Creation of The "Wold Newton Universe"
Win Scott Eckert first read Philip José Farmer's "fictional biography" Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, and become hooked by the concept of the Wold Newton family. In 1997, he coined the term "Wold Newton Universe" on his website, An Expansion of Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton Universe.
Farmer's original concept of the Wold Newton family was of a literary merging between novels, a crossover between multiple works, linking standout fictional characters into a deliberate family and coherent chronology. Farmer's two fictional "biographies" of the fictional characters Tarzan (Tarzan Alive) and Clark Savage, Jr. (Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life) proposed that actual meteorite which landed in Wold Newton, Yorkshire, England, on December 13, 1795 caused a genetic mutation in the occupants of a passing coach.
Their (fictional) descendants, therefore, became the stalwarts of fantastic fiction. Farmer's initial family trees include such luminaries (and their ancestors and descendants) as Sherlock Holmes, Lord Greystoke, A.J. Raffles, (Conan Doyle's) Professor Challenger, Sir Percy Blakeney, (Poe's) C. Auguste Dupin, Lord Peter Wimsey, Bulldog Drummond and Nero Wolfe; James Bond, Mr Moto, Philip Marlowe, Kilgore Trout, Sam Spade, Professor Moriarty (A.K.A. Captain Nemo), Phileas Fogg, Wells' Time Traveller and Fu Manchu.
Eckert and others expanded upon Farmer's concept of the Wold Newton Family, using the family trees as a central device to expand the fictional universe that the family inhabits, by documenting crossovers between said fictional characters in various media. Thus, the original core, related Wold Newton Family became a Universe, no longer tied to being the relatives, descendants and ancestors of those present at the 1795 Wold Newton meteor strike. (Eckert also expanded the 'main' family tree in 2002.
The presumption from the family trees was that most – if not all – fictional characters could be said to share the same universe. Farmer himself penned a number of crossover fiction stories and novels set in what is now termed the Wold Newton Universe, largely based around the three central pillars of Tarzan, Holmes and Savage, but also incorporating (among others) Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos into the universe. Subsequently, the early history of the WNU has been expanded forwards and backwards in time to incorporate the very early history of Conan the Barbarian (through the works of Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Roy Thomas and others), right through to the far-future exploits of the many characters in the Star Trek universe.
Eckert (and others)'s work in bringing together diverse articles and references by, and from works by, such individuals as Alan Moore, William S. Baring-Gould, Michael Moorcock, Kim Newman, John Pearson and Jess Nevins have expanded the idea. With the blessing and approval of P.J. Farmer, the primary Wold Newton website features details on various fictional biographies (including those of Biggles and John Steed); details on Farmer's own contributions to the WNU and a comprehensive chronology of the WNU from "Prehistory" to the future.
Read more about this topic: Win Scott Eckert
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