Lord of the Trees
Philip José Farmer
ALSO FROM TITAN BOOKS
CLASSIC NOVELS FROM
PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER
WOLD NEWTON SERIES
The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (available now)
Tales of the Wold Newton Universe
PREHISTORY
Time’s Last Gift (available now)
Hadon of Ancient Opar
SECRETS OF THE NINE: PARALLEL UNIVERSE
A Feast Unknown
The Mad Goblin
GRANDMASTER SERIES
Lord Tyger (available now)
The Wind Whales of Ishmael
Flesh
Venus on the Half-Shell
PHILIP
JOSE
FARMER
LORD OF THE TREES
VOLUME X OF
THE MEMOIRS OF LORD GRANDRITH EDITED BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER
TITAN BOOKS
LORD OF THE TREES
Print edition ISBN: 9781781162934
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781162941
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP
First edition: November 2012
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 1970, 2012 by the Philip J. Farmer Family Trust. All rights reserved. Introduction copyright © 2012 by Win Scott Eckert.
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LORD OF THE TREES
A TALE OF TWO UNIVERSES
INTRODUCTION BY WIN SCOTT ECKERT
Philip José Farmer’s novels of the Nine, A Feast Unknown (1969), Lord of the Trees (1970), and The Mad Goblin (1970) (all part of Titan Books’ Wold Newton series under the subheading “Secrets of the Nine—Parallel Universe”), recount the ongoing battle of the ape-man Lord Grandrith and the man of bronze Doc Caliban against the Nine, a secret cabal of immortals bent on amassing power and manipulating the course of world events. These novels present an interesting conundrum for followers of Farmer’s Wold Newton mythos.
Farmer wrote two biographies which kicked off the Wold Newton Family in earnest after he wrote the Nine novels: Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke (1972) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973; revised 1975). In these biographies, he uncovered the true identities of the men whose adventures had been presented to the world in the guise of popular fiction under the fabricated names “Lord Greystoke” and “Doc Savage.”
And the true identities Farmer revealed were not John Cloamby, Lord Grandrith, and Doctor James Caliban, despite having written the Nine novels just a few years earlier, sourced directly from Grandrith’s and Caliban’s memoirs.
Instead, “Lord Greystoke’s” real name remains undisclosed (although there are many hints in the strands and threads presented in Tarzan Alive), while “Doc Savage’s” real name is Doctor James Clarke Wildman, Jr.
Furthermore, the backgrounds of Greystoke and Grandrith, and of Wildman and Caliban, are bursting with significant similarities and noteworthy differences.
Greystoke and Grandrith are both feral men. Both were born after their parents were shipwrecked off the coast of Gabon, were raised by sub-humans or “great apes,” and went on to become “Wild Men of the Jungle,” discover secret sources of gold, and have many wondrous adventures. Both men have similar Apollo-like physiques, are about six-foot-two-inches tall, and have coal-black hair and gray eyes.
Both jungle lords have “biographers,” the term Grandrith uses when referring to the man who wrote a series of highly fictionalized novels and stories about him for popular consumption. Grandrith then goes one better than his biographer, writing his own autobiographical memoirs, of which A Feast Unknown is Volume IX and Lord of the Trees is Volume X.
As for Greystoke, Philip José Farmer followed in the footsteps of the jungle lord’s original biographer with a more realistic account of his adventures, Tarzan Alive, as well as two novels presented as fiction, The Peerless Peer and The Dark Heart of Time: A Tarzan Novel.
Greystoke was born on November 22, 1888, a few minutes after midnight. Grandrith was born on November 21, 1888, at 11:45 p.m.
Both are immortal.
Greystoke’s immortality was conferred by a grateful witch doctor. The month-long process involved a vile brew of herbs and a blood transfusion. The one-time procedure resulted in eternal youth.
Grandrith’s immortality came from annual visits to the secret caverns of the Nine, somewhere in Africa, where “candidates” participated in a ceremony requiring the painful removal and consumption of certain parts of flesh. The Nine’s elixir caused the regrowth of any lost organs and tissue. The immortality elixir could extend life to as much as 30,000 years before death due to old age.
Unlike the two jungle lords, Wildman and Caliban are “Men of the Metropolis,” of science and technology. They are champions of justice. Both have bronzed skin and hair, and are about six-foot-eight-inches tall. They were each raised by their fathers, in a bizarre training program, to the height of physical and mental perfection, with the goal of fighting evildoers all over the world. Both men are geniuses, surgeons at the top of their field, and world-class experts in a variety of disciplines and sciences, including biology, engineering, physics, archeology, chemistry, law, and more. Both are responsible for inventions and scientific breakthroughs far beyond their time.
Wildman and Caliban each battled criminals with the aid of a band of five adventurers, beginning in the 1930s. Both men had cousins named Patricia. James Wildman’s cousin was Pat “Savage” (or really, “Wildman,” as Farmer discovered), while James Caliban’s cousin was Trish Wilde.
Both men, of course, are nicknamed “Doc.”
As with Greystoke and Grandrith, Wildman’s and Caliban’s adventures were fictionalized in pulp magazine stories. There was no mention of sex in these, but A Feast Unknown reveals that Doc Caliban had an ongoing (if repressed) sexual relationship with his cousin Trish Wilde. Farmer speculates on Doc Wildman’s sexuality in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, but firm information comes from his novel The Evil in Pemberley House (coauthored with Win Scott Eckert) wherein we discover that he has a daughter, Patricia Wildman, born in 1950, who takes after her father in many respects.
James Clarke Wildman, Jr., was born on November 12, 1901. James Caliban was born in 1903 (A Feast Unknown) or 1901 (The Mad Goblin). The 1901 date makes more sense, as Grandrith mentions in Lord of the Trees that Caliban fought in the Great War: “...he served with distinction as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army in 1918.” And in The Mad Goblin, it’s noted that, “When Doc was only seventeen and a li
eutenant in World War I, he had captured two German soldiers at the same time that he had been cut off by the advance of the enemy.”
In A Feast Unknown, Grandrith spied upon Caliban’s elderly aides, the dapper Mr. Rivers and the apish Mr. Simmons, and learned from them the 1903 date. We can assume they misspoke, or he misheard them.
Of course, seventeen is underage, but many who fought had enlisted before the age of eighteen. Doc Wildman certainly did, entering the Great War as a combat pilot at the age of sixteen, as outlined in Farmer’s Escape from Loki: Doc Savage’s First Adventure.
Farmer speculated that Doc Wildman had access to an immortality elixir in the form of Kavuru pills discovered by his relative, Greystoke. Doc Caliban was also a candidate of the Nine and beholden to that secret organization in exchange for the same immortality elixir as Grandrith used.
The source of Grandrith’s and Caliban’s strength, intelligence, physical perfection, and extraordinary abilities differs from that of Greystoke and Wildman. The latter two are inheritors of the Wold Newton gene, reinforced in them by generations of intermarriage.
As for half-brothers Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban, their amazing capabilities and talents derive from their grandfather, the immortal member of the Nine called XauXaz, inserting himself into the family line many times over. Since Grandrith and Caliban are the grandsons of a Cro-Magnon man, their bones are much larger and have a much greater surface area for muscle attachment.
Grandrith also believes that XauXaz’s brothers, Ebn XauXaz and Thrithjaz, contributed to the Grandrith family line in a similar fashion, and that Castle Grandrith may have been used by the Nine, or some members of the Nine, as a breeding farm. It is strongly implied that the Grandrith lineage is the result of an elaborate eugenics program, carried out by the Nine over the millennia.
Grandrith’s and Caliban’s genealogies also differ from those of Greystoke and Wildman.
Lord Grandrith’s father is actually the man known to the world as his uncle: John Cloamby. His legal father, James Cloamby, Viscount Grandrith, is actually his uncle, although the Viscount was married to Grandrith’s mother, Alexandra Applethwaite. John Cloamby, in the madness brought on by the Nine’s elixir, raped his sister-in-law Alexandra, resulting in pregnancy and the birth of Lord Grandrith, the jungle lord. The mad John Cloamby also became the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.
Later, the madness subsided and John Cloamby escaped to America, changed his surname to Caliban, became a doctor, and fathered James Caliban.
The real father of John and James Cloamby, and their brother Patrick Cloamby, was XauXaz of the Nine. Patrick Cloamby was the father of Trish Wilde; he preceded his brother John to America after assaulting and almost killing a teacher (presumably under the influence of the elixir), also became a doctor, and changed his surname to Wilde in order to escape his past. Trish Wilde was born in 1911.
We know much more about Greystoke’s and Wildman’s genealogies, which have been extensively traced by Philip José Farmer and documented as the Wold Newton Family in two essays: “A Case of a Case of Identity Recased, or, The Grey Eyes Have It” (published as an addendum to Tarzan Alive) and “The Fabulous Family Tree of Doc Savage (Another Excursion into Creative Mythography)” (published as an addendum to the biography Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life).
The Wold Newton Family genealogy is far too extensive and tangled to cover in depth here, but from these tracts we know that Greystoke and Wildman are kin (they are cousins, sharing the same great-grandfather, among other relations), and are also closely related to many other crimefighters, adventurers, geniuses, and criminal masterminds. These extraordinary people all share the Wold Newton gene, which is reinforced to different degrees based on the amount of intermarriage in their backgrounds.
The Wold Newton mutation occurred when the Wold Cottage meteor struck on December 13, 1795, exposing seven couples and their coachmen to the ionized radiation of the meteor. They “were riding in two coaches past Wold Newton, Yorkshire... A meteorite struck only twenty yards from the two coaches... The bright light and heat and thunderous roar of the meteorite blinded and terrorized the passengers, coachmen, and horses... They never guessed, being ignorant of ionization, that the fallen star had affected them and their unborn.” (Tarzan Alive, Addendum 2, pp. 247–248.) This was “the single cause of this nova of genetic splendor, this outburst of great detectives, scientists, and explorers of exotic worlds, this last efflorescence of true heroes in an otherwise degenerate age.” (Tarzan Alive, Addendum 2, pp.230–231.)
Farmer discovered that many other well-known people are part of the Wold Newton Family. A short list includes: Solomon Kane (a pre-meteor strike ancestor); The Scarlet Pimpernel (present at the meteor strike); Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet (present at the meteor strike); Sherlock Holmes and his foe Professor Moriarty (aka Captain Nemo); Phileas Fogg; A.J. Raffles; the evil Fu Manchu and his archrival, Sir Denis Nayland Smith; Sir Richard Hannay; Lord Peter Wimsey; The Shadow; Sam Spade; Doc Savage’s friend and associate Monk Mayfair, his cousin Pat Savage, and his daughter Patricia Wildman; The Spider; Nero Wolfe (the son of Sherlock Holmes); The Avenger; Philip Marlowe; James Bond; Travis McGee; and many others.
As I noted in the afterword to Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (Titan Books, 2012), his researches are extremely well-sourced, including a personal interview with the jungle lord and countless hours spent poring over Burke’s Peerage. Following the Greystoke and Wildman biographies, Farmer related adventures of the Wold Newton Family in the guise of fiction, similarly sourced from newly discovered, or unpublished, manuscripts and diaries.
Which brings us to the conundrum I noted at the beginning of this introduction.
The prior publication of the Nine novels A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, and The Mad Goblin have created the idea in some readers that the Wold Newton biographies, novels, and stories are all works of fiction. After all, the first two novels are also sourced from the memoirs of Lord Grandrith, and edited for publication by Farmer. The Mad Goblin was written by Doc Caliban in the third person singular, though again it is autobiographical and Farmer edited it for publication.
Farmer claims, in essence, that both the Wold Newton stories and the Nine novels are true. They are all—or almost all—based on the accounts of the men and women who experienced the adventures and survived to tell the tales. Or they are sourced from manuscripts, memoirs, and diaries left behind by those who lived through amazing exploits.
However, some readers have concluded that it all must be fiction—make-believe, the result of Farmer’s overactive imagination—because the Wold Newton tales and the Nine novels appear to be mutually exclusive, based on the differing accounts and histories as outlined above.
There are several potential explanations for the apparent discrepancies. Perhaps the Nine novels are highly fictionalized adventures of the real Greystoke and Savage. Farmer published the books before discovering and revealing the true backgrounds of these men in Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. In this scenario, Wold Newton novels such as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, Time’s Last Gift, The Peerless Peer, the Khokarsa series (Hadon of Ancient Opar, Flight to Opar, and The Song of Kwasin), Ironcastle, Escape from Loki, The Dark Heart of Time, and The Evil in Pemberley House are truer reflections of the lives of these heroes.
In this set-up, Farmer’s initial meeting with “James Claymore” (the putative John Cloamby) at the home of a mutual friend in Kansas City, Missouri, as recounted by Farmer in his “Editor’s Note” to A Feast Unknown, is a falsehood created by Farmer to lend legitimacy to his manuscript. Perhaps Farmer had stumbled upon rumors and half-truths regarding the events of A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, and The Mad Goblin, and had crafted these into a rousing adventure trilogy. If so, Farmer may have been embarrassed when he actually met the real Greystoke a few years later, although it’s not clear from their interview that the two men discussed the incident.1
Alternat
ively, Lord Grandrith’s and Doc Caliban’s escapades could have occurred much as Farmer documented them, based on these supermen’s memoirs. In this scenario, the two heroes coexist alongside their more famous analogues in the Wold Newton Universe. Farmer scholar Dennis E. Power is a proponent of this theory, and has outlined his thoughts in an intricate series of interconnected articles on his website, The Wold Newton Universe: A Secret History (pjfarmer.com/secret/index.htm). Briefly, Power suggests that Grandrith and Caliban are the result of an elaborate plan by the Nine to create doppelgängers of Greystoke and Wildman.
Power, discussing Grandrith and Caliban vis-à-vis the Wold Newton Family, suggests that, “Although the characters of Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith can be placed in the Wold Newton Universe, we must ask if they were members of the Wold Newton Family. I would doubt that they were immediately related to the Wold Newton line, but a relationship possibly exists. Farmer claimed that [Greystoke] was descended from Odin. In all three of the Doc Caliban/Lord Grandrith novels, the claim is made that XauXaz was Odin. If not all of XauXaz’s families and progeny were designated for the Nine’s breeding programs, then it is a possibility that he was a distant ancestor to Greystoke and [Doc Wildman].”
Under this scenario, Farmer met Cloamby (as “James Claymore”) much as described in A Feast Unknown, and was later put in touch with Caliban, serving as the editor of their manuscripts. A few years later he met and interviewed Greystoke.
A third explanation is that Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban exist in a universe which is parallel, but very similar, to the Wold Newton Universe. This alternate universe may share a common past with the Wold Newton Universe, but perhaps diverged from it at some point in the distant millennia. Or perhaps the two universes have always been parallel and coexistent.
The parallel universe theory is supported by Farmer’s fragment of a fourth Nine novel, The Monster on Hold. The fragment was introduced by Farmer at the 1983 World Fantasy Convention, and was published in the convention program.2 During a series of adventures in which Doc Caliban continues to battle the forces of the Nine, he “begins to suffer from a recurring nightmare and has dreams alternating with these in which he sees himself or somebody like himself. However, this man, whom he calls The Other, also at times in Caliban’s dreams seems to be dreaming of Caliban.”
