The Wold Newton Universe

November 24, 2002 3:50 PM

Devoted to late nineteenth century adventure novels? Irredeemably neurotic? For you, there is Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton universe, in which such extraordinary gentlemen as Dracula and Sherlock Holmes are related through complex genealogies dating back to a peculiar meteorological event in the British countryside. This is meta-nerdiness.
posted by Hildago (7 comments total)

I don't want to break those Geocities and AOL links, but I thought they were cool enough to include. Hopefully traffic will be low enough today that it won't matter.
posted by Hildago at 3:52 PM on November 24, 2002

Sounds fantastic - I love Victoriana and Philip Jose Farmer, so this sounds right up my alley. Thanks for the 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' link; I buys me comix in book form, so I can't wait until the second series is published as a compendium. The first one was absolutely brilliant - of course, it's Alan Moore, so that goes without saying.
posted by GriffX at 4:36 PM on November 24, 2002

Don't forget the French and the Indian branches of the family tree or the area where it started.

well, I'm a meta-nerd by proxy: a Doc Savage fan
posted by ?! at 4:39 PM on November 24, 2002

GriffX: You may enjoy these annotations of the first series (and the existing parts of the second).
posted by Hildago at 5:17 PM on November 24, 2002

Wold Newton is great fun and tends to be a central clearinghouse for all sorts of entertaining metafiction nuttiness as fans extend the Wold bloodlines down all kinds of crazy roads. My favorite: the true history of the Scooby Doo gang.

As for metafiction novels, just last week I reread one of my favorites, Silverlock by John Myers Myers. While I wait for the next issue of LoEG2, I plan on dipping into another classic--a novel of historical figures meeting fictional characters written in the nineteenth century--John Kendrick Bangs' A Houseboat on the Styx. Good reads, both.
posted by Inkslinger at 9:27 PM on November 24, 2002

The Wold Newton stories can be viewed as a parody of Novell's ACME tutorials for Netware 5. To demonstrate VPN strategies, Sherlock Holmes, Mahatma Ghandi, Florence Nightengale, Wyatt Earp and no less than Robin of Sherwood were employed as network sysadmins.

As the Novell guides could be seen as a bow toward Farmer's Riverworld saga, the similarities between the Wold lineage and ACME could be construed as a fitting return.
posted by Smart Dalek at 9:00 AM on November 25, 2002

A day and several hundred clicks into the World Newton Universe later, I'd like to say Thanks for the links!
posted by Trik at 12:07 PM on November 25, 2002