Tales of the Wold Newton Universe

ALSO FROM TITAN BOOKS

CLASSIC NOVELS FROM

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)

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

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

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 Wold 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 meteorite
²
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, DEC
^R
13
^TH
, 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