Tales of the Wold Newton Universe Read Free Page A

Portraits of a Trickster, Michael Croteau, ed., Meteor House, 2012.
    “The Last of the Guaranys” by Octavio Aragão & Carlos Orsi*
    “The Wild Huntsman” by Win Scott Eckert*
    Exiles of Kho: A Tale of Lost Khokarsa by Christopher Paul Carey, Meteor House, 2012.
    The Scarlet Jaguar , a Pat Wildman adventure by Win Scott Eckert, Meteor House, 2013.
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    Philip José Farmer’s novels of the Nine, A Feast Unknown (1969), Lord of the Trees (1970), and The Mad Goblin (1970) (all part of Titan Books’ Wold Newton series under the subheading “Secrets of the Nine—Parallel Universe”), present an interesting conundrum for followers of Farmer’s Wold Newton mythos, and may have also added to the impression among some readers that the Wold Newton biographies, novels, and stories are works of fiction. The books recount the ongoing battle of the ape-man Lord Grandrith and the man of bronze Doc Caliban against the Nine, a secret cabal of immortals bent on amassing power and manipulating the course of world events.
    These novels are sourced from the memoirs of Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban, and cover the exploits of Grandrith and Caliban. Grandrith is also a jungle lord, while Caliban is also a man of bronze. However, unlike cousins Lord Greystoke and Doc Wildman (the real name of the man whose exploits were published in pulp novels under the fictional name “Doc Savage”), Grandrith and Caliban are half-brothers. They share a common history that is not based on the Wold Newton meteor strike. One widely accepted explanation for the discrepancy is that Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban exist in a universe that is parallel, but very similar, to the Wold Newton Universe. As described in Win Scott Eckert’s afterword to Titan Books’ new edition of The Mad Goblin (“A Feast Revealed: A Chronology of Major Events Pertinent to Philip José Farmer’s Secrets of the Nine Series”), the alternate universe shares a common past with the Wold Newton Universe, but diverged from it circa 26,000 B.C .
    The parallel universe theory is supported by Farmer’s fragment of a fourth Nine novel, The Monster on Hold . The fragment was introduced by Farmer at the 1983 World Fantasy Convention, and was published in the convention program. 10 During a series of adventures in which Doc Caliban continues to battle the forces of the Nine, he “begins to suffer from a recurring nightmare and has dreams alternating with these in which he sees himself or somebody like himself. However, this man, whom he calls The Other, also at times in Caliban’s dreams seems to be dreaming of Caliban.”
    Later, when Caliban has descended below the surface into a labyrinthine series of miles-deep caverns in search of the extra-dimensional entity known as Shrassk, a being that had been invoked and then imprisoned by the Nine in the eighteenth century, Caliban has another vision of The Other: “The Other was standing at the entrance to a cave. He was smiling and holding up one huge bronze-skinned hand, two fingers forming a V.”
    “One huge bronze-skinned hand.”
    The Other is Doc Wildman, communicating to Caliban across the dimensional void.
    The presence of Doc Wildman in the caverns deep beneath New England, at the gate held open by the Shrassk entity, as observed by Doc Caliban across the dimensional nexus, strongly indicates that there also exists a secret organization of the Nine in Farmer’s universe (i.e., Wildman and Greystoke’s dimension, known as the Wold Newton Universe). Since the two universes diverged circa 26,000 B.C ., the Nine in each universe have some immortal members in common, members who were alive when the universes divided.
    The present volume’s “The Wild Huntsman” brings the two universes back together.
    * * *
    Win Scott Eckert is the coauthor with Philip José Farmer of the Wold Newton novel The Evil in Pemberley House, about Patricia Wildman, the daughter of a certain bronze-skinned pulp hero. Pat Wildman’s adventures