Universes

[IdleRich]

A few examples in gothic literature and penny dreadfuls. There's a bit in Matthew Lewis' "The Monk" where The Wandering Jew makes a guest appearance. And then, the villian in "The Monk" comes back to possess a London widower in Dion Fortune's "The Goat Foot God".

Think Mick Norman's "Angels From Hell" has someone turn on a radio with a news report about Jerry Cornelius falling overboard his yacht.
Used to also like Richard Allen's bizarre universe where the dominant music weekly was SPINS (which Stewart Home later co-opted).

Does two books featuring or referring to the same character or thing count as a universe? Maybe it does, or I'd say it means that those two books clearly exist in the same world/universe and so this happening implies that such a universe exist and these books are references to it - but they are not themselves taking the time to create the universe, they are not describing it or its rules (beyond what they happen to say naturally in the course of the book). It's quite an interesting idea that simply by mentioning a character in another book you call a universe into existence. Or would it be more correct to say that all novels call a universe into existence and by mentioning a character from another book you are simply collapsing the universes together and in fact saying that normally two books bring two universes into existence, but here they only bring one.

There's quite a lot to think about here. Like if you read a book set in modern day UK, then do you say it takes place in our universe or has it created a very similar parallel universe that is the same as ours except the events of the book happen? Probably a completely pointless distinction but I find it interesting. A weird one is Sopranos where they mention the band Four Seasons... but later on Frankie Valli turns up as an actor playing someone else... so what's going on here? Does the band have a different singer in Sopranos universe? Or do we assume the singer moonlights as a mobster and noone noticed?

Ok I don't want to get too deep into that cos I could probably think of loads of similar conundrums that would make my head hurt and yet be pointless and perhaps incredibly boring.

Anyway, a famous sort of gothic example is the Jane Eyre/Wide Sargasso Sea universe

"Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Antoinette is caught in a patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica."

 

[IdleRich]

A more silly one arises in the book Anno Dracula by the film critic Kim Newman. I found this interesting cos the book had a huge forward or introduction or load of notes at the start (I'm not sure of the technical definitions here) in which he explains his reasoning and how he created the book. The gist of it as I recall was that at first he wanted to reveal that Jack the Ripper was Dracula but he decided that the timelines didn't match up. So instead he had Dracula go to England and marry Victoria with the result that vampires and humans were forced into living in a kind of uneasy peace in a hybrid human/vampire society - there are laws about killing humans by drinking their blood or murdering vampires with stakes, but many people choose voluntarily to become vampires and sine humans sell their blood for money. And this world allies him to bring in countless famous vampires such as Lord Ruthven, and Jack the Ripper does in fact show up.

Another Vampire universe come to think of it is What We Do in The Shadows - first there is the film set in NZ and then the series based in NY. But some of the Kiwi vampires turn up in tv show - and then later on there is a bit where the vampire council has to judge them - one of the members of the council is Tilda Swinton so presumably we are in the sane universe as Only Lovers Left Alive where she is a vampire. I think there are other famous actors who have played vampires in the council but the only one I remember is Wesley Snipes who joins via zoom which reveals him to be "showing off" by broadcasting from a daylit room much to everyone's annoyance. We have to assume that he is indeed the "daywalker" and so we're in the Blade universe too.

They further expand the universe with the series Wellington Paranormal which follows the antics of the two hapless police who show up to investigate the vampire house in the film. In the series Karen O'Leary and Kyle Minogue face various monsters including one if the vampires from the film.

Another obvious kinda meta-universe thing is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in which he just grabs loads of famous characters who feature in novels placing them in the sane era such as Alan Quatermain and Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde and banding them together to have adventures. To me it seems less about creating a universe than about assuming one has already been created and using it for his own purpose. I'm not sure how exactly that differs but to me it feels different somehow.

 

[Mr. Tea]

the apex of Universes collide is contained in the Typhonian Trilogies of Kenneth Grant where Fu Manchu meets Austin Spare and entities from Universe B invade the Earth after the veil is ripped asunder by the Manhattan Project

Is this how 'Bob' entered the world to possess Leland Palmer?