which adds innumerable French characters to the

Wold Newton Family tree. It expands the family trees of gentleman thief Arsène Lupin and

detective M. Lecoq (both of whom Phil included in the Family, at least by implication), and adds

other popular French characters such as the arch-villain Fantômas and the detective Jules

Maigret.

Without a doubt, the greatest challenge facing Wold Newton researchers is determining

Philip José Farmer’s exact place in the Wold Newton Family. In fact, Phil, in his Myths back

cover quote, extended this proposal: “I’m just waiting for them to prove that I am also part of the

extended family.”

I believe we will be taking him up on his friendly invitation soon.

WIN SCOTT ECKERT CLIMBS THE WOLD NEWTON FAMILY TREE!

  • News
  • December 13, 2010

Win Scott Eckert © 2008-2010
Farmerphile no. 11
Paul Spiteri and Win Scott Eckert, eds., Michael Croteau, publisher, January 2008

Trunks and Branches: The Wold Newton Family
by Win Scott Eckert
Long time Farmerphile readers will recall the first issue in which I reviewed the origins of Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Family, covered the Wold Newton meteor strike in 1795 which exposed nearby coach passengers to ionized radiation, and discussed Phil’s genealogical researches into the amazing descendents of those coach passengers, a group of supermen and superwomen known collectively as the “Wold Newton Family” (“A Nova of Genetic Splendor,” Farmerphile no. 1, July 2005).

win-8823939

Phil also included extraordinary characters who pre-date the meteor strike under the umbrella of the Wold Newton Family, adding them as antecedents of the coach passengers. One such is Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane. Another character who Phil included in the extended Family, but is not directly descended from the coach passengers, is H. Rider Haggard’s famous hunter, Allan Quatermain.

Some better-known characters in Phil’s Wold Newton Family, as outlined in Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, include Captain Blood (another pre-meteor strike ancestor); The Scarlet Pimpernel (present at meteor strike); Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet (present at meteor strike); Harry Flashman; Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Phileas Fogg; The Time Traveler; A.J. Raffles; Professor Challenger; Arsène Lupin; Richard Hannay; Bulldog Drummond; the evil Fu Manchu and his adversary, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; G-8; The Shadow; Sam Spade; The Spider; Nero Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; and Travis McGee.
Adding characters to the Wold Newton Family is an entertaining exercise. It is also a messy and creative process; the criteria are not nearly as clear-cut as when determining whether a crossover story is valid for purposes of Wold Newton Universe continuity.

First and foremost, one must ensure that the addition to the Family is directly descended from at least one carriage passenger Phil identified as being present at the meteor strike. For me, more often than not, this means making a graphic family tree to ensure I’m not missing anything.

Also pay attention to the timelines of the characters, ensuring that it makes chronological sense to hook them together as parents and children. One should look for genetic traits in common, such as many of the Family members’ trademark gray eyes, and yet not fall into the  trap of only including characters with gray eyes, or hanging the entire genealogical connection on gray eyes.

For instance, Chuck Loridans identified one of The Avenger’s aides, Nellie Gray, as a daughter of Tarzan (“The Daughters of Greystoke,” Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, MonkeyBrain Books, 2005). He was careful to make his identification on a variety of factors: Nellie’s gray eyes; her physical prowess, such as the ability to swing through the jungle from tree to tree; and Phil’s theory that characters’ biographers use code names as subtle clues to character’s real identities. In this case, the last name Gray was a clue connecting Nellie to the Greystokes. While Loridans was careful, a critique of his theory was not, attempting to debunk it because Nellie was described as having blue eyes. In Nellie’s first appearances in the Avenger pulps, she was described as having gray eyes. Only later did they change to blue. Loridans did his homework in expanding the Wold Newton Family.

Another guideline in adding members to the Family is avoiding oversimplification. For instance, William S. Baring-Gould theorized that Nero Wolfe was the son of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and Nero Wolfe of West 35th Street). This theory has been criticized on the basis that Wolfe must, instead, be the son of Sherlock Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, since both Nero Wolfe and Mycroft Holmes are fat. In this oversimplification, fat characters can only be the children of other fat characters. The logical conclusion is that Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes cannot be brothers. But they are—that relationship comes from the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The lesson here is that different phenotypes—tall and lanky,
stocky and fat, etc.—are certainly possible, and should not be the sole basis for disqualifying a candidate from membership in the Family or in a particular line.

Perhaps the grossest oversimplification when adding Family members is placing all characters with the same last name in the same branch of the Family, without regard to any other qualifying characteristics. One can imagine this trap is magnified a thousand-fold with very common last names, such as Smith. I faced this dilemma when expanding on the relatives of Sir Denis Nayland Smith (the hero of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series), who Phil originally identified as a nephew of Sherlock Holmes.

In “Who’s Going to Take Over the World When I’m Gone?” (Myths), I addressed the conundrum by adding other Smiths from the works by Conan Doyle, thus expanding the thematic connection Phil began. I also chose Smith characters who were detectives or secret agents (like Nayland Smith), or had connections to Egyptology and archaeology, common themes in the Fu Manchu books. Some of Nayland Smith’s more prominent relatives include Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective, the Continental Op; Algernon Heathcote “Smitty” Smith from the Avenger pulps; and Professor Horatio Smith, from the 1941 Leslie Howard film Pimpernel Smith. In my expansion of the Family tree, and as implied by the film’s title, Horatio
Smith is also descended from Sir Percy Blakeney, The Scarlet Pimpernel, whom Phil identified as one of the carriage passengers at the Wold Newton meteor strike.

With some of this background in mind, what follows is an overview of other character additions to the Wold Newton Family, focusing on descendents of those irradiated at the meteor strike, without going into exacting detail on the precise line of descent.

Dennis E. Power can claim the first genealogical post-Farmerian speculation on the internet. He added the famous detective Charlie Chan to the Family as the son of Fu Manchu, who was, according to Phil, the son of the prolific Sir William Clayton. William Clayton was the son of one of those irradiated at Wold Newton. Chan fits in well in the Family by balancing out the yellow peril stereotype perpetuated by his father. The essay incorporating Chan was revised for publication in Myths for the Modern Age as “Asian Detectives in the Wold Newton Family.”

Power also added John Henry as the son of Sir William Clayton and Bafia, a female Waziri slave who accompanied Clayton on his African expedition. Here, Power blended the Wold Newton Family with American folklore and provided a basis for incorporating African-American characters such as Jim from Tom Sawyer. This addition also linked the Caucasian descendents of Long John Silver, as described in Phil’s Greatheart Silver, with those descended from Long John Silver’s wife, whom Robert Louis Stevenson described as an old woman of African descent. Power’s article on this branch of the Family, “The Wold Wold West: Hammer of Freedom—The Henrys,” is at his website, The Wold Newton Universe: A Secret History http://www.pjfarmer.com/secret/secret.htm.

In addition, Power added Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli as a half-brother to Tarzan, in an essay adroitly reconciling Phil’s novels The Adventure of the Peerless Peer and The Adventure of the Three Madmen (“Jungle Brothers, or, Secrets of the Jungle Lords,” Myths). He also proposed, on his website, that Leslie Charteris’ modern Robin Hood, The Saint (Simon Templar), is the son of E.W. Hornung’s gentleman thief, A.J. Raffles, and thus is part of the Wold Newton Family.

Rick Lai added John Buchan’s Andrew Lumley (The Power-House) and Dominick Medina (The Three Hostages) as members of Professor Moriarty’s family. Lai was also first to propose an additional person at the Wold Newton meteor event, a young medical student named Sebastian Noel. Noel went on to father Dr. James Noel, a master criminal seen in “The Suicide Club” from R.L. Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. Lai also related Dr. Noel to the Moriartys. All of these additions to the Family are in Lai’s essay “The Secret History of Captain Nemo” (Myths).

In addition to Nellie Gray, Chuck Loridans’ identified another daughter of Tarzan. Nellie’s mother was the love of Tarzan’s life, Jane Porter, but during one of Tarzan’s infamous amnesiac blackouts, he succumbed to the wiles of La of Opar. Their daughter was orphaned, and eventually became the criminal-turned-secret agent Modesty Blaise (“The Daughters of Greystoke,” Myths).

Brad Mengel’s favorite contribution to the Wold Newton Family is Detective Robert Goren from the television series Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Mengel proposes that Goren is the great-grandson of Sherlock Holmes (“Watching the Detectives, or, The Sherlock Holmes Family Tree,” Myths). Mengel has also proposed that Robert B. Parker’s Boston P.I., Spenser, is the nephew of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (“The Land Family,” The Wold Newton Chronicles website http://www.pjfarmer.com/chronicles/index.htm).

One of Wold Newton researcher Matthew Baugh’s favorite characters is Myra Reldon, an agent of The Shadow who often poses as a Chinese woman named Ming Dwan. I included her as a granddaughter of Fu Manchu in “Who’s Going to Take Over the World When I’m Gone?” (Myths). In the same essay I postulated that two of James Bond’s adversaries, Dr. No and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, were Wold Newton Family members. Dr. No was the grandson of the aforementioned Dr. James Noel. Dr. No’s maternal grandfather was Fo-Hi, from Sax Rohmer’s The Golden Scorpion. Blofeld was the great-great grandson of Sir William Clayton.

Cheryl Huttner built upon a small clue in Phil’s family tree to add occult detective Jules de Grandin, and while she was at it also managed to include Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot (“Name of a Thousand Blue Demons,” Myths).

Mark Brown, in a short piece in Myths, added a notable female detective to the Family, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, as a daughter of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer (“D is for Daughter, F is for Father,” Myths). Additionally, Brown’s “A Look at the Wimsey Family” (The Wold Newton Universe website ) adds Mack Bolan to the Family as a son of the pulp hero The Spider (Richard Wentworth) and Nita Van Sloan.

Expansions of the Wold Newton Family are not restricted to non-fiction articles. Chris Roberson’s story “Penumbra” (Tales of the Shadowmen, Volume 1: The Modern Babylon, Black Coat Press, 2005), expertly hinted that The Batman might be The Shadow’s son. Another story in Tales of the Shadowmen, Volume 1, my own “The Vanishing Devil,” added martial arts expert Shang Chi as a grandson of Doc Ardan (Doc Savage), albeit in an unusual way. The original Marvel Comics Shang Chi stories had already established him as Fu Manchu’s son. Jean-Marc Lofficier, noted French SF and comics writer, and editor of the Tales of the
Shadowmen series, also maintains the French Wold Newton Universe website http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/wnu1.htm,  which adds innumerable French characters to the Wold Newton Family tree. It expands the family trees of gentleman thief Arsène Lupin and detective M. Lecoq (both of whom Phil included in the Family, at least by implication), and adds other popular French characters such as the arch-villain Fantômas and the detective Jules Maigret.
Without a doubt, the greatest challenge facing Wold Newton researchers is determining Philip José Farmer’s exact place in the Wold Newton Family. In fact, Phil, in his Myths back cover quote, extended this proposal: “I’m just waiting for them to prove that I am also part of the extended family.”

I believe we will be taking him up on his friendly invitation soon.

WOLD NEWTON WRITERS/SCHOLARS AT THE METEOR SITE!!

  • News
  • December 13, 2010

Per Win Scott Eckert-

Here is a pic of me (left), Paul Spiteri (middle) and Mike Croteau (right) at the Wold Newton monument erected by Edward Topham in 1799 (the monument that has the inscription which was in the first article of mine you posted today). This is the exact spot where the meteor struck. Topham’s country house, the Wold Cottage, is about half a mile away. The Wold Cottage is now a Bed & Breakfast, and we (Lisa and I) stayed there overnight with the Spiteris and the Croteaus during a two-week England/France vacation. The pic was taken in July 2009.
 
Here also is a pic of the monument by itself.

  • News
  • December 13, 2010
My Travels through the Wold Wide Web
By Dennis E. Power
My excursions into the mythology of the Wold Newton family began, like Philip José Farmer, through the pulps. However in my case it was he paperback reprints of Tarzan, Doc Savage and the Shadow. I must have been around eight when I was watching a Johnny Weismuller movie on television. When my father walked into the room he laughed at what I was watching. He commented, “That isn’t Tarzan.”  A couple of days later he handed me a 1964 Whitman edition of Tarzan of the Apes. I remember that it was a new book so the stores must have still been carrying them in 1968. Once I had devoured that I bugged my parents for more Tarzan books. At that time Ballantine was still publishing their reprints so I was able to buy half of them and get the rest out of the library. Tarzan introduced me to the wider world of Burroughs and to adventure fiction in general. My father had small collection of science fiction paperbacks which included five or six Doc Savage novels and two Shadow novels. I also became hooked on Doc Savage and began collecting what paperbacks of his I could find.
My first exposure to the works of Philip José Farmer came from reading either A Private Cosmos, which was the third in his World of Tiers or The Fabulous Riverboat, the second in his Riverworld series. I remember really liking A Private Cosmos and while was intrigued by The Fabulous Riverboat, at 12, I was befuddled by it.  Shortly after that I read Dare and Lord Tyger.
I was always a bit of an omnivorous reader but my two favorite subjects were science fiction/adventure fiction and history. I really enjoyed biographies and one day while perusing the biography section of the local library I found the first edition hardback of Tarzan Alive, which must have been out only a few months at that time. I grabbed it, thinking to myself that it was a good thing no one else had noticed this great book. Already familiar with most of the Tarzan books by that time it was a treat for Mr. Farmer to show how Burroughs had exaggerated some of the details of the books but had been fairly faithful to how it really happened. When I finished the book I was convinced for a time anyway, that Tarzan was indeed a real person. Especially since the book had been in the biography section of the library. It wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t true, would it? I was less convinced about the family tree but since I had already read some of Michael Harrison’s books about Sherlock Holmes, I thought maybe parts of the family tree were real.
However as I began to look up various members of the family tree and read their exploits, I knew that he had tricked me, but in a good way. One of the benefits of having read Tarzan Alive was that it introduced me to a wealth of literary figures that I knew nothing about, such as Professor Challenger, Wolf Larsen, A. J. Raffles, Alan Quatermain and the works of Sabatini, Austen,  George MacDonald Fraser.
A couple of years later when I saw Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life on Walgreens bookrack I snatched it up. In addition to literary works such as Raintree County, The Sot-Weed Facto, A Prisoner of Zenda, and characters such as José ph Jorkens, Colonel Clay, and Arsene Lupin, I was pleased to see that Doc Savage was related to some of my favorite character such as James Bond Mr. Moto, The Avenger, Kickaha, Phileas Fogg and Sam Spade. I was also intrigued to see Manuel of Poictesme and Kilgore Trout among the members of this family tree. I had read Cabell’s Figures of Earth which had been reprinted by Ballantine and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and this mention prompted to seek out and read more of their adventures. I was thrilled, and a bit confused, a few years later when Kilgore Trout came out with Venus on the Half Shell.  Trout was a fictional character, right. Or was he?
Venus on the Half Shell was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager and I passed it around to a lot of my friends. It was years before I learned that it had actually been written by Philip José Farmer.
From the ages of 13 to 17, I was really fascinated by the concept of the Wold Newton family and such books like The Adventure of the Peerless Peer and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg only spurred my enthusiasm. Using graph paper I created a master family tree that incorporated both of the family trees in Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life and added on material found in The Other Log of Phileas Fogg and the The Lavalite World. Once that was done, I began expanding the tree on my own. I created extensive family trees adding in a mixture of fictional and historical gunslingers, criminals. I also added Asian characters such as Charlie Chan, characters from the James Bond novels, Mark Twain’s characters and characters from blaxploitation films. Inspired by Vincent McHugh’s Caleb Catlum’s America, which had America’s folk heroes as part of an extended family tree I also added some these folk heroes such as John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill and Stormalong.  This was all done with idea of writing a Doc Savage book that would incorporate the Wold Newton family concept. Eventually I learned however that such a book would most likely never make it to print and so dropped the idea of the novel. However I did sporadically work on my family trees for amusement.
When I first got onto the internet back in 1997 once of the first things I did was search for anything Wold Newton related. Although I did not find anything I kept trying. If Win Eckert had anything up at that time I did not find it. This was in the pre-Google dark ages.
Eventually I found I did find Win Eckert’s An Expansion of Philip José  Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe site . At that time it consisted of a rather short crossover chronology, a couple of articles by Lou Mougin and a humongous graphic was a collage of several pulp cover scans. That graphic took forever to load in those days of 28.8 modems.  I became a very frequent visitor to the site but was kind of disappointed that although the chronology grew a bit, there was a distinct lack of articles. Despite having created several Wold Newton derived genealogies in the eighties, I was not currently doing any Wold Newton related stuff but rather was currently involved in creating my El Head character and so was working exclusively on that. However it bugged me that no one was writing any articles about the Wold Newton family like was in Tarzan Alive or the Doc Savage biography.
So after a great deal of trepidation, I sent Win a rather long email about my theory to incorporate Charlie Chan into the Wold Newton Family. I did not hear from him for some time, so I figured he thought the idea had no merit. One day out of the blue his email popped up with a request for me to turn the theory into an article.  This became the Asian Detectives in the Wold Newton Universe article , which I believe was the first to delve into Wold Newton speculative genealogy on his site.
 I kept working on El Head stories but kept coming back to Win’s page. I saw that other people had also begun putting up articles and Win’s chronology had grown to incorporate the Highlander type Immortals, Star Trek, the X-Files and things like that. After my Asian Detectives article had appeared Mark Brown had submitted From Pygmalion to Casablanca: The Genealogy of Henry Higgins and a couple of other speculative articles to Win’s site.
Around that time the film The Wild Wild West came out, I began to wonder how to reconcile the film with the television series. I thought of my old genealogy which I had created over twenty years before. By cannibalizing my Wold Newton family tree and incorporating some of the mythology that Farmer had created when he wrote The Other Log of Phileas Fogg I began writing The Wild Wild West article which blossomed into a Wold Wold West article which not only reconciled the Wild Wild West film and television show but it also incorporated many of the Western characters that had been in my Wold Newton Family Tree.  As I was working on the Wold Wold West article I began to think on how to reconcile the existence of Star Trek, the Highlander Immortals, X-Files and what not with the Capelleans and the World of Tiers series. This lead to an Aliens Among Us article. In creating the two articles, to help me keep things straight I used Win’s The Wold Newton Universe Crossover Chronology and added in my own stuff which lead to the creation of The Revised Wold Newton Crossover Chronology Crossover Chronology

        I submitted the articles to Win. He replied that he really enjoyed them but that at that time he was not going to have the time to put articles on his website. He said that one of his other contributors was planning on creating an ancillary site and suggested I do so as well. He also thought because of the length of the articles and the revised chronology that it would be a good start for a new site. We worked out the details which would distinguish his work from mine. Since my site was intended to be a sort of look behind the history on Win’s site, I called it The Secret History of the Wold Newton Universe. I have since shortened slightly to The Wold Newton Universe: A Secret History.

        It was about this time that Win invited me to join a Wold Newton email group. The email group was eventually transmogrified into a Wold Newton e-group, the latest version of which is simply called Wold Newton Family


        Shortly after I put my site up I was joined by another site, The Wold Newton Chronicles < http://www.pjfarmer.com/chronicles/index.ht> site Mark Brown. One of his first articles on that site was The Magnificent Gordons, which was in part an extension of the Gordon genealogy I had created for The Wold Wold West article. This was one of the first instances of cross-referencing between articles created by the early writers of Wold Newton speculation.
After Win’s Mark’s and my sites had been up for a while, Jess Nevins created Jess Nevins’ Wold Newton site,  <http://ratmmjess.tripod.com/wold.html> where he posted his own Wold Newton speculation. A bit later Jean Marc Lofficier created the French Wold Newton site which provided a Gallic-centric version of the Wold Newton Universe.
Mark, Win’s and my sites were on three different servers for a while. Eventually Mike Croteau and Rick Beaulieu offered to host our three sites on the www.pjfarmer.com domain, where the Official Philip José Farmer homepage is hosted. Our sites were chosen because there was some cross referencing between the three, creating an informal “consensus” Wold Newton Universe. This cross referencing came about in a couple of different ways. One way was that various authors had articles posted on two or three of the sites. For example Win has articles posted on his site and the Chronicles site. I have articles posted on my site and Win’s site. Brad Mengel and Art Bollman have articles posted on all three sites.
Another manner in which this cross fertilization took place was in the process of article creation. Mark, Win and I provided each other, and article writers who followed, with feedback and suggestions as they created their articles. This was either through the public message board or in private emails. For instance, Matthew Baugh, Mark Brown and I helped Win with The Amazing Lanes, his first foray into speculative genealogy. I also remember providing feedback and suggestions to Jess Nevins, Brad Mengel, Chuck Loridans, Art Bollman, Matthew Baugh, David Kennedy and a few others.
Another form of the cross fertilization took place in the form of what could be termed spring boarding, that is one piece leading either to another’s creation or providing the impetus for the article to be created. Mark Brown’s The Magnificent Gordons spring boarded from my Wold Wold article. I think Mark had previously been working on a Gordon’s genealogy but when my article appeared; he had something else to link it two. Another example is John Small’s Kiss of the Vampire. John took an email I had written speculating on the connection between Lady Rawhide and Vampirella and turned it into a gem of an article. Another of couple springboards was Win’s

Amazing Lane

’s article which led to my series of articles about the Jekyll and Hyde family and Peter Coogan’s John Carter is Phra the Phoenician which led to John Carter: Torn from Phoenician Dreams and the subsequent articles in our John Carter series.

This cross pollination between our sites led to the creation of the book Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Monkeybrain books, November 2005. This volume articles from Philip José Farmer and articles from each of the owners of the three www.pjfarmer.com hosted sites, and I believe at least one article from each of the sites from other contributors. These articles were revised and expanded for print publication.
          Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe was the crowning achievement of the “consensus” for it gave their fannish scribblings a sense of legitimacy. However, it was also for all intents and purposes the peak of the Woldnewtonry on the internet, as many of the authors of those pieces went onto other writing projects; some Wold Newton related, others tangentially so. Most Wold Newton related activity on the internet now comes from message boards.
          I do however remain hopeful that their will be a renaissance from a new generation of Wold Newton researchers who will write new articles and create their own sites.

DENNIS E. POWER AND THE WOLD WIDE WEB!

  • News
  • December 13, 2010

My Travels through the Wold Wide Web
By Dennis E. Power
My excursions into the mythology of the Wold Newton family began, like Philip José Farmer, through the pulps. However in my case it was he paperback reprints of Tarzan, Doc Savage and the Shadow. I must have been around eight when I was watching a Johnny Weismuller movie on television. When my father walked into the room he laughed at what I was watching. He commented, “That isn’t Tarzan.”  A couple of days later he handed me a 1964 Whitman edition of Tarzan of the Apes. I remember that it was a new book so the stores must have still been carrying them in 1968. Once I had devoured that I bugged my parents for more Tarzan books. At that time Ballantine was still publishing their reprints so I was able to buy half of them and get the rest out of the library. Tarzan introduced me to the wider world of Burroughs and to adventure fiction in general. My father had small collection of science fiction paperbacks which included five or six Doc Savage novels and two Shadow novels. I also became hooked on Doc Savage and began collecting what paperbacks of his I could find.

My first exposure to the works of Philip José Farmer came from reading either A Private Cosmos, which was the third in his World of Tiers or The Fabulous Riverboat, the second in his Riverworld series. I remember really liking A Private Cosmos and while was intrigued by The Fabulous Riverboat, at 12, I was befuddled by it.  Shortly after that I read Dare and Lord Tyger.

I was always a bit of an omnivorous reader but my two favorite subjects were science fiction/adventure fiction and history. I really enjoyed biographies and one day while perusing the biography section of the local library I found the first edition hardback of Tarzan Alive, which must have been out only a few months at that time. I grabbed it, thinking to myself that it was a good thing no one else had noticed this great book. Already familiar with most of the Tarzan books by that time it was a treat for Mr. Farmer to show how Burroughs had exaggerated some of the details of the books but had been fairly faithful to how it really happened. When I finished the book I was convinced for a time anyway, that Tarzan was indeed a real person. Especially since the book had been in the biography section of the library. It wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t true, would it? I was less convinced about the family tree but since I had already read some of Michael Harrison’s books about Sherlock Holmes, I thought maybe parts of the family tree were real.
However as I began to look up various members of the family tree and read their exploits, I knew that he had tricked me, but in a good way. One of the benefits of having read Tarzan Alive was that it introduced me to a wealth of literary figures that I knew nothing about, such as Professor Challenger, Wolf Larsen, A. J. Raffles, Alan Quatermain and the works of Sabatini, Austen,  George MacDonald Fraser.

A couple of years later when I saw Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life on Walgreens bookrack I snatched it up. In addition to literary works such as Raintree County, The Sot-Weed Facto, A Prisoner of Zenda, and characters such as José ph Jorkens, Colonel Clay, and Arsene Lupin, I was pleased to see that Doc Savage was related to some of my favorite character such as James Bond Mr. Moto, The Avenger, Kickaha, Phileas Fogg and Sam Spade. I was also intrigued to see Manuel of Poictesme and Kilgore Trout among the members of this family tree. I had read Cabell’s Figures of Earth which had been reprinted by Ballantine and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and this mention prompted to seek out and read more of their adventures. I was thrilled, and a bit confused, a few years later when Kilgore Trout came out with Venus on the Half Shell.  Trout was a fictional character, right. Or was he?

Venus on the Half Shell was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager and I passed it around to a lot of my friends. It was years before I learned that it had actually been written by Philip José Farmer.

From the ages of 13 to 17, I was really fascinated by the concept of the Wold Newton family and such books like The Adventure of the Peerless Peer and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg only spurred my enthusiasm. Using graph paper I created a master family tree that incorporated both of the family trees in Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life and added on material found in The Other Log of Phileas Fogg and the The Lavalite World. Once that was done, I began expanding the tree on my own. I created extensive family trees adding in a mixture of fictional and historical gunslingers, criminals. I also added Asian characters such as Charlie Chan, characters from the James Bond novels, Mark Twain’s characters and characters from blaxploitation films. Inspired by Vincent McHugh’s Caleb Catlum’s America, which had America’s folk heroes as part of an extended family tree I also added some these folk heroes such as John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill and Stormalong.  This was all done with idea of writing a Doc Savage book that would incorporate the Wold Newton family concept. Eventually I learned however that such a book would most likely never make it to print and so dropped the idea of the novel. However I did sporadically work on my family trees for amusement.

When I first got onto the internet back in 1997 once of the first things I did was search for anything Wold Newton related. Although I did not find anything I kept trying. If Win Eckert had anything up at that time I did not find it. This was in the pre-Google dark ages.
Eventually I found I did find Win Eckert’s An Expansion of Philip José  Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe site . At that time it consisted of a rather short crossover chronology, a couple of articles by Lou Mougin and a humongous graphic was a collage of several pulp cover scans. That graphic took forever to load in those days of 28.8 modems.  I became a very frequent visitor to the site but was kind of disappointed that although the chronology grew a bit, there was a distinct lack of articles. Despite having created several Wold Newton derived genealogies in the eighties, I was not currently doing any Wold Newton related stuff but rather was currently involved in creating my El Head character and so was working exclusively on that. However it bugged me that no one was writing any articles about the Wold Newton family like was in Tarzan Alive or the Doc Savage biography.
So after a great deal of trepidation, I sent Win a rather long email about my theory to incorporate Charlie Chan into the Wold Newton Family. I did not hear from him for some time, so I figured he thought the idea had no merit. One day out of the blue his email popped up with a request for me to turn the theory into an article.  This became the Asian Detectives in the Wold Newton Universe article , which I believe was the first to delve into Wold Newton speculative genealogy on his site.

 I kept working on El Head stories but kept coming back to Win’s page. I saw that other people had also begun putting up articles and Win’s chronology had grown to incorporate the Highlander type Immortals, Star Trek, the X-Files and things like that. After my Asian Detectives article had appeared Mark Brown had submitted From Pygmalion to Casablanca: The Genealogy of Henry Higgins and a couple of other speculative articles to Win’s site.

Around that time the film The Wild Wild West came out, I began to wonder how to reconcile the film with the television series. I thought of my old genealogy which I had created over twenty years before. By cannibalizing my Wold Newton family tree and incorporating some of the mythology that Farmer had created when he wrote The Other Log of Phileas Fogg I began writing The Wild Wild West article which blossomed into a Wold Wold West article which not only reconciled the Wild Wild West film and television show but it also incorporated many of the Western characters that had been in my Wold Newton Family Tree.  As I was working on the Wold Wold West article I began to think on how to reconcile the existence of Star Trek, the Highlander Immortals, X-Files and what not with the Capelleans and the World of Tiers series. This lead to an Aliens Among Us article. In creating the two articles, to help me keep things straight I used Win’s The Wold Newton Universe Crossover Chronology and added in my own stuff which lead to the creation of The Revised Wold Newton Crossover Chronology Crossover Chronology

        I submitted the articles to Win. He replied that he really enjoyed them but that at that time he was not going to have the time to put articles on his website. He said that one of his other contributors was planning on creating an ancillary site and suggested I do so as well. He also thought because of the length of the articles and the revised chronology that it would be a good start for a new site. We worked out the details which would distinguish his work from mine. Since my site was intended to be a sort of look behind the history on Win’s site, I called it The Secret History of the Wold Newton Universe. I have since shortened slightly to The Wold Newton Universe: A Secret History.

        It was about this time that Win invited me to join a Wold Newton email group. The email group was eventually transmogrified into a Wold Newton e-group, the latest version of which is simply called Wold Newton Family


        Shortly after I put my site up I was joined by another site, The Wold Newton Chronicles < http://www.pjfarmer.com/chronicles/index.ht> site Mark Brown. One of his first articles on that site was The Magnificent Gordons, which was in part an extension of the Gordon genealogy I had created for The Wold Wold West article. This was one of the first instances of cross-referencing between articles created by the early writers of Wold Newton speculation.
After Win’s Mark’s and my sites had been up for a while, Jess Nevins created Jess Nevins’ Wold Newton site,  <http://ratmmjess.tripod.com/wold.html> where he posted his own Wold Newton speculation. A bit later Jean Marc Lofficier created the French Wold Newton site which provided a Gallic-centric version of the Wold Newton Universe.
Mark, Win’s and my sites were on three different servers for a while. Eventually Mike Croteau and Rick Beaulieu offered to host our three sites on the www.pjfarmer.com domain, where the Official Philip José Farmer homepage is hosted. Our sites were chosen because there was some cross referencing between the three, creating an informal “consensus” Wold Newton Universe. This cross referencing came about in a couple of different ways. One way was that various authors had articles posted on two or three of the sites. For example Win has articles posted on his site and the Chronicles site. I have articles posted on my site and Win’s site. Brad Mengel and Art Bollman have articles posted on all three sites.
Another manner in which this cross fertilization took place was in the process of article creation. Mark, Win and I provided each other, and article writers who followed, with feedback and suggestions as they created their articles. This was either through the public message board or in private emails. For instance, Matthew Baugh, Mark Brown and I helped Win with The Amazing Lanes, his first foray into speculative genealogy. I also remember providing feedback and suggestions to Jess Nevins, Brad Mengel, Chuck Loridans, Art Bollman, Matthew Baugh, David Kennedy and a few others.
Another form of the cross fertilization took place in the form of what could be termed spring boarding, that is one piece leading either to another’s creation or providing the impetus for the article to be created. Mark Brown’s The Magnificent Gordons spring boarded from my Wold Wold article. I think Mark had previously been working on a Gordon’s genealogy but when my article appeared; he had something else to link it two. Another example is John Small’s Kiss of the Vampire. John took an email I had written speculating on the connection between Lady Rawhide and Vampirella and turned it into a gem of an article. Another of couple springboards was Win’s Amazing Lane’s article which led to my series of articles about the Jekyll and Hyde family and Peter Coogan’s John Carter is Phra the Phoenician which led to John Carter: Torn from Phoenician Dreams and the subsequent articles in our John Carter series.

This cross pollination between our sites led to the creation of the book Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe, Monkeybrain books, November 2005. This volume articles from Philip José Farmer and articles from each of the owners of the three www.pjfarmer.com hosted sites, and I believe at least one article from each of the sites from other contributors. These articles were revised and expanded for print publication.

          Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe was the crowning achievement of the “consensus” for it gave their fannish scribblings a sense of legitimacy. However, it was also for all intents and purposes the peak of the Woldnewtonry on the internet, as many of the authors of those pieces went onto other writing projects; some Wold Newton related, others tangentially so. Most Wold Newton related activity on the internet now comes from message boards.
          I do however remain hopeful that their will be a renaissance from a new generation of Wold Newton researchers who will write new articles and create their own sites.

WOLD NEWTON LIVES IN TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN 7!!

  • News
  • December 13, 2010

TALES OF THE SHADOWMEN 7: FEMME FATALES from Black Coat Press
http://www.blackcoatpress.com/talesshadowmen07.htm

US$22.95/GBP 14.99 – 6×9 tpb, 324 p. – ISBN-13: 978-1-935558-44-6

Contents:
Matt Haley: My Femmes Fatales (portfolio)

Xavier Mauméjean: My Femmes Fatales (foreword)

Roberto Lionel Barreiro: Secrets starring Jean Valjean, Zorro.

Matthew Baugh: What Rough Beast starring Hugo Danner, Judex, Sâr Dubnotal.

Thom Brannan: What Doesn’t Die starring Dr. Omega, The Bride of Frankenstein.

Matthew Dennion: Faces of Fear starring Judex, Freddy Krueger.

Win Scott Eckert: Nadine’s Invitation starring Lady Blakeney, The Black Coats.

Emmanuel Gorlier: Fiat Lux! starring The Nyctalope, The Invaders.

Micah Harris: Slouching Towards Camulodunum starring Becky Sharp, Sâr Dubnotal.

Travis Hiltz: The Robots of Metropolis starring Dr. Omega, Rotwang.

Paul Hugli: Death to the Heretic! starring Bruce Wayne, Indiana Jones, The Nyctalope.

Rick Lai: Will There Be Sunlight? starring John Sunlight, The Black Coats.

Jean-Marc Lofficier: The Sincerest Form of Flattery starring Diabolik, Fantômas.David McDonnell: Big Little Man starring Dr. Loveless, Nurse Ratched.

Brad Mengel: The Apprentice starring The Saint, Malko Linge.

Sharan Newman: The Beast Without starring Catherine Levendeur, Bisclavret.

Neil Penswick: Legacy of Evil starring Fu Manchu, Le Poisson Chinois.

Pete Rawlik: The Masquerade in Exile starring Herbert West, Christine Daae.

Frank Schildiner: The Tiny Destroyer starring Jean Kariven, Kato.

Stuart Shiffman: Grim Days starring Lord Peter, Colonel Haki.

Bradley H. Sinor: The Screeching of Two Ravens starring Captain Blood, Milady.

Michel Stéphan: The Three Lives of Maddalena starring Victor Frankenstein, Carmilla.

David L. Vineyard: The Mysterious Island of Dr. Antekirtt starring Bob Morane, Bernard Prince, The Nyctalope.

Brian Stableford: The Necromancers of London starring Gregory Temple, Victor Frankenstein, Count Szandor.


This seventh volume of the only international anthology devoted to paying homage to the world’s most fantastic heroes from popular literature spotlights the females of the species: beautiful, deadly, tragic, accursed, enticing… all gathered here for an amazing collection of new adventures…

Tremble as Christine Daae meets Herbert West the Reanimator and Dr. Loveless Nurse Ratched! Experience thrills as Milady tries to outwit Captain Blood and Lady Blakeney the Black Coats! Watch in awe as Becky Sharp foils the designs of Sâr Dubnotal and Amelia Peabody those of mad King Tut! Wonder as the Bride of Frankenstein challenges the power of Dr. Omega and the vampire countess Marcian Gregoryi that of Victor Frankenstein and the Illuminati! Also starring Carmilla! Catherine Levendeur! Rosa Klebb! Fah Lo Suee! And the Eyes Without A Face!

With a foreword by Xavier Mauméjean and a portfolio by Matt Haley.

IN DEFENSE OF WOLD NEWTONRY-by John A. Small!!!

  • News
  • December 13, 2010

IN DEFENSE OF “WOLD-NEWTONRY”
By John A. Small
(Originally posted on the Internet site ERB-Zine, Issue 1484 [http://www.erbzine.com/mag14/1484.html]; 2005)
To The Editors of ERB-Zine:

I read with great interest Den Valdron’s recent article entitled “H.G. WELLS’ BARSOOM!” which dealt with how certain writers have endeavored to make the Martian invaders of Wells’ classic novel compatible with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ epic tales of Barsoomian derring-do. Having been a fan of both Wells and ERB since the third grade, I found his article to be quite good in general, informative and for the most part entertaining.

However, there was one aspect of Mr. Valdron’s essay which, quite frankly, bothered me. I refer to the following paragraph that appears near the beginning of the article in question:
“Further, fans and theorists, including the Wold Newton people, have written extensively of the mixing and matching of the worlds. Personally, I tend to take the Wold Newton stuff with a grain of salt, those people have too strong a tendency to discard inconvenient facts and invent imaginary facts to make their theories fit.”

Before I respond, a word of explanation is in order. I have already stated that I have long been a fan of Burroughs and Wells; I readily admit to also being a fan for many years of Philip Jose Farmer’s works regarding what some have come to call the “Wold Newton Universe.” (I myself prefer the term “Wold Newton Mythos,” but that is a topic for another time.) I became introduced to Farmer’s concept at the age of 12 – some 30 years ago now, I am somewhat pained to suddenly realize – and was intrigued by the imaginative tapestry which Farmer had weaved; I rather liked the idea that so many of the literary characters to whom my parents had introduced me over the years might actually exist within a single unified mythology. 

Of course this was not a concept that Farmer created; as he himself has acknowledged, Farmer was simply building upon ideas originally set forth by the likes of William S. Baring-Gould in his scholarly works concerning Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. In doing so Farmer no doubt introduced more than a few readers to characters and works they might otherwise have never even heard of, let alone sought out, and (like Wells, Burroughs and so many others before him) ignited a spark in the collective imagination of more than one genereation of fans – some of whom have endeavored to further build upon the foundation which Baring-Gould, Farmer and others have laid. 
As a professional writer myself, I have had the opportunity to make my own (admittedly miniscule) contributions to the further expansion of Farmer’s concepts. It has been an enjoyable experience, one which I have come to treasure both at a professional and personal level. But for me it is a hobby, a diversion – a game I play every now and then to help relieve the tensions of my day-to-day routine. (I am by trade a newspaper reporter, which according to several studies I have come across ranks high upon the list of most stressful occupations – which may explain why so may reporters tend to become alcoholics. But where many reporters tend to drink a lot, I prefer to read and write about my favorite childhood heroes – it’s far less expensive in the long run, and not nearly so hard on my liver.) 
And unlike, say, checkers or Twister, it is a game without any hard and fast rules; gather any 10 such Wold Newton devotees in a room together, and you’re likely to hear 10 different explanations of what characters and works should or should not be included in the Mythos and why. And each argument will be equally as valid as the others, when considered from each individual’s point of view.
That is part of what bothered me about Mr. Valdron’s statement: his indiscriminant painting of all devotees of the Wold Newton concept with such a broad brush. Labelling all fans of any fictional series or concept as “those people” brings to mind the unfortunate stereotypical image of the “fanboy” (to use the derogatory term originally coined to identify a certain type of comic book fan) or of “Trekkies,” labels which generally are used with derision and disdain by those who don’t happen to share these fans’ particular passion. Such labels and others like them are as inaccurate as they are unkind, as I’m sure a great many fans of both “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” will gladly attest. 
(For the record, I am also a fan of both “Star Wars” and “Star Trek.” However, I have never attended a George Lucas film dressed as Luke Skywalker and brandishing a lightsaber. And I am certainly no “Trekkie,” or “Trekker,” or whatever term is currently in vogue among those whose behavior gave rise to such stereotypes in the first place; in fact, I was once asked to leave a convention hall full of some of the more rabid “Trek” fans because I dared to suggest publicly that the reason the Klingons from the original TV series looked different than those seen in the films and subsequent TV spin-offs was because the later productions had more money in their budgets for creative make-up appliances. If there is anything more disconcerting than to be regarded as being odd by a group of people wearing rubber Spock ears, it would have to be finding yourself being chased out of a room with those rubber Spock ears bouncing off your back.)

I have referred to my own interest in the Wold Newton Mythos as a game or diversion; this is not meant to belittle the Wold Newton concept in any way, and I hope that others do not read such intent into my comments. Indeed, I happen to share the view of a number of friends and colleagues who consider the study and expansion of Farmer’s concepts to be a legitimate field of literary scholarship; what separates me from such students of this field is not lesser interest on my part, but rather my comparative lack of adequate time or resources. 

I mention this because it occurs to me that if attaching a label to all fans of a particular science fiction series due to the behavior of a relative few is unfair, then dismissing an entire field of study as something that “those people” do is equally ill-advised. It is an act akin to disavowing the entire field of biology simply because one does not agree with the theories set forth by Darwin, or showing contempt for all geneticists because of the controversy surrounding stem cell research. 
Casting members of any group – biologists, geneticists, individuals of different religious or political persuasions, even the “Wold Newton people” (to use Valdron’s terminology) – as “those people” creates an unnecessarily adversarial, “Us vs. Them” dichotomy that is both counter-productive and, ultimately, intellectually dishonest..
Which brings me to the other aspect of Mr. Valdron’s statement that I found disturbing, as well as somewhat puzzling. After going out of his way to issue what amounts to a blanket condemnation of Wold Newton devotees, he then proceeds to engage in exactly the same manner of scholarly literary exercise which he has just so cavalierly dismissed. Mr. Valdron would no doubt dismiss this last observation of mine as inaccurate, yet a simple comparison of his essays with those produced by Wold Newton devotees clearly demonstrates otherwise.
Such comparison will also reveal to the open-minded reader that Mr. Valdron’s studies have in certain cases led to observations and conclusions that are identical or similar to those reached independently by other literary scholars who, as it happens, are devotees of the Wold Newton Mythos. Yet his view appears to be that his work is above reproach, while similar conclusions that have been arrived at by anyone who even professes interest in Wold Newton scholarship is somehow suspect. He is welcome to this opinion, of course, but his believing it does not automatically make it so. 
Just as there are a number of variations of the game poker, so too are there more than one way to play the game which we are considering here. A college professor of mine referred to it as “literary archeology”; Mr. Valdron has similarly referred to it as the “Archeology of Unreality,” while certain devotees of Farmer’s concepts refer to it as Wold Newtonry. In my younger days I called it “Sleuthing in the Stacks” – a reference to a 1944 book of the same name by Professor Rudolph Altrocchi, a work referenced by Richard A. Lupoff in his excellent “Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master Of Adventure.”

But no matter what name we may individually apply to it, no matter how the rules may vary from one variation to the next, in the end we are all playing the same game; to suggest otherwise is, again, intellectually dishonest at best – and blatantly hypocritical at worst. Our perspectives and methodologies may differ, our conclusions may not always be compatible with one another’s, but in the end our goal is the same: “to try and get it all to fit in plausibly together,” as Mr. Valdron himself has stated.

There was more I had originally intended to say, but I believe I’ll conclude here. It is not my intent to engage in a war of words or dispute literary ideologies with Mr. Valdron (although one can’t help but get the impression from his work that Mr. Valdron, for reasons known only to him, might actually welcome such a fight); such debate would be a fruitless exercise, an unnecessary expenditure of time and energy unlikely to change anyone’s mind, and which would serve no real function other than to take away from the joy many of us with an interest in such things derive from this game in the first place.
And at the end of the day, isn’t that really what this is supposed to be all about? Aren’t we just trying to have fun? 
I know I am…

SIX DEGRESS OF PJF BY WSE!!!

  • News
  • December 13, 2010

Win Scott Eckert © 2005-2010
Farmerphile no.2
Christopher Paul Carey and Paul Spiteri, eds., Michael Croteau, publisher, October 2005

“Six Degrees of Philip José Farmer”
By Win Scott Eckert

Last column we discussed the great genealogist Philip José Farmer’s discovery of the “Wold Newton Family,” – highly influential people, many heroic, and some villainous, whose lives are chronicled in the guise of popular literature. While Farmer wrote critical essays and serious biographies in which he revealed his researches, he was also not above divulging more of his findings under the guise of popular fiction.
A full survey of Farmer’s Wold Newton “fiction” is beyond the scope of this column, so I will focus here on a few key pieces which reveal that, beyond the Wold Newton Family (WNF) proper, there is indeed a whole “Wold Newton Universe” (WNU) ripe for exploration. In fact, if one follows the trail of connections through his fiction, one is lead to the most astonishing places.

For instance, after reading Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, one might not be surprised to find in Farmer’s novel The Adventure of the Peerless Peer that Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, The Shadow (“Colonel Kentov”), and G-8 (“Wentworth”) shared an adventure together. One might not even be surprised that three other WNF members are mentioned: Leftenant John “Korak” Drummond, Lord John Roxton, and Allan Quatermain. But one might be taken aback to also see Dr. Gideon Fell and Henry Merrivale, two renowned detectives whose cases were recounted by John Dickson Carr. Farmer never mentioned them as Family members, but surely their appearance is indicative that sleuths in the larger WNU are not limited to WNF members.

Farmer also wrote two novels of pre-history, Hadon of Ancient Opar and Flight to Opar. In these, he discovered connections between the lost city of Opar from Burroughs’ Tarzan novels, and the novels of H. Rider Haggard. In a later interview, Farmer revealed that Hadon’s son emigrated south and founded the city of Kôr, from Haggard’s She. He carried with him a huge axe made of meteorite iron, which was eventually passed down to Umslopogass, the great Zulu warrior, who shattered it in the city of Zu-Vendis (Haggard’s Allan Quatermain). In this way, Farmer revealed that the WNU has a rich history beyond the WNF.

In Farmer’s translation of J. H. Rosny’s Ironcastle, he adds references to several WNF members, including Phileas Fogg, Sherlock Holmes (through a reference to the Diogenes Club from the Holmes stories), Joseph Jorkens, Doc Savage (although the reference in Ironcastle is really to Doc’s father, Dr. Clark Savage, Sr.1), and Professor Challenger (through a reference to the South American expedition from Doyle’s The Lost World). Sir George Curtis also appears; he is the nephew of Sir Henry Curtis from H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain novels. Farmer states that Hareton Ironcastle is related to Professor Porter, Jane’s father from the Tarzan books.

An interesting new element that Farmer adds with this crossover is the Baltimore Gun Club. This means that some version of Jules Verne’s novels, From the Earth to the Moon and The Purchase of the North Pole (aka Topsy Turvy), take place in the WNU. Since Verne’s works are also interconnected, this means that other Verne novels such as Hector Servadac, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, and The School for Robinsons (aka The School for Crusoes) occur within Wold Newton continuity.

Farmer’s novel of young Doc Savage’s first adventure, Escape from Loki, added many other elements to the WNU, as seen from this excerpt from my Wold Newton Universe Crossover Chronology:

ESCAPE FROM LOKI
Clark “Doc” Savage, Jr., meets his friends and associates Ham Brooks, Monk Mayfair, Renny Renwick, Long Tom Roberts and Johnny Littlejohn in the German prison camp Loki. There is mention of a “worm unknown to science,” which can be demonstrated to be a direct link to the Cthulhu Mythos. Doc’s tutor in mountain climbing, yoga, and self-defense, Dekka Lan Shan, is the grandfather of Peter the Brazen. A character named Benedict Murdstone also appears. Savage & Co. meet Abraham Cohen, who would go on to membership in Jimmie Cordies’ band of mercenaries, and an Allied prisoner named O’Brien, a soldier of Irish extraction. It is also mentioned that Doc Savage was trained by an aborigine, Writjitandel of the Wantella tribe. And Doc’s Persian Sufi tutor is named Hajji Abdu el-Yezdi.

Escape from Loki is a novel by Philip José Farmer, Bantam Books, 1991. The “worm unknown to science” was first referred to in Watson’s / Doyle’s “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” and was followed-up on in Harry “Bunny” Manders’ Raffles tale (edited by Philip José Farmer), “The Problem of the Sore Bridge – Among Others.” Peter the Brazen, aka Peter Moore, was an adventurer in pulp stories written by George Worts. Of Peter the Brazen, Wold Newton scholar Rick Lai adds, “One of Worts’ Gillian Hazeltine stories mentions a ship, The King of Asia, which also appears in the Peter the Brazen stories. Worts’ Singapore Sammy story, “South of Sulu,” mentions that Sammy was friendly with a jewel trader, De Sylva. This may be the same character as the jewel merchant, Dan de Sylva, who appears in a later Peter the Brazen story, “The Octopus of Hongkong.”

Murdstone is related to the family which appears in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. The Jimmie Cordie adventures by William Wirt are a series of twentyone stories about a group of mercenaries in the Far East after the Great War. Rick Lai adds: “O’Brien is probably Jem O’Brien, ex-jockey, exconvict, decorated soldier in the American army during World War I, and special assistant to the Scarlet Fox. Created by Eustace Hale Ball, the Scarlet Fox was a pulp hero who appeared in seven stories in Black Mask during 1923-24. The first six stories were published as a novel, The Scarlet Fox, in 1927.”

In Arthur Upfield’s novel about the Australian detective, Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte, No Footprints in the Bush (1940), a major character is Writjitandil (Farmer changed an “i” to an “e”) of the Wantella tribe. Rick Lai writes again: “In an introduction to an edition of an Upfield novel which does not feature Bonaparte, The House of Cain (Dennis McMillan, 1983), Philip José Farmer speculated that Bonaparte was the illegitimate son of E. W. Hornung’s A.J. Raffles. In Upfield’s novels, Bonaparte is illegitimate son of an unnamed white man and an aborigine woman. Upfield’s early novels suggest that Bonaparte was born in the late 1880s. Raffles was in Australia about that time according to Hornung’s ‘Le Premier Pas.’”

Chris Carey points out that “Sir Richard Francis Burton (the real-life protagonist of Farmer’s Riverworld series) wrote a curious book entitled The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî. At the time the volume was first published, Burton claimed to be merely the translator of the wise Sufi’s work. However, the truth finally came out that Burton wrote it. While Haji Abdu El-Yezdi may be a fictional character in our world, we may only assume that he existed in flesh and blood in Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe.”


One never knows when additional information from Farmer’s researches will come to light. His tale “After King Kong Fell” clearly takes place in the WNU because WNF members Doc Savage and The Shadow arrive on the scene in the aftermath of the giant ape’s plummet from Doc’s headquarters, the Empire State Building. That King Kong exists in the WNU may be old news to some.

Imagine, then, the glee with which a “Farmerphile,” who thinks that there are no new Wold Newton connections to be revealed in Farmer’s work, learns that he is wrong. The young protagonist who is visiting New York during the 1931 events of “After King Kong Fell” is one Tim Howller of Peoria, Illinois, age thirteen. A newly discovered Farmer short story, “The Face that Launched a Thousand Eggs” (published for the first time in Farmerphile No. 1, July 2005), features nineteen-year-old Tim Howller. The story takes place in 1937. It undoubtedly features the same Tim Howller from “After King Kong Fell,” and what’s more, “The Face that Launched a Thousand Eggs” is semi-autobiographical.
The inescapable conclusion is that Philip José Farmer himself witnessed Kong’s plunge from the Empire State Building. And if that doesn’t enhance our understanding of the inter-tangled history behind the Wold Newton Universe, then I don’t know what does.

Additional Sources:
Carey, Christopher Paul. “Farmer’s Escape from Loki: A Closer Look.” The Official Philip José Farmer Home Page. <http://www.pjfarmer.com/fan/chris1.htm>.

Pringle, David. “Allan and the Ice Gods.” Violet Books: Antiquarian Supernatural, Fantasy, and Mysterious Literatures. <http://www.violetbooks.com/haggard-pringle.html>.

1 To be perfectly accurate, the real name of Doc Savage’s father, as Farmer demonstrated in Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, is Dr. James Clarke Wildman, Sr.

PJF MEMORIAL TRIBUTE STORY by JOHN ALLEN SMALL!!!

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  • December 13, 2010

THE BRIGHT HEART OF ETERNITY

By John Allen Small

(Originally published in the program for FarmerCon IV [a.k.a. The Philip José Farmer Memorial Gathering], held in Peoria, Illinois, on June 6, 2009)

…Phil let out a long, relaxed sigh, held his arms up over his head and stretched, as if waking up from an afternoon nap. He opened his eyes and quickly shut them again, blinded by a bright summer sun like the ones he remembered from his childhood so many years before.

Holding up a hand to block the sunlight, he slowly opened his eyes again and waited for his vision to adjust itself to his surroundings. After a moment he rose from the waist up, put his arms behind him to prop himself up, and looked around. He was lying in the middle of a vast meadow, the unshorn grass and bright yellow and purple flowers swaying to the caress of a warm, gentle breeze. The sky was cloudless, a great azure sea that seemed to stretch out forever.

“Now how the hell did I get here?” he asked aloud. “Come to think of it, where is here?” The sound of his own voice took him by surprise; there was a renewed strength and youthful resonance it had not earlier possessed.

And then he noticed something else – that warm, gentle breeze that caressed the grass and flowers was also caressing his body in a fashion he had not felt for more years than he remembered. Glancing down at himself, he realized with a start that he was as naked as the day he was born. No, he was more than simply naked; he was transformed. Where before he would have seen the frail, wizened shell of a man in his 90s, there now sat a strapping, robust, much younger fellow whom he could not remember ever having been.

He leapt to his feet with a vigor that almost scared him. He held his hands and arms before his eyes, amazed at the power and vitality they now seemed to possess. He rubbed his palms over his face and realized that the wrinkles that had once lined his visage had disappeared. Hell, he even had a full head of hair!

He tried to think of something to say, but for one of the few times he could remember words failed him. The first thing that came to mind – “Holy shit!” – just didn’t seem appropriate somehow. So instead he just laughed and danced around like a child on Christmas morning, marveling at this unexpectedly gracious gift the universe had seen fit to bestow and wondering just what he might have done to deserve it.

He was still dancing about when he thought he caught a glimpse of another man there in the distance, running in his direction with a look of determination etched upon his features. As the stranger drew closer Phil had the feeling that he had seen him somewhere before, but he could not be certain; certainly there was something familiar about him, but it was the kind of vague familiarity that one sometimes feels about someone they only think they might have encountered at some point.

Carrying a broadsword, clad only in a loincloth with a huge battle axe strapped across his back, the stranger sprinted gracefully across the grass and at first did not seem to notice Phil’s presence. In fact, Phil thought at first that he might pass by without seeing him at all. After a moment, however, the stranger slowed and changed direction ever so slightly, approaching Phil with an amused expression. Phil thought that expression may have stemmed from the sight of his own nudity; suddenly self-conscious, he glanced about in hopes of finding some kind of shrub to step behind. There were none.

“Hello, there,” the stranger called out as he came closer. “Are you friend or foe?”

When Phil didn’t answer immediately the stranger cocked his head slightly to one side, his expression darkening slightly. “Well? Which is it?”

“I… well, I don’t know,” Phil finally replied. “That depends on you, I guess. I hope a friend. I can’t imagine that I have any quarrel with someone I’ve just met for the first time.”

The stranger grunted softly in response. “Fair enough,” he said. “Where are you headed?”

Phil looked around again. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I don’t know where I am, or how I got here.” He paused for a moment and wrinkled his forehead in consternation. “To tell the truth, all of a sudden I’m not even sure who I am. I remember lying in my bed at home, feeling very tired and light headed, and I guess I must have drifted off to sleep… then I wake up a few minutes ago stark naked in the middle of nowhere, looking 70 years younger and feeling better than I remember feeling in a good many years. It’s all very… strange.”

A flicker of recognition flashed in the stranger’s eyes, and he grinned. “Yes,” he said softly. “I remember that feeling…”

Something about the stranger’s expression tickled Phil’s memory, and he once again found himself wondering why. After a moment he shrugged and surveyed is surroundings once more. After a moment he mused, “I’m guessing this isn’t Riverworld then, is it?”

“No,” the stranger told him. “It’s not Barsoom, either.”

Then his grin turned into a full-fledged smile and he added, “It’s better.”

Phil whirled round to face the stranger again. “Did you say Barsoom?” The stranger only nodded in response, and then it was Phil’s turn to grin in recognition.

After a moment’s silence the stranger reached out and placed a hand on Phil’s shoulder as a gesture of fellowship. “Stay well then, friend. I hope your voyage is a pleasant one.” With that he turned and started to jog away in the direction he had been going when Phil first spied him.

At first Phil just stood and watched his departure, but before the stranger had gone very far he heard Phil calling after him. “Hey!” Phil cried as he sprinted to catch up. As the stranger stopped and turned to face him, Phil added, “Please, wait just a minute. There’s so much I don’t understand, and something tells me you’re the one who can answer my questions. So if you don’t mind the company, I’d like to come with you.”

The stranger gave the request just a few seconds’ thought. “All right,” he answered. “Here, take this.” He handed his sword to Phil and reached behind him, taking the battle axe in hand. “You’ll need it where we’re headed.”

Phil looked upon the sword and smiled, admiring the way it felt in his hands as he used the weapon to cut a swath through the air in front of him. Then he looked up at his new friend. “Thank you,” he said with a mixture of awe and respect. “By the way, my name’s Phil.”

The stranger smiled again as he reached out to shake Phil’s hand. “I’m Ed,” he answered. “Now let’s be off. There’s a princess to be rescued, and not a moment to waste.”

He took a single step forward before stopping and turning to face Phil again. “But first, let’s see if we can’t find you something to wear.”

Phil returned his smile as the two of them set out across the grassy terrain, toward whatever adventure might lie ahead….

　

(Lovingly dedicated to the memories of Philip José Farmer and Edgar Rice Burroughs)

　

Copyright 2009 by John Allen Small

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