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Tarzan Alive
by Philip José Farmer
(Bison Books, $19.95, 312 pages; trade paperback, first published
without additional material in 1972, this edition April 2006.)
 Tarzan
Alive, a fictional biography of the famous Edgar Rice Burroughs
character, is the foundation of an important aspect of Philip José
Farmer's oeuvre: the Wold Newton Universe, which postulates that all
of adventure fiction constitutes one shared universe, that in fact it
comprises a secret history of the real world.
Bison Books has reprinted this fun and endlessly intriguing classic
with extra material, including a foreword by Win Scott Eckert - the
editor of Myths for the Modern Age, a 2005 anthology that expands
on Farmer's metafictional work - and two other Farmer texts: an interview
with Tarzan, and excerpts from Tarzan's private journals.
In Tarzan Alive, Farmer proposes that Burroughs's books are
fictionalized versions of a real man's adventures (with names, places,
and dates altered), a man Farmer claims to have identified and tracked
down. Farmer then recounts the shocking "true" history of
Tarzan.
His "investigations" unveiled more surprising information:
that other "fictional" heroes - Sherlock Holmes, Doc Savage,
the Shadow, and many more - are also real and that they are all related,
with a common ancestor having been exposed to a radioactive meteor in
Wold Newton, Yorkshire, causing strange mutations in that gene pool.
The metafictional games of Tarzan Alive have inspired not only
Farmer himself to pen a sequel (Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life),
not only the anthology Myths for the Modern Age, but also collaborative
websites where dedicated fans and scholars further speculate on the
secret history that lurks between the lines of literature.
Originally published, in slightly different form, in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 17 June 2006.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
Elsewhere on the web:
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