Lord of the Trees

ALSO FROM TITAN BOOKS

C
LASSIC NOVELS FROM

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

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

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States.

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 lieutenant 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.