Tales of the Wold Newton Universe Read online

  ALSO FROM TITAN BOOKS

  CLASSIC NOVELS FROM

  PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  WOLD NEWTON SERIES

  The Other Log of Phileas Fogg

  PREHISTORY

  Time’s Last Gift

  Hadon of Ancient Opar

  SECRETS OF THE NINE: PARALLEL UNIVERSE

  A Feast Unknown

  Lord of the Trees

  The Mad Goblin

  GRAND MASTER SERIES

  Lord Tyger

  Flesh

  The Wind Whales of Ishmael

  Venus on the Half-Shell (coming soon)

  PHILIP

  JOSÉ

  FARMER

  TALES OF

  THE WOLD NEWTON

  UNIVERSE

  EDITED BY WIN SCOTT ECKERT AND CHRISTOPHER PAUL CAREY

  TITAN BOOKS

  TALES OF THE WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781163047

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781163054

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: October 2013

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2013 by Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  “The Wold Newton Tales of Philip José Farmer” and story introductions copyright © 2013 by Win Scott Eckert and Christopher Paul Carey. All rights reserved. “The Problem of the Sore Bridge—Among Others” by Philip José Farmer copyright © 1975, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  “A Scarletin Study” by Philip José Farmer copyright © 1975, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  “The Doge Whose Bark Was Worse Than His Bight” by Philip José Farmer copyright © 1976, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved. “Skinburn” by Philip José Farmer copyright © 1972, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  “The Freshman” by Philip José Farmer copyright © 1979, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  “After King Kong Fell” by Philip José Farmer copyright © 1973, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  “Kwasin and the Bear God” by Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey copyright © 2011, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved. “Into Time’s Abyss” by John Allen Small copyright © 2011, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  “The Last of the Guaranys” by Octavio Aragão and Carlos Orsi copyright © 2012, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  “The Wild Huntsman” by Win Scott Eckert copyright © 2012, 2013 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  TALES OF

  THE WOLD NEWTON

  UNIVERSE

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE WOLD NEWTON TALES OF PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  by Win Scott Eckert and Christopher Paul Carey

  THE GREAT DETECTIVE AND OTHERS

  THE PROBLEM OF THE SORE BRIDGE—AMONG OTHERS

  by Harry Manders, edited by Philip José Farmer

  A SCARLETIN STUDY

  by Jonathan Swift Somers III, edited by Philip José Farmer

  THE DOGE WHOSE BARQUE WAS WORSE THAN HIS BIGHT

  by Jonathan Swift Somers III, edited by Philip José Farmer

  PULP INSPIRATIONS

  SKINBURN

  by Philip José Farmer

  THE FRESHMAN

  by Philip José Farmer

  AFTER KING KONG FELL

  by Philip José Farmer

  WOLD NEWTON PREHISTORY: THE KHOKARSA SERIES

  KWASIN AND THE BEAR GOD

  by Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey

  WOLD NEWTON PREHISTORY: JOHN GRIBARDSUN & TIME’S LAST GIFT

  INTO TIME’S ABYSS

  by John Allen Small

  THE LAST OF THE GUARANYS

  by Octavio Aragão and Carlos Orsi

  WOLD NEWTON ORIGINS/SECRETS OF THE NINE

  THE WILD HUNTSMAN

  by Win Scott Eckert

  THE WOLD NEWTON TALES OF PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  INTRODUCTION BY WIN SCOTT ECKERT AND CHRISTOPHER PAUL CAREY

  What precisely makes a tale a Wold Newton tale?

  In short, a Wold Newton tale must involve a character whom Philip José Farmer identified as a member of the Wold Newton Family, and/or it must add to our knowledge of the secret history that Farmer uncovered, which has come to be known as the “Wold Newton Universe.” It can also be a crossover story, but that is not required.

  In recent years, generic crossover stories have come to be mistakenly referred to as “Wold Newton” tales. A mere crossover is not enough.

  A few examples are likely in order.

  Farmer’s The Peerless Peer (reissued by Titan Books in 2011) is an unabashed Wold Newton Universe novel. The two leads, Sherlock Holmes and Lord Greystoke, are Wold Newton Family members. It is also, obviously, a crossover.

  Farmer’s short story “Skinburn,” included in the present volume, features the son of a man Farmer identified as a Wold Newton Family member. Since the son is also a Wold Newton Family member, “Skinburn” is a Wold Newton tale, although it does not feature any crossovers.

  “The Freshman,” another short tale in this volume, has a crossover between a descendant of a character seen in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Lord Greystoke stories, and H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. Since the continuity of the Greystoke tales is a subset of the larger Wold Newton Universe, and since Farmer also discovered that the Cthulhu mythos tales take place in the wider Wold Newton secret history (he noted this in “The Fabulous Family Tree of Doc Savage: Another Excursion into Creative Mythography” in his biography Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life [1973]), “The Freshman” is a Wold Newton Universe story.

  In contrast, a comic-book crossover between Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man and Red Sonja (Marvel Team-Up #79, March 1979) is not a Wold Newton tale. Via a chain of crossovers links, the story can be shown to take place in a “Crossover Universe” that encompasses the Wold Newton Universe (Farmer included Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane as an ancestor of the Wold Newton Family, and the Red Sonja character is a variant of a Howard heroine), but it is not, in and of itself, a Wold Newton story.1

  To make matters even more complicated, Cay Van Ash’s authorized Fu Manchu novel, Ten Years Beyond Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Matches Wits With the Diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu, features a crossover match-up between two prominent Wold Newton Family members, the Great Detective and the Devil Doctor. One might argue that this qualifies as a Wold Newton novel, but it’s also instructive to remember that although Van Ash was privy to Dr. Petrie’s notes, which formed the basis of this novel, he was not aware of the wider “secret history” events that form the basis of the Wol
d Newton Universe continuity.

  With all this in mind, a primer on Farmer’s discoveries regarding the Wold Newton Family is in order.

  The Wold Newton Family takes its name from the cosmic event that spawned it. On December 13, 1795, at 3:00 P.M., a meteor came plunging to the Earth, landing near the English village of Wold Newton. The impact site became part of the local folklore in the countryside of the Yorkshire Wolds in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Pieces of the Wold Cottage meteorite2 are held in the Natural History Museum in London, and in 1799, Edward Topham built a brick monument to commemorate the event:

  HERE

  ON THIS SPOT, DECR 13TH, 1795

  FELL FROM THE ATMOSPHERE

  AN EXTRAORDINARY STONE

  IN BREADTH 28 INCHES

  IN LENGTH 30 INCHES

  AND

  WHOSE WEIGHT WAS 56 POUNDS

  THIS COLUMN

  IN MEMORY OF IT

  WAS ERECTED BY

  EDWARD TOPHAM

  1799

  History also records that several people observed the object in the sky. “Topham’s shepherd was within 150 yards of the impact and a farmhand named John Shipley was so near that he was forcibly struck by mud and earth as the falling meteorite burrowed into the ground.”3 A contemporaneous account observes that:

  In the afternoon of the 13th of December, 1795, near the Wold Cottage, noises were heard in the air, by various persons, like the report of a pistol; or of guns at a distance at sea; though there was neither any thunder or lightning at the time:—two distinct concussions of the earth were said to be perceived:—and an hissing noise, was also affirmed to be heard by other persons, as of something passing through the air;—and a labouring man plainly saw (as we are told) that something was so passing; and beheld a stone, as it seemed, at last, (about ten yards, or thirty feet, distant from the ground) descending, and striking into the ground, which flew up all about him: and in falling, sparks of fire, seemed to fly from it.

  Afterwards he went to the place, in company with others; who had witnessed part of the phænomena, and dug the stone up from the place, where it was buried about twenty-one inches deep.

  It smelt, (as it is said,) very strongly of sulphur, when it was dug up: and was even warm, and smoked:—it was found to be thirty inches in length, and twenty-eight and a half inches in breadth. And it weighed fifty-six pounds.

  —Edward King, ESQ. F.R.S. and F.A.S, Remarks Concerning Stones Said To Have Fallen from the Clouds, Both in These Days, and in Ancient Times (1796)

  What many historians fail to adequately record is the presence of eighteen other persons in the immediate vicinity at the time of the Wold Newton meteor strike. We know about these eighteen people through the extraordinary and singular work of one historian. This historian, in fact, engaged in a rather in-depth treatment of the subject in two scholarly biographical tomes. However, despite the fact that this historian’s biographies are often appropriately shelved in the Biography section of libraries, his revelations are generally regarded as fictional.

  The historian to whom we refer, of course, is Philip José Farmer, and the biographies of which we speak are Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (1972) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973). In the course of his researches into the life of Lord Greystoke, Farmer extensively traced the jungle lord’s ancestry, and came to discover the ape-man was closely related to several other august historical personages. The nexus of this relationship was the Wold Cottage meteor strike in 1795.

  As Farmer uncovered, seven couples and their coachmen “were riding in two coaches past Wold Newton, Yorkshire... A meteorite struck only twenty yards from the two coaches... The bright light and heat and thunderous roar of the meteorite blinded and terrorized the passengers, coachmen, and horses. They never guessed, being ignorant of ionization, that the fallen star had affected them and their unborn.” (Tarzan Alive, Addendum 2, pp. 247-248.)

  The eighteen present were:4

  COACH PASSENGERS (14)

  JOHN CLAYTON, 3rd Duke of Greystoke, and his wife, ALICIA RUTHERFORD - ancestors of the jungle lord

  SIR PERCY BLAKENEY, and his (second) wife, ALICE CLARKE RAFFLES - Blakeney is from Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and sequels

  FITZWILLIAM DARCY, and his wife, ELIZABETH BENNET - from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

  GEORGE EDWARD RUTHERFORD (THE 11TH BARON TENNINGTON), and his wife, ELIZABETH CAVENDISH - ancestors of Professor George Edward Challenger, from The Lost World by Edward Malone, edited for publication by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  HONORÉ DELAGARDIE, and his wife, PHILIPPA DRUMMOND - ancestors of Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond from H. C. “Sapper” McNeile’s (and later Gerard Fairlies) novels

  DR. SIGER HOLMES, and his wife, VIOLET CLARKE - ancestors of Sherlock Holmes, from the stories and novels by John H. Watson, M.D., edited for publication by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  SIR HUGH DRUMMOND, and his wife, LADY GEORGIA DEWHURST - ancestors of Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond from H. C. “Sapper” McNeile’s (and later Gerard Fairlies) novels

  COACHMEN (4)

  LOUIS LUPIN - ancestor of Arsène Lupin, from novels and stories by Maurice Leblanc

  ALBERT LECOQ - ancestor of Monsieur Lecoq, from the novels by Émile Gaboriau

  ALBERT BLAKE - ancestor of Sexton Blake, from the stories by Harry Blythe and countless others

  1 UNNAMED by Farmer

  The meteor’s ionized radiation caused a genetic mutation in those present, endowing many of their descendants with extremely high intelligence and strength. As Farmer stated, the meteor strike was “the single cause of this nova of genetic splendor, this outburst of great detectives, scientists, and explorers of exotic worlds, this last efflorescence of true heroes in an otherwise degenerate age.”5 (Tarzan Alive, Addendum 2, pp.230-231.)

  In addition to the jungle lord and the man of bronze, Farmer concluded that influential people whose lives were chronicled in popular literature were part of the Wold Newton Family, including Solomon Kane (a pre-meteor strike ancestor); Captain Blood (a pre-meteor strike ancestor); The Scarlet Pimpernel (present at meteor strike); Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet (present at meteor strike); Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Phileas Fogg; Monsieur Lecoq; The Time Traveller; Allan Quatermain; A. J. Raffles; Professor Challenger; Arsène Lupin; Bulldog Drummond and his archenemy, Carl Peterson; the evil Fu Manchu and his adversary, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; Sir Richard Hannay; G-8; Lord Peter Wimsey; The Shadow; Sam Spade; Doc Savage’s friend and associate Monk Mayfair, his cousin Pat Savage, and his daughter Patricia Wildman; The Spider; Nero Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; Travis McGee; and many more.

  Farmer’s researches, uncovering the cosmic explanation for the almost superhuman nature and abilities of these amazing men and women, heroes and villains, are meticulous, well-sourced, and representative of all his historical endeavors. He not only studied the jungle lord’s life, but he actually met and interviewed the ape-man himself,6 after spending uncounted hours poring over Burke’s Peerage to uncover his real name, titles, arms, and forebears. He applied a similar depth of focus when researching the life of Doc Savage, discovering Doc’s real name, ancestors, and current relatives, as well as the family arms.

  After writing the two biographies, Farmer continued to chronicle previously unrevealed exploits of Wold Newton Family members in novels and short stories; often these tales have been mistaken for fiction, but they are entirely consistent with the information he had already uncovered, and many are similarly sourced from newly discovered, and unpublished, manuscripts and diaries.

  Among the first of these was The Adventure of the Peerless Peer, edited by Farmer in 1974 from Dr. John H. Watson’s unpublished manuscript. Another, The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, was first published in 1973 (reissued by Titan Books in 2012), and derived from Phileas Fogg’s secret notes.

  Although
Farmer’s Time’s Last Gift (1972; revised 1977) and the related Khokarsa trilogy—Hadon of Ancient Opar7 (1974), Flight to Opar (1976), and The Song of Kwasin (2012; coauthored with Christopher Paul Carey)—are set in prehistoric times, they also recount the real-life histories of Wold Newton Family members. This might at first seem to be a contradiction, since the Wold Cottage meteor strike that gave rise to the Wold Newton Family occurred in 1795 A.D. whereas the events of Time’s Last Gift and the Khokarsa trilogy take place circa 12,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. respectively.

  The answer to this seeming paradox, however, may be found in Time’s Last Gift. In that novel, a man named John Gribardsun travels back in time as a member of an anthropological expedition from the year 2070 A.D. to 12,000 B.C. He appears in Hadon of Ancient Opar under the identity of Sahhindar, the Gray-Eyed Archer God, also known as the god of plants, bronze, and Time. As a member of the Wold Newton Family, Gribardsun introduced the mutated genes of his lineage to the prehistoric peoples of Khokarsa and other lands, and since both Hadon of Opar and Kwasin of Dythbeth—the heroes of the Khokarsa trilogy—can count him as an ancestor, this means they themselves are both members of the Wold Newton Family, despite having been born 12,000 years before the meteor fell to Earth near Wold Newton, Yorkshire in December 1795.

  And thus the Wold Newton Family enters prehistory.

  But who exactly is John Gribardsun? Farmer leaves plenty of clues to his true identity in Time’s Last Gift, although such hints are neither overbearing nor do they distract from the novel’s compelling narrative, and the reader should not feel embarrassed at having missed them. In fact, the author buried them deep for a reason. He could not risk the world knowing the truth, and, although he had come into an arrangement with “Gribardsun” to publish his memoirs in the guise of fiction, Farmer was honor-bound by the agreement to remain within certain very well-defined parameters. Gribardsun had to ensure that the author would not reveal clues that might endanger him or his loved ones. For this reason, Farmer withheld publication of the novel’s epilogue until the revised edition of Time’s Last Gift appeared in 1977, by which time Gribardsun must have felt he had slipped far enough off the radar that no one could conceivably follow the clues to him or his family. This newly appended epilogue (also included in the Titan Books edition) revealed that the jungle lord whom Farmer called Gribardsun was married to a beautiful blonde named Jane. The reader should also consider the account in that novel of the Duke of Pemberley, the British peer who was born in 1872 and “raised in indeterminate circumstances” in the jungles of West Africa, and who one member of the time travel expedition to 12,000 B.C. believes is one and the same as John Gribardsun. Incidentally, the 1872 birthdate serves as both a red herring and a clue to Gribardsun’s identity, as readers of Farmer’s Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke are well aware.