PHILIP JOSE FARMER AND THE WOLD NEWTON FAMILY, Continued

The establishment of a genre mixing historical people with fictional characters can be traced at least to the John Kendrick Bangs 1897 novel Persuit of the House-Boat (in which Sherlock Holmes tracks down Captain Kidd) and John Myers Myers's novel Silverlock, 1949, with a cast of dozens of characters from history, literature and mythology. The establishment of a Modern Mythology derived from original archetypes of nineteenth and twentieth-century culture begins with William S. Baring-Gould's fictional biography, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective (1962).

Left: Bramhall House edition, 1962. Right: Front end-paper and front-fly from Farmer's Tarzan Alive, published by Doubleday in 1972.

Taking this concept further, Philip Jose Farmer created the Wold Newton family, a genealogical family tree that includes many fictional characters and historical figures. Farmer's "family" originated after a radioactive meteor actually crashed in Wold Newton, England, in 1795. In Farmer's extrapolation of this event, the radiation generated a genetic mutation in people near the crash, endowing many of their descendants with extremely enhanced powers of intelligence, strength, and the capacity to drive world events for good or evil.

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