Timeline Of Adventure

In the past, one of my favorite websites to browse has been the Wold Newton Universe expansion site on pjfarmer.com. I had been greatly dismayed, over the past few years, that updates for the site seemed to come seldom or never.

I needn't have worried.

Win Scott Eckert, the mastermind behind the site, has apparently spent the time he wasn't updating the site with preparing it for publication. I just finished reading Crossovers: a Secret Chronology of the World (Vol. 1), and even though I only knew it was coming for a few weeks, I spent those weeks in acute anticipation.

And it was worth the wait. This book hits a large number of my interests - intricate world-building, crossovers, pulp action - all mushed together in a 460-page tome detailing a world built up from hundreds of other literary works. Many of these are world-renowned classics like the Sherlock Holmes stories, Dracula, Frankenstein, and Tarzan of the Apes, while others are more modern and/or obscure works - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to give an obvious example, features prominently.

Although there is much here that is familiar to fans of Eckert's online work, there is much that is new, as well. My only complaint is about several things that were not included that I missed, but these were made up for by numerous entries that surprised me by their inclusion. Furthermore, this book only covers up to the year 1939 - there's a "Vol. 2" coming at the end of this month which will continue the project through the present into the future and, if it's anything like the first part, will be pretty amazing.