Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but I tried a search and came up nilch. I just started reading Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Deathcloud Peril, which has the most intriguing premise. Set in 1939, Lester Dent (the creator of Doc Savage) and Walter Gibson (the creator of The Shadow), with a young L. Ron Hubbard in tow, investigate the "murder" of H.P. Lovecraft, which gets them involved in a pulp adventure straight out of their books.
Kind of a spiritual cousin to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I stumbled upon this after I found an anthology of The Spider: Master of Men short stories at the library. Remembering the name, I looked up the character on wikipedia and got caught up in a history I never even knew.
Apparently an author named Philip Jose Farmer wrote "autobiographies" of Tarzan and Doc Savage in the 70s, and created a connected universe called the Wold Newton family. From wikipedia...
'is a literary concept derived from a form of crossover fiction developed by the science fiction writer Philip José Farmer. Farmer suggested in two fictional "biographies" of fictional characters (Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life), that the (real) meteorite which fell in Wold Newton, Yorkshire, England, on December 13, 1795, was radioactive and caused genetic mutations in the occupants of a passing coach. Many of their descendants were thus endowed with extremely high intelligence and strength, as well as an exceptional capacity and drive to perform good, or, as the case may be, evil deeds. The progeny of these travellers were purported to have been the real-life originals of fictionalised characters, both heroic and villainous, over the last few hundred years, such as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Doc Savage, and Lord Peter Wimsey.
Other popular characters that Philip José Farmer concluded were members of the Wold Newton mutant family include: Solomon Kane; Captain Blood; The Scarlet Pimpernel; Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty; Phileas Fogg; The Time Traveller (main character of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells); Allan Quatermain; A.J. Raffles; Professor Challenger; Richard Hannay; Bulldog Drummond; the evil Fu Manchu and his adversary, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; G-8; The Shadow; Sam Spade; Doc Savage's cousin Patricia Savage, and one of his five assistants, Monk Mayfair; The Spider; Nero Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; Travis McGee; Monsieur Lecoq; and Arsène Lupin.'
Amazing. This of course led to Win Scott Eckert, another author that started a website to pick up (maybe to an obsessive degree) where Farmer left off. He also served as a consultant for that inane lawsuit against Alan Moore after the League of Extraordinary Gentleman movie was accused of ripping off an earlier screenplay titled Cast of Characters.
How had I not heard about this before?
Kind of a spiritual cousin to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I stumbled upon this after I found an anthology of The Spider: Master of Men short stories at the library. Remembering the name, I looked up the character on wikipedia and got caught up in a history I never even knew.
Apparently an author named Philip Jose Farmer wrote "autobiographies" of Tarzan and Doc Savage in the 70s, and created a connected universe called the Wold Newton family. From wikipedia...
'is a literary concept derived from a form of crossover fiction developed by the science fiction writer Philip José Farmer. Farmer suggested in two fictional "biographies" of fictional characters (Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life), that the (real) meteorite which fell in Wold Newton, Yorkshire, England, on December 13, 1795, was radioactive and caused genetic mutations in the occupants of a passing coach. Many of their descendants were thus endowed with extremely high intelligence and strength, as well as an exceptional capacity and drive to perform good, or, as the case may be, evil deeds. The progeny of these travellers were purported to have been the real-life originals of fictionalised characters, both heroic and villainous, over the last few hundred years, such as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Doc Savage, and Lord Peter Wimsey.
Other popular characters that Philip José Farmer concluded were members of the Wold Newton mutant family include: Solomon Kane; Captain Blood; The Scarlet Pimpernel; Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty; Phileas Fogg; The Time Traveller (main character of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells); Allan Quatermain; A.J. Raffles; Professor Challenger; Richard Hannay; Bulldog Drummond; the evil Fu Manchu and his adversary, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; G-8; The Shadow; Sam Spade; Doc Savage's cousin Patricia Savage, and one of his five assistants, Monk Mayfair; The Spider; Nero Wolfe; Mr. Moto; The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Lew Archer; Travis McGee; Monsieur Lecoq; and Arsène Lupin.'
Amazing. This of course led to Win Scott Eckert, another author that started a website to pick up (maybe to an obsessive degree) where Farmer left off. He also served as a consultant for that inane lawsuit against Alan Moore after the League of Extraordinary Gentleman movie was accused of ripping off an earlier screenplay titled Cast of Characters.
How had I not heard about this before?
