Weekly Wikipedia Find: The Wold Newton Universe

It must be literature week here at The Genius Defines. Just kill me now, eh? Am I right, guys? Am I right or am I right?

The Wold Newton Universe takes noted science fiction author Philip José Farmer's notion that famous literary characters were all members of the same bloodline (the Wold Newton Family) and runs with it. This bloodline includes Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Doc Savage, Solomon Kane, The Time Traveller, Allan Quatermain, Fu Manchu, Philip Marlowe, James Bond, etc. (OMG tag heaven!!1!). Of course, this is no ordinary bloodline to include all these exceptional individuals. Rather, it has been effected by the meteorite that struck the village of Wold Newton in 1795. That's the real-life meteorite which struck the real-life village of Wold Newton in the real-life 1795. The town's descendants then are gifted with extra endowed with intelligence and strength becoming of their fictional statures. Also, a community does not make a bloodline.

Onto the actual expansion of this idea is the sense that these now connected characters can infinitely extracted upon and within each other, looping and looping, so that 90% of all fiction (EVAR!) takes place in Farmer's mind as he shakes a snow globe. It's intertextuality, people; when will you learn (I might remind you that Spock is a descendant of Sherlock Holmes).

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