According to Grandrith, the “candidates of the Nine” number five hundred or more, and are the elite of the organization with whom the elixir is shared. A lower echelon, the “servants of the Nine,” number perhaps half a million and are not aware of the elixir. (Lord of the Trees)
1921
James Murtagh is inducted as a candidate of the Nine. (Lord of the Trees)
1926
Doc Caliban completes his medical internship. He already has several Ph.D.s. in a variety of disciplines, and a law degree from Harvard. (The Mad Goblin)
1927
The Nine make first contact with Doc Caliban. (The Mad Goblin)
1928
Doc Caliban is formally invited to join the Nine. (The Mad Goblin)
Doc Caliban kills a gangster’s moll while breaking up a drug-smuggling ring in Los Angeles. His remorse over this act sends him into a suicidal depression. He withdraws from society for almost a year, retreating to a hideaway in the Arctic Circle. (A Feast Unknown)
1929
Doc Caliban, upon returning to civilization, meets his cousin Trish Wilde for the first time. (A Feast Unknown)
Caliban (and presumably also Trish Wilde) undergoes the first of the terrible annual ceremonies in order to receive the Nine’s elixir. (The Mad Goblin)
1932
Births of William Grier “Pauncho” van Veelar (son of “Jocko” Simmons) and Barney Albany Banks (son of “Porky” Rivers). (Lord of the Trees)
Simmons and Rivers are two of Doc Caliban’s five adventurous aides, the other three being Williams, Shorthans, and Kidfast. (The Mad Goblin)
LATE 1930S
Doc Caliban secretly begins researches into independently creating the Nine’s elixir—or an elixir superior to that of the Nine. (A Feast Unknown)
1943
Grandrith loses his right leg below the knee after the RAF bomber he’s piloting crashes after a mission over Hamburg. The leg regrows in six months due to the Nine’s elixir. (A Feast Unknown)
1944
Grandrith’s boat is sunk in the Indian Ocean, giving him his first experience fighting sharks. (Lord of the Trees)
1945
The Nine hold a highly important meeting, presumably regarding World War II. (A Feast Unknown)
The result of this meeting may have been a mission assigned to Lord Grandrith:
“My own philosophy is simple and practical and not at all based on the idea that life is sacred. If a man is out to kill you, you kill him first. This has nothing to do with the rules of warfare as conducted by nations. When I was a member of the British forces in World War II, I observed the Geneva rules. That is, I did except in two cases, where I had orders from the Nine, and their orders superseded anybody’s. In return for giving me a very extended youth, they demanded a high price sometimes. But I had had no qualms about killing the men the Nine wanted out of the way, especially since they were the enemy. If I were to tell you that several of them were the highest and most famous of our enemy, you might find it difficult to believe. Especially since the world believes that they committed suicide to keep from falling into the hands of the Russians.” (Lord of the Trees)
Farmer and pulp expert Rick Lai reasons that “the highest and most famous of our enemy” were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels: “Grandrith says that both high-ranking Axis officials supposedly committed suicide because they were afraid of being captured by the Russians. This fits Hitler and Goebbels. Goering and Himmler committed suicide in American custody, and are ruled out. Grandrith also says both leaders were men. Therefore, Eva Braun and Mrs. Magda Goebbels aren’t being directly referenced. Japanese leaders like Sugiyama knew that the USA, not the USSR, would judge them. The only possible exceptions might be Japanese officials in Manchuria which the Russians invaded after the Nazis surrendered. It isn’t difficult to reconcile the ‘suicide pact’ deaths of Goebbels’s wife and children with Grandrith’s statement. Magda Goebbels could have gone crazy after seeing Grandrith kill her husband, and then killed her children and then herself. All Grandrith then had to do was make it look like Joseph Goebbels was part of Magda’s suicide pact. Whether the Eva Braun of the Grandrith/Caliban universe killed herself or was executed by Grandrith is debatable.”
1946
Doc Caliban issues a report to the Nine regarding mankind’s eventual destruction of the earth through pollution and mass starvation. (The Mad Goblin)
1947
Lord Grandrith once again visits his parents’ cabin on the coast of Gabon. (Lord of the Trees)
1948
Up until this point in time, Doc Caliban believes that Lord Grandrith is a fictional character in a series of fantastic novels. In this year, Caliban also begins brain transplant experiments. (A Feast Unknown)
Lord Grandrith decides to secretly begin writing his memoirs, knowing they are unpublishable due to his membership of the Nine. (Lord of the Trees)
An agent of the Nine discovers an orphaned baby of The Folk; the Nine order the baby to be raised with the children of two Kenyan agents of the Nine. (Lord of the Trees)
NOVEMBER 1948
Doc Caliban descends into the deep New England caverns and battles terrifying shapeless creatures and tentacled beings. (The Monster on Hold)
EARLY 1950S
Pauncho van Veelar and Barney Banks serve in the same Marine outfit during the Korean War. (Lord of the Trees)
1958
Lord Grandrith first sees James Murtagh during the Nine’s grisly annual rites, held in the caves deep in east central Africa. (Lord of the Trees)
1966
Doc Caliban cuts off some of his fingers in an effort to isolate elements of the elixir. The fingers regrow, of course. (A Feast Unknown)
MARCH 21–APRIL 1968
Events of A Feast Unknown.
Death of one member of the Nine, XauXaz, due to extreme old age. He is the first member of the Nine to die in about two thousand years. The last member was XauXaz’s brother Thrithjaz, and the “preseating” ceremony which Grandrith, Caliban, and seven other candidates attend is the first to be held since then. (A Feast Unknown)
Grandrith and Caliban discover they are half-brothers, and after overcoming the madness brought on by the Nine’s elixir, they turn against the Nine. (A Feast Unknown)
In “The Wild Huntsman,” it is revealed that the XauXaz who appeared to die in 1968 in A Feast Unknown was actually murdered by his counterpart from the Wold Newton Universe about 250 years earlier, and the parallel universe counterpart had been impersonating him ever since. With the Nine in Grandrith’s universe starting to become suspicious of him, the doppelgänger faked his death, thus setting off the chain of events in the Secrets of the Nine series.
MAY 1968
In Los Angeles, Lord Grandrith mails the manuscript for Volume IX of his memoirs (published as A Feast Unknown) to a man he believes to be his editor. (Lord of the Trees)
In reality, the man is XauXaz from the parallel dimension known as the Wold Newton Universe.
XauXaz travels back to the Wold Newton dimension and, pretending to be a man calling himself “James Claymore,” mails the manuscript from Western Samoa (see A Feast Unknown) to science fiction author Philip José Farmer for publication, as posited in the new introduction to the Titan Books edition of Lord of the Trees:
“Could someone else have passed through the dimensional gate and given the manuscript to Farmer? It would not have been hard to pose as Lord Grandrith (or rather, ‘James Claymore’) during their one meeting, since Farmer had never met him, and indeed had never heard of him. But Farmer, with his fascination with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of a jungle lord raised by ‘apes,’ would have been instantly hooked by the story of a real-life feral man brought up under such unusual circumstances, and it would not have been hard to convince him that Grandrith was the real-life inspiration for Burroughs’ tales—which, in fact, was largely true; they just happened to be Burroughs’ tales in an alternate universe.”
MID 1968
<
br /> Pauncho van Veelar and Barney Banks, who have not seen their “uncle” Doc Caliban since 1963, are shocked to see that he has still not aged. Caliban recruits them into the fight against the Nine. (The Mad Goblin)
1968–1969
Lord Grandrith and Clio circle the globe twice in an effort to shake the Nine from their trail, while Doc Caliban, Trish Wilde, Pauncho, and Barney lay in wait, planning their next move.
Eventually, Doc and company get a line on the location of one of the Nine, Iwaldi, and prepare to go after him. (The Mad Goblin)
Meanwhile, Grandrith leaves Clio safely ensconced in a London hideaway (or so he thinks) and heads to Africa to scout out the caves of the Nine. (Lord of the Trees)
1969
Events of the intertwined sequels to A Feast Unknown: Lord of the Trees/ The Mad Goblin.
Lord Grandrith kills a member of the Nine, Mubaniga, and another, Jiizfan, dies in the battle at Stonehenge. (Lord of the Trees)
Another member, Iwaldi, is killed by James Murtagh during the Stonehenge battle. Murtagh also dies. (The Mad Goblin)
With the deaths of XauXaz, Mubaniga, Jiizfan, and Iwaldi, the Nine are left with four empty spots to fill. Surviving members of the Nine are Anana, Ing, Yeshua, Shaumbim, and Tilatoc.
There are ambiguous and sometimes contradictory references to the amount of time that has passed since the events of A Feast Unknown—understandable, given that the follow-up manuscripts were separately written by Grandrith (Lord of the Trees) and Caliban (The Mad Goblin).
Some descriptions in Lord of the Trees of the amount of time passed since A Feast Unknown indicate that it is still 1968 and that only two months, or eight months, have passed, but other references in both Lord of the Trees and The Mad Goblin indicate a year has passed, pointing to a 1969 date. There is a reference to “spring” in The Mad Goblin, but also two references to the “winter solstice.” The conflicting time references—surely purposeful on the part of Grandrith, Caliban, and their editor, Farmer—have resulted in a general 1969 date for these adventures in this Chronology.
1984
Doc Caliban captures a man called “Scott Free” and interrogates him. Free claims to have the power of teleportation. Caliban suspects that his truth drug is ineffective on Free and wonders if Free hasn’t been planted by the Nine to lure Caliban back to the caverns beneath Maine, which he last visited in 1948. Later, in those same caverns, searching for the extradimensional entity Shrassk, Caliban has another vision of “The Other.” The Other is Doc Wildman, across the dimensional void. (The Monster on Hold)
* * *
1 A Feast Unknown (Titan Books, October 2012), Lord of the Trees (Titan Books, November 2012), and The Mad Goblin (Titan Books, June 2013). A fourth book, the Doc Caliban novel The Monster on Hold, was planned but not completed. A short story by Win Scott Eckert, authorized by Farmer’s estate, “The Wild Huntsman,” bridges the Secrets of the Nine series and the Wold Newton novels and biographies.
2 Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe novels and biographies are: Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (Titan Books, May 2012), Time’s Last Gift (Titan Books, June 2012), The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Peerless Peer (Titan Books, June 2011), the Khokarsa series (Hadon of Ancient Opar [Titan Books, January 2013], Flight to Opar, and The Song of Kwasin [with Christopher Paul Carey]), Ironcastle, Escape from Loki: Doc Savage’s First Adventure, The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel, and The Evil in Pemberley House (with Win Scott Eckert).
Win Scott Eckert is the coauthor with Philip José Farmer of the Wold Newton novel The Evil in Pemberley House, about Patricia Wildman, the daughter of a certain bronze-skinned pulp hero (Subterranean Press, 2009). In 1997, Eckert launched the first Wold Newton website, The Wold Newton Universe. He is the editor of and contributor to Myths for the Modern Age: Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton Universe (MonkeyBrain Books), a 2007 Locus Awards finalist. He has also coedited three Green Hornet anthologies for Moonstone Books, and his short fiction about adventurous characters such as The Green Hornet, Zorro, The Avenger, The Phantom, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Hareton Ironcastle, The Green Ghost, Honey West, T.H.E. Cat, Captain Midnight, Doc Ardan, and Sherlock Holmes, can be found in the pages of various anthologies from Moonstone Books and Black Coat Press. His critically acclaimed, encyclopedic Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World 1 & 2 was released by Black Coat Press in 2010. His latest project is the Wold Newton Origins series of interconnected short stories found in several volumes of Meteor Houses annual anthology The Worlds of Philip José Farmer. Win holds a B.A. in Anthropology, a Juris Doctorate, and lives with his wife Lisa and a menagerie of three cats and two dogs near Denver, Colorado. Find him on the web at www.winscotteckert.com.
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WOLD NEWTON SERIES
The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (coming soon)
PREHISTORY
Time’s Last Gift
Hadon of Ancient Opar
SECRETS OF THE NINE: PARALLEL UNIVERSE
Lord of the Trees
A Feast Unknown
GRANDMASTER SERIES
Lord Tyger
The Wind Whales of Ishmael
Flesh (coming soon)
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