ERBzine 1484: Readers' Forum (original) (raw)

To The Editors of ERBzine:

I read with great interest Den Valdron's recent article entitled "H.G. WELLS' BARSOOM!" which dealt with how certain writers have endeavored to make the Martian invaders of Wells' classic novel compatible with Edgar Rice Burroughs' epic tales of Barsoomian derring-do. Having been a fan of both Wells and ERB since the third grade, I found his article to be quite good in general, informative and for the most part entertaining.

However, there was one aspect of Mr. Valdron's essay which, quite frankly, bothered me. I refer to the following paragraph that appears near the beginning of the article in question:

"Further, fans and theorists, including the Wold Newton people, have written extensively of the mixing and matching of the worlds. Personally, I tend to take the Wold Newton stuff with a grain of salt, those people have too strong a tendency to discard inconvenient facts and invent imaginary facts to make their theories fit."

Before I respond, a word of explanation is in order. I have already stated that I have long been a fan of Burroughs and Wells; I readily admit to also being a fan for many years of Philip Jose Farmer's works regarding what some have come to call the "Wold Newton Universe." (I myself prefer the term "Wold Newton Mythos," but that is a topic for another time.) I became introduced to Farmer's concept at the age of 12 - some 30 years ago now, I am somewhat pained to suddenly realize - and was intrigued by the imaginative tapestry which Farmer had weaved; I rather liked the idea that so many of the literary characters to whom my parents had introduced me over the years might actually exist within a single unified mythology.

Of course this was not a concept that Farmer created; as he himself has acknowledged, Farmer was simply building upon ideas originally set forth by the likes of William S. Baring-Gould in his scholarly works concerning Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. In doing so Farmer no doubt introduced more than a few readers to characters and works they might otherwise have never even heard of, let alone sought out, and (like Wells, Burroughs and so many others before him) ignited a spark in the collective imagination of more than one generation of fans - some of whom have endeavored to further build upon the foundation which Baring-Gould, Farmer and others have laid.

As a professional writer myself, I have had the opportunity to make my own (admittedly insignificant) contributions to this further expansion of Farmer's concepts. It has been an enjoyable experience, one which I have come to treasure both at a professional and personal level. But for me it is a hobby, a diversion - a game I play every now and then to help relieve the tensions of my day-to-day routine. (I am by trade a newspaper reporter, which according to several studies I have come across ranks high upon the list of most stressful occupations - which may explain why so may reporters tend to become alcoholics. But where many reporters tend to drink a lot, I prefer to read and write about my favorite childhood heroes - it's far less expensive in the long run, and not nearly so hard on my liver.)

And unlike, say, checkers or Twister, it is a game without any hard and fast rules; gather any 10 such Wold Newton devotees in a room together, and you're likely to hear 10 different explanations of what characters and works should or should not be included in the Mythos and why. And each argument will be equally as valid as the others, when considered from each individual's point of view.

That is part of what bothered me about Mr. Valdron's statement: his indiscriminately painting of all devotees of the Wold Newton concept with such a broad brush. Labeling all fans of any fictional series or concept as "those people" brings to mind the unfortunate stereotypical image of the "fanboy" (to use the derogatory term originally coined to identify a certain type of comic book fan) or of "Trekkies," labels which generally are used with derision and disdain by those who don't happen to share these fans' particular passion. Such labels and others like them are as inaccurate as they are unkind, as I'm sure a great many fans of both "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" will gladly attest.

(For the record, I am also a fan of both "Star Wars" and "Star Trek." However, I have never attended a George Lucas film dressed as Luke Skywalker and brandishing a lightsaber. And I am certainly no "Trekkie," or "Trekker," or whatever term is currently in vogue among those whose behavior gave rise to such stereotypes in the first place; in fact, I was once asked to leave a convention hall full of some of the more rabid "Trek" fans because I dared to suggest publicly that the reason the Klingons from the original TV series looked different than those seen in the films and subsequent TV spin-offs was because the later productions had more money in their budgets for creative make-up appliances. If there is anything more disconcerting than to be regarded as being odd by a group of people wearing rubber Spock ears, it would have to be finding yourself being chased out of a room with those rubber Spock ears bouncing off your back.)

I have referred to my own interest in the Wold Newton Mythos as a game or diversion; this is not meant to belittle the Wold Newton concept in any way, and I hope that others do not read such intent into my comments. Indeed, I happen to share the view of a number of friends and colleagues who consider the study and expansion of Farmer's concepts to be a legitimate field of literary scholarship; what separates me from such students of this field is not lesser interest on my part, but rather my comparative lack of adequate time or resources.

I mention this because it occurs to me that if attaching a label to all fans of a particular science fiction series due to the behavior of a relative few is unfair, then dismissing an entire field of study as something that "those people" do is equally ill-advised. It is an act akin to disavowing the entire field of biology simply because one does not agree with the theories set forth by Darwin, or showing contempt for all geneticists because of the controversy surrounding stem cell research.

Casting members of any group - biologists, geneticists, individuals of different religious or political persuasions, even the "Wold Newton people" (to use Valdron's terminology) - as "those people" creates an unnecessarily adversarial, "Us vs. Them" dichotomy that is both counter-productive and, ultimately, intellectually dishonest.

Which brings me to the other aspect of Mr. Valdron's statement that I found disturbing, as well as somewhat puzzling. After going out of his way to issue what amounts to a blanket condemnation of Wold Newton devotees, he then proceeds to engage in exactly the same manner of scholarly literary exercise which he has just so cavalierly dismissed. Mr. Valdron would no doubt dismiss this last observation of mine as inaccurate, yet a simple comparison of his essays with those produced by Wold Newton devotees clearly demonstrates otherwise.

Such comparison will also reveal to the open-minded reader that Mr. Valdron's studies have in certain cases led to observations and conclusions that are identical or similar to those reached independently by other literary scholars who, as it happens, are devotees of the Wold Newton Mythos. Yet his view appears to be that his work is above reproach, while similar conclusions that have been arrived at by anyone who even professes interest in Wold Newton scholarship is somehow suspect. He is welcome to this opinion, of course, but his believing it does not automatically make it so.

Just as there are a number of variations of the game poker, so too are there more than one way to play the game which we are considering here. A college professor of mine referred to it as "literary archeology"; Mr. Valdron has similarly referred to it as the "Archeology of Unreality," while certain devotees of Farmer's concepts refer to it as Wold Newtonry. In my younger days I called it "Sleuthing in the Stacks" - a reference to a 1944 book of the same name by Professor Rudolph Altrocchi, a work referenced by Richard A. Lupoff in his excellent "Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master Of Adventure."

But no matter what name we may individually apply to it, no matter how the rules may vary from one variation to the next, in the end we are all playing the same game; to suggest otherwise is, again, intellectually dishonest at best - and blatantly hypocritical at worst. Our perspectives and methodologies may differ, our conclusions may not always be compatible with one another's, but in the end our goal is the same: "to try and get it all to fit in plausibly together," as Mr. Valdron himself has
stated.

There was more I had originally intended to say, but I believe I'll conclude here. It is not my intent to engage in a war of words or dispute literary ideologies with Mr. Valdron (although one can't help but get the impression from his work that Mr. Valdron, for reasons known only to him, might actually welcome such a fight); such debate would be a fruitless exercise, an unnecessary expenditure of time and energy unlikely to change anyone's mind, and which would serve no real function other than to take away from the joy many of us with an interest in such things derive from this game in the first place.

And at the end of the day, isn't that really what this is supposed to be all about? Aren't we just trying to have fun?

I know I am...

Respectfully,
John A. Small
Tishomingo, Oklahoma

Dear John,

Thank you for your comments. I'm sorry if I've tread upon your toes or the toes of the Wold Newton folk.

And you're correct in that I enjoy a good knock down, drag out fight.

However, in this case, I'm not looking for a fight. Like yourself, I came across Philip Jose Farmer's 'Wold Newton' books, _Tarzan Alive_and Doc Savage: An Apocalyptic Life and obviously, they've had a bit of influence.

Of course, this sort of 'crossing over' stuff actually goes back quite a ways. In Greek mythology, for instance, Hercules has a guest spot on Jason and the Argonauts. More recently, I'd argue that the writings of Ned Buntline about the gunslingers of the old west, which both fictionalized their adventures and introduced fictional characters, was the beginning of a kind of 'shared universe' space. Pretty soon, you had Hopalong Cassidy duking it out with Billy the Kid.

I remember though, even when young, taking a bit of an exception to Philip Jose Farmer's assumption that some or all of Tarzan's adventures had been fictionalized, and could therefore be dismissed or seriously revised. I think I was most appalled by his contention that _Tarzan the Terrible_was really about encountering an inbred village where vestigial tails were common, and riding a Babylonian Sirrush.

A few years back, through Edgar Governo's 'Timelines' site, I stumbled into the Wold Newton world on the web. I was alternately enthralled and frustrated. There was quite brilliant, clever and interesting stuff going on.

In particular, I remember being impressed by Wold Newton articles about the early superman, which treated as canonical the original works by Spiegel and Schuster, and disregarded the later revisions and retcons. This seemed to be careful and meticulous scholarship.

On the other hand, some of the 'Wold Newton' techniques drive me absolutely around the bend. In part, my objections to aspects of 'Wold Newton' scholarship fall into the following categories:

There's a degree of removal when the assumption is that the texts we rely upon have been fictionalized. Instead of simply reading the texts themselves, Farmer and others have taken the view that these texts are mediated by an intermediary author who omits details, adds superfluous details, changes names and situations and otherwise modifies the story.

This approach creates all sorts of problems. If we can't be sure that James Bond really is James Bond, or that Honeypot Chugalug is really who she is presented to be, or that Scaramanga is really in Jamaica, or that Blofeld is really Blowfeld... then what can we know?

The danger is that the whole thing becomes completely unreliable. The narrative breaks down completely, to the point where characters and events may become unrecognizeable. What is real or unreal in the narrative becomes completely arbitrary. Thus, the temptation is to 'rewrite' ad hoc, throwing out any old thing without consistent rhyme or reason.

Farmer took this approach to try and reconcile the reality of Tarzan with the apparent impossibility of some of his adventures. I can respect that, and as an academic tool, this sort of rigorous parsing of the novels is acceptable.

It can be perfectly reasonable to attempt to filter incidents through a 'reality screen', and discount incidents which seem to be completely implausible. However, this can get completely out of hand.

On the other hand, Farmer also used this technique more dangerously in order to add to the existing narratives. Thus, Farmer inferred relationships between Tarzan and other pulp heroes.

It's the other side of the coin. If you assume that your text is unreliable, then you have to assume (a) that some parts of the text are not valid; and even more significantly; (b) that some relevant information is not in the text.

Okay, now we're getting into dangerous territory. Where do we get this other 'relevant information' that we then infer into the text?

Farmer's approach was twofold: Sometimes, he transferred that information from parallel canonical works. Sometimes he inferred that information from similarities in parallel canonical works. The difference, I suppose, is the sort of thing where Doc Savage refers to a distant cousin who was raised by apes in Africa on the one hand, to where Farmer notes that Savage and Tarzan share a number of physical similarities and may be related somehow. Both have problems, the second involves major problems.

Of course, the danger with the second is that it leads to the temptation to simply dispense entirely and start making up your own facts and incidents as you go along in order to make it all fit together. Thus, new facts are manufactured to go with old facts, old facts are discarded. The theory becomes an undifferentiated morass of supposition and text without any dividing lines.

The danger of course, is that once you start the twofold process of disregarding parts of your canon, and inferring new or additional material to your canon, your theory begins to mutate radically from your source material.

James Bond is no longer James Bond, secret agent, and his girlfriend is no longer Pussy Galore. Instead, he inevitably mutates into Herbert Tompkinson, chartered accountant and would be lion tamer from Woking, and his pet cat. I'm not thrilled with the rewrite.

These are a potent set of tools, and must be wielded carefully, reluctantly and with great precision like scalpels. Get all chain-saw fu, on our asses, and instead of a work, you have a mound of hamburger.

Now frankly, if Wold Newton theorists had stayed within these confines, I'd have no particular problem. I might invest in some plastic sheeting to protect the furniture, but hey, have at it.

But of course, it doesn't stop there. And to be fair, I can see why and how people went over the cliff, and to some extent, I can blame Farmer as well.

Here's a big problem: The Wold Newton researchers failed to distinguish canonical and non-canonical sources, and in particular, they began to mix media. Instead, it all goes into the great big blender.

Now, this is very problematic, particularly the mixing of media. For one thing, the set of assumptions underlying one media to another can be very different, the fit may not be seamless.

As an example, take the pulp view of Mars and Venus in the period 1890 to 1940. For the most part, the Mars and Venus of fiction of this era were remarkably consistent bodies composed of both the known science and observations of the time, current theories, and the social preconceptions and prejudices. The underlying social consensus is critical: Mars was an older, aged, dying world than Earth. Venus was a younger, hotter, more primitive world than Earth.

But move Mars and Venus up into the modern era, the 1960's through the 1990's, and those worlds simply do not exist. The underlying social ideas do not exist.

The sci fi movies of the period from 1950 to 1960 all exhibit a fairly narrow set of beliefs as to what technology was going to be like, who was going to go into space and what they were going to be doing, and this is consistent from Queen of Outer Space to Destination Moon to 2001 A Space Odyssey. The sci fi movies of the period from 1980 to 2000 reflect a very different, but also very uniform vision of technology and society. The two don't mix.

By the same token, comic strips, television, movies, pulp novels, etc. may represent different sets of consciousnesses, different parameters, and literally, different worlds.

Now, normally, this means that if you tried to mix and match them, the discontinuities would become apparent, and then you'd get into real trouble. It just wouldn't work.

Unless you went back to Farmer, and simply lopped off whatever didn't fit, and made up a few additional facts to make sure things did fit.

Well, suddenly, we're getting into academic Frankenstein theory, now aren't we?

And it gets really ugly when you start getting iterations of canonical material. Take James Bond, the novel Moonraker is quite different from the movie, Moonraker. Does this mean that one is false? Or that both are true? Or that they depict different adventures? Or that they represent different aspects of the same adventure? Or, once we finish dropping things out and adding new things in, does the Wold Newton Moonraker resemble nothing on Earth.

This is the sort of thing that really just cheeses me off mightily.

Look, let me give you an example of what really strikes me as a classic case of problematic and difficult work:

"Gullivar Jones is Ulysses Paxton"
http://www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Articles9.htm#Gullivar2
Feel free to open it up and read along:

The opening paragraphs tell the story of how the writer, Matthew Arnold, on the trail of Phra the Phoenician, tracked down a carpet and other middle eastern artifacts from the estate allegedly belonging to Phra, and came across the story of Ulysses Pierpont.

(The problem here is that its wall to wall bull. There is nothing in either Gulliver Jones, or Phra the Phoenician, or Matthew Arnold's life to support any of this part of the story. Instead, facts are simply being made up. A supposition and completely arbitrary hypothetical construct has been manufactured to fill in a blank spot.)

Arnold never meets Pierpont. Instead, his Pierponts story comes to Arnold through the recollections of the Rug Merchant of Pierponts tale, and later from edited (?) transcripts of Pierponts court martial, out and out borrowings from H.G. Wells and Johnathan Swift, and a conversation with a sub-fictional Carter/Burroughs.

(The second problem is the contempt for the source material. Arnold here is not even a secondhand source. Since he has never met Pierpont, he gets the story third hand, from rug merchants, bowdlerized Marine court martial transcripts, etc. So his information, right from the start, is incomplete, partial, third hand hearsay. To make it worse, Arnold simply makes things up with fictionalizations from Wells and Swift. Now, if that's not all bad enough, our theorists here choose to introduce Arnold to the man who has John Carter's manuscript, and this gets mixed in, adding plagiarization. Now, with all of this, the canonical text can only be deemed to be thoroughly compromised. There is not one word therein which can truly be said to represent Gullivar Jones actual experiences, words, deeds or thoughts. At best, you've got a very loose analogue which may depart arbitrarily at any point.)

We then jump to the character of Ulysses Paxton, with his words quoted directly from Master Mind of Mars. From there, the writers proceed to manufacturing other sources of information, including further visits by John Carter in the 50's, writings of Carthoris, and new translations in the 90's.

(Also called making facts up. The manufacture of artificial provenance to new stories, goes all the way back to Sherlock Holmes, where writers were always discovering new Sherlock Holmes manuscripts in locked filing cabinets and safes. However, the application here is quite different. The provenance game in the Sherlock Holmes stories is simply a framing device, here it is being used to justify narrative connections not found in text.)

From here, we segue into Marvel Comics John Carter of Mars comics. Once again, however, Marvel's versions of Carter's adventures are passed off as badly translated, plagiarizing of previous adventures, partial and incomplete. One of the adventures, a modified retelling of 'The Ancient Dead' from Llana of Gathol, becomes the basis for an implied adventure featuring both Gullivar Jones and John Carter.

(Remember what I said about mixing media, and iterations? Well, here the comics are simultaneously presented as both canonical and contaminated. To make matters worse, what appears to be a variant retelling of an existing Barsoom story is completely shotgunned. The conservative thing to do would be to jettison the aberrant parts of text. Here, what they do is use some aberrant parts to manufacture a new story. Yikes!!!!)

The revised adventure has John Carter travelling to the region of the Hither and Thither where he meets Ulysses Pierpont (Gulliver Jones) and the two hang out together. This incident is placed right in the middle of the events of Arnold's Gulliver Jones novel.

(Gulliver Jones, therefore, has now been drastically rewritten, to include characters and events not found at all in the actual novel, characters and events which directly contradict the novel. In essence, our theorists are throwing out entire chapters of Arnold. Their basis for doing so is on an even more massively mutilated reading of a comic story. Double Yikess!!!!)

From there, we find the Sarmak's have invaded, and are the source of both the strange comet which in Gulliver, never actually lands, and the heat wave is caused by a Martian tripod).

(Okay, I've got whiplash from this radical turn. Among other problems, the heat wave Gulliver describes is a meteorology phenomenon. It's not a beam weapon as the Sarmaks use. To attribute Gulliver's heat wave to a Sarmak attack, you pretty much have to abandon anything Arnold wrote or described. Of course, we're still in the timeline for Arnold's novel, so these events will have to take place in substitution for Gulliver's own narration.)

Alan Moore writes of a meeting between Gullivar and Carter, and their mutual battle against the Sarmaks, this is acknowledged.

(But like everything else, its bowdlerized. The description herein is inconsistent with the descriptions we see in Moore's comic. Ergo, we must assume that once again, Moore's comic is either irrelevant, or it is again, simultaneously canonical and contaminated. The theorists seem to feel free to simply make up their own facts in substitution yet again.)

As a result of the battle, the Sarmak gains the information about Dejah Thoris from Carter, and uses it against him. This sets the stage for Mars: The Home Front.

(And once again, our theorists have made up facts, inferring a highly specific battle, a confrontation between Carter and a Sarmak, and telepathic abilities by Sarmaks not shown on Earth to read terrestrial minds and transmit that information across planetary distances)

After failing to mutilate Mars: The Home Front in any major way, the theorists return to the comics, and take up a melanged version of Chessmen of Mars and Mastermind of Mars.

(Again, rather than taking these stories as distorted versions of stories already established in the original media, they are treated as both canonical - representing new adventures, and contaminated unreliable accounts. This becomes the basis for a fairly radical revision which has almost no resemblance to the original. And of course, this reintroduces Ulysses/Gullivar.)

Ulysses Pierpont after having more adventures not chronicled by Matthew Arnold, returned to Earth. He hung around for ten or fifteen years, changed his name, joined the army and was toted back to Mars by a flying carpet. His legs on Earth were not blown off, instead, he is injured and arrives on Mars in a state of injury.

(Holy Leaping Monkey Testicles, Batman! This description is hardly congruent with that written by Burroughs. Moreover, it is dependent upon a state of happy amnesia, since Gulliver/Ulysses/Paxton has no clear recollection of his previous sojourn on Mars. This point is unclear, however. It seems, according to the theorists, that Paxton did remember, but dismissed it as a false memory. On the other hand, since he clearly knew John Carter on Mars and travelled some of the same landscape, one wonders what he would have made of the Burroughs novels, or why he would make no reference to his previous adventure. So, he has to have some sort of amnesia, only later recovered. This is Schodinger's Amnesia, apparently, sometimes its there, sometimes its not.)

Now, overall, this sort of thing, makes me want to go and punch someone in the nose!

All the cardinal sins are here: The contemptuous approach to the source materials, in which facts are not fitted together, but simply abandoned, the mixing and matching of source material, including different media where the secondary media is obviously simply distorting primary media, but is treated as original text. And most obnoxiously, the manufacture of entire narratives which take the place of the original narratives.

Well look, with all due respect to Wold Newton scholarship, this just annoys the hell out of me.

I take a few leaps here and there myself, in my writing, but my approach is conservative. I try to treat source material with respect, I don't simply throw it out when I feel like it. Where I launch variant interpretations, I try to base that in the authorial limitations and ambiguity of the text itself

Because, really, if you can just throw out any old facts you don't like, and make up any new facts you want any old time, then you can connect anything to anything to prove anything all the time anywhere. What's the fun of that?

Anyway, please do not take my views as unnecessarily stuffy. At the bottom line, I'm simply a proponent of more conservative interpretations than some Wold Newton writers.

The chapters I've written on Gulliver Jones, Malacandra, Otis Kline, and Wells, are concerned first and foremost with locating these works in the geography of real Mars, the same broad geography I lay Burroughs on. The effort to link these works to Barsoom is a bit of amusement.

Warmest regards and thank you for writing

Yours truly,
Den Valdron
Manitoba, Canada