Spanner and the Incident at Wold Newton

On December 13, 1795, a meteor fell near the village of Wold Newton in the Wolds of East Yorkshire, England. According to the late Philip José Farmer, science fiction author (of Riverworld fame) and genealogist, these people were nearby at the time:

• John Clayton, third Duke of Greystoke, and his wife Alicia (né Rutherford), sister of...
• George Edward Rutherford, eleventh Baron Tennington, and his wife, Elizabeth Cavendish;
• Honoré Delargardie and his wife, Philippa Drummond;
• Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet;
• Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel) and his second wife, Alice Clarke Raffles;
• Sir Hugh Drummond (Philippa's brother) and his wife, Georgia Dewhurst;
• Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife, Violet Clarke Raffles (Alice's sister);
• Sebastian Noel, a friend and student of Dr. Holmes; and
• four coachmen: Louis Lupin, Albert Lecoq, Arthur Blake, and Simon MacNichols.

The radiation from the meteor mutated these people, who became the ancestors of several of the greatest heroes in literature and pop culture. Farmer focuses in particular on three of them: Sherlock Holmes, descendant of Siger, and two Greystoke scions: John Clayton-Wilder, the eighth Duke of Greystoke, better known under the name Tarzan; and Dr. James Clayton "Doc" Wilder, Jr., whose adventures were fictionalized first as "Doc Ardan" (in French) and then, more famously, as Doc Savage.

A Simple Conflict to Complicate: Dragonites vs. Enders

I was reading a book on the Book of Revelation (also known as the Apocalypse of John), called A History of the End of the World, by Jonathan Kirsch. He shows that the last book of the Christian Bible is a rage-fuelled mind bomb so potent that it has all but dominated Western culture at least since Emperor Theodosius turned the Roman Empire into Christendom by decree in 391. But the most important point I'm drawing from it in this entry is the extreme dualism the Apocalypse embodies. From at least the middle of Black Science all the way to the end of Spanner, America is torn apart by an apocalyptic duel between two factions determined to put an end to American democracy and replace it with an apocalyptic theocracy: the Gnostic fundamentalist Dragonites, the ultra-elitist conspiracy of self-described supermen who want to reimpose the old totalitarian caste system based on a cult of blood; and the Christian fundamentalist Enders, that group of militant cults determined to put an end to the world by force. Actually, the Enders don't have to be Christian; the Islamists and the Jewish Messianists are also Enders. Both factions see the world in ultra-stark black-and-white, either-or, with-us-or-against-us terms. If you're not for one faction, they believe, you are by definition part of the other. This is a "Gordian knot" that desperately needs to be cut before it destroys the world. In my dialectical worldview, there must be a third force dedicated to disrupting both forces. This force I call the Spoiler. But the Spoiler's disruptions are useless unless (s)he fights alongside, and for the sake of, the common enemy of both Dragonites and Enders: the people.

The Family Feud, 4: Eleanor Richter vs. Drusilla Becket

Perhaps the most titanic battle in the entire Spanner cycle is the recurring magic war between Eleanor Richter, the Richter-Thomas matriarch, a shaman and witch, and Drusilla Becket, channeller and designated guru to the Becket clan and their cult. Their first matchup in the series is during the middle of Bad Company; their battle, occurring in what in Spanner I call "dream reality", is over the souls of Nelly's lost granddaughters and Dru's prodigal daughters, the main characters of the novel, Charlie and Desiree Richter-Thomas. No doubt the two bitter enemies, rival leaders in the New Age movement, at least in the Seattle area, will have several rematches and grudge matches before the cycle ends. Who knows — they might even deserve their own story dedicated entirely to their decades-long war, somewhat in the tradition of the Thing vs. the Hulk in superhero comics.

The Family Feud, 2: The Richter-Thomases, and Why They Fight

Two strange families dominate Spanner and the Dictel trilogy. One of the is the aristocratic and authoritarian Beckets, the subject of my next entry. The other is the Richter-Thomases, the source of almost all the heroes of my stories. What is strange about them, at least compared to most Americans, is the culture they've assembled out of various European and American cultural castoffs: some from the more culturally radical elements of Weimar Germany in the 1920s, others from the cultural revolution in the US, especially California, in the 1960s and '70s.

The Family Feud: Introduction

One of the major conflicts that structures both Spanner and the Dictel trilogy is a long-running family feud. The two families battling over the fate of America and the world in my novels and comics are the Richter-Thomases, a nominally middle-class family with what turns out to be quite the revolutionary tradition, and the Beckets, a very much aristocratic family that traces its ancestry back to Oliver Cromwell and thus claims to be the true American royal family, cheated of its destined tyranny by none other than the Founding Fathers themselves, with the help of some of the Richter-Thomases' more treacherous ancestors.