Wold Newton Family - The Wold Newton Universe

The Wold Newton Universe

The Wold Newton Universe (or WNU) is a term coined by Win Scott Eckert to denote an expansion of Philip José Farmer's original Wold Newton Family concept (introduced in Tarzan Alive (1972)). Eckert introduced the term in 1997 on his website, An Expansion of Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton Universe. Eckert uses Farmer's concept of the Wold Newton Family as a unifying device, and expands the universe that the Wold Newton Family inhabits by documenting crossovers between fictional characters from various media and genres. Characters incorporated into the WNU are not necessarily blood relatives, descendants, or ancestors of those present at the 1795 Wold Newton meteor strike, but they all exist in the same shared fictional universe. Farmer himself penned a number of crossover fiction stories and novels set in what is now termed the Wold Newton Universe; not all characters in Farmer's Wold Newton fiction are core members of the Wold Newton Family, but all are linked into the larger WNU via connections with Farmer's primary Wold Newton Family works, Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.

Eckert and other "post-Farmerian" writers (denoting authors working with or in a similar vein as Eckert, who are admirers of Farmer's Wold Newton biographies and fiction) have – through crossovers documented in Eckert's massive online Crossover Chronology (published in book form by Black Coat Press in two volumes in 2010 as Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World), and through parascholarly articles such as those appearing on the various WNU-themed websites online; Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton Universe (edited by Win Scott Eckert, MonkeyBrain Books, 2005, a 2007 Locus Award finalist ) and in various issues of the pro-zine dedicated to and authorized by Farmer, Farmerphile: The Magazine of Philip José Farmer (published by Michael Croteau, webmaster of the Official Philip José Farmer Home Page ) – brought numerous further fictional characters into the WNU. These characters have appeared in literary fiction – including penny dreadfuls, pulp comics, Victorian, Romanticism and Renaissance literature, steampunk, Gothic novels, fairy tales, mythology and folklore – as well as in film, television programs, comic book series and graphic novels, radio shows, and even video games.

Many post-Farmerian "parascholars" have attempted to expand the WNU to include characters of their liking into the WNU, and often into the Wold Newton family proper. These attempts have included efforts to fit in comic book superheroes and supervillains, whose published exploits, by their very nature, often prove difficult to reconcile with Farmer's original framework. Therefore, in order for aspects of larger fictional universes to adhere to certain conditions of the overall continuity and even believability of the WNU (whose root conceit has always been that characters the world knows as fictional actually lived, or are yet living, and that their adventures are based on true events embroidered by the genre authors who serve as their "biographers"), certain accounts of the characters' lives that overly strain suspension of disbelief are often labeled as "distortion" of actual events, or dismissed as complete fabrication.