Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (Wold Newton #1) in Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton Universe

Feb 15, 2013 Anthony rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philip-jose-farmer, wold-newton-universe, tarzan, edgar-rice-burroughs, fictional-biographies

First thing to note: Officially, there are 312 pages in this book (or 316 if you go by Amazon's listing), just as there were in the original edition. But this current edition also includes lxxiii pages of additional material: a new foreword, new introduction, and several of Farmer's Tarzan pieces that have appeared until now only separately from the main text.

The new foreword by Win Scott Eckert winscotteckert delves into the history of "creative mythography," putting Farmer's works directly in First thing to note: Officially, there are 312 pages in this book (or 316 if you go by Amazon's listing), just as there were in the original edition. But this current edition also includes lxxiii pages of additional material: a new foreword, new introduction, and several of Farmer's Tarzan pieces that have appeared until now only separately from the main text.

The new foreword by Win Scott Eckert winscotteckert delves into the history of "creative mythography," putting Farmer's works directly in line with Baring-Gould's biographies of Holmes and Wolfe and other authors but then going on to explain how Farmer took the concept to the next stage, with the introduction of the Wold-Newton Family Tree. It's a well-written, if in my humble opinion too short, piece.

Mike Resnick's new introduction gives a slightly more detailed look at how a piece of Farmer's early fiction, "A Feast Unknown," led to "Tarzan Alive" and "Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life And Times."

The other additional materials at the front are by Farmer himself: an interview conducted with the real "Lord Greystoke," and a large section of his unpublished Memoirs.

The conceit here, after all, is that Edgar Rice Burroughs based his Tarzan novels (what Farmer frequently calls "the biography") on a very real person. This book is the biography of that person filtered through Burroughs' novels -- Farmer goes to great lengths to explain discrepancies (especially the very large one of how Tarzan and Jane's only son seems to age ten years between the publication of one volume and the next, and somehow again is old enough just two years after that to fight in World War One). He goes out of his way also to point out certain of Burroughs' volumes as being "entirely fiction, and so we don't really know what Tarzan was doing at this time." Fair enough.

The attention to detail, the linking of one story to the next, is amazing. Farmer really does a magnificent job of making you feel like there is a real person behind these stories. You get caught up easily in the conceit and it carries you through most of the book. There are occasional confusing spots, where even upon rereading the book (I read the original edition in high school in the early 80s), I had to ask "is Farmer talking about the "real" Tarzan, or the "Burroughs" Tarzan? But those are few and far between.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the Wold-Newton Family Tree. Farmer raises the question of how it could be that so many grey-eyed, super-strong and/or super-intelligent men and women could crop up in the same time period: Tarzan, Doc Savage, Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, Nemo, Moriarity, The Shadow, The Avenger, Bulldog Drummond, AJ Raffles, etc etc etc. He builds on Baring-Gould's theory that Nero Wolfe is Sherlock Holmes' son and then expands that backwards to a meteor strike in the area of Wold-Newton in 1795. This seminal event, and the amazing children it created, are discussed in the book's Addendum. The one unfortunate fact of the Bison edition is that the actual family tree is not included in the end-papers, which made keeping track of who's who a bit harder as I read through it.

I'm glad Bison Books came out with a new edition of this book. I highly recommend it. I'm looking forward to digging back into my copy of Farmer's "Doc Savage" biography as well. ...more

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