•Do Mr. Farmer’s works (and, by extension, an
expanded WNU) take place in the “real world”?
–“Yes and no.”
•Readers of Farmer’s seminal Wold Newton
“biography,” Tarzan
Alive, understand he followed
in the Holmesian tradition of treating his subject as a real person who
actually lived.
•However, readers who have carefully and
scrupulously reviewed the remainder of Mr. Farmer’s Wold Newton works,
including his follow-up “biography,” Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, understand that he moved away from this
confining literary pretense. Even Tarzan Alive departs from “reality”
with its contention that Tarzan is immortal, as well as the inclusion of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories.
•Farmer’s movement away from the confining
non-fiction “real world” literary premise has lead many WNU Creative
Mythographers, who have chosen to work together to reach consensus on many
Wold Newton issues, to treat the WNU as a parallel universe
that mirrors and emulates the real world as much as reasonably
possible, without being compulsively, obsessively strict about it.