What links Sherlock Holmes, Captain Nemo, Doc Savage, Tarzan, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and pretty much any fictional character of the past 200 years whose adventures could be filed under "thumping good reads", with a real-life meteor strike in a sleepy hamlet not far from the East Yorkshire coast?
The answer is an ambitious attempt to create a logical universe in which all those fictional heroes could have lived and interacted by the late author Philip José Farmer which has proved to be Nerdvana for that particular sort of reader who simply loves the satisfaction to be had from continuity.
Farmer's Wold Newton "family" of characters was first posited in his 1972 fictional biography of Lord Greystoke, Tarzan Alive. He took as his jumping off point the impact of a meteorite in the small village of Wold Newton in December 1795.
What, thought Farmer quite reasonably, if that meteorite was formed of highly radioactive material? And what if those near the impact site suffered genetic mutations to their DNA because of the exposure? And what if the children they subsequently sired received, by dint of these mutated genes, much greater strength and/or intelligence than the mere mortals around them?
In Tarzan Alive and its companion volume, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, Farmer drew painstaking family trees linking pretty much everybody who's anybody in fiction from the early 19th century right up to the pulp era to the Wold Newton meteor.
It's a similar concept to that employed by Alan Moore in his much later graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, except that unlike Moore's throwing together of classic fictional characters by circumstance or hidden agency, Farmer created a defining moment that not only explained their "abilities" - Holmes's superior powers of deduction, Tarzan's feats of physical prowess, Doc Savage's strength and physical perfection – but enabled them to cross into each others' lives.
The age of the internet, of course, has allowed the Wold Newton universe to expand far beyond its creator's imaginings. A community already accepting of the appropriation of existing characters into new works by way of fan and slash fiction rejoiced at the opportunity to play with literary toys in a ready-made universe.
Fan Win Scott Eckhart has set up an exhaustive (and exhausting) Wold Newton website which not only details Farmer's original vision but draws together the disparate internet attempts to expand and widen the Wold Newton universe – heading into the past to link Conan the Barbarian and Robin Hood (though how characters who predate the meteorite strike can descend from those who were present requires perhaps a greater leap of faith than Farmer's initial scheme) and even the crew of the USS Enterprise.
Eckhart's devotion to the Wold Newton cause means that Farmer's death last year does not signal the end of the experiment … in September this year Subterranean Press publish a collaboration between Farmer and Eckhart in The Evil in Pemberley House … which nicely puts Jane Austen's canon firmly in the Newton Wold universe.
It takes a special type of geek to enjoy this, and might seem as relevant to some as wondering what would happen if the coppers from The Bill and the firemen from London's Burning attended an incident in Albert Square which resulted in several casualties being taken to Holby City hospital. But once you get immersed in the connections drawn up by Farmer and his successors in the often fiendish family trees, it does offer a rather satisfying diversion for an hour or two.
