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The Mad Goblin: Wold Newton Parallel Universe (Secrets of the Nine Book 3) by [Philip Jose Farmer, Win Scott Eckert]

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Philip Jose Farmer

The Mad Goblin: Wold Newton Parallel Universe (Secrets of the Nine Book 3) Kindle Edition

by Philip Jose Farmer (Author), Win Scott Eckert (Afterword) Format: Kindle Edition

25 ratings

Book 3 of 3: Secrets of the Nine

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They were known simply as the Nine - grim and ancient rulers who thirty thousand years ago had discovered the key to eternal life and ever since had secretly held the world in thrall.

Once, Doc Caliban had been their servant and had shared their secrets. Now, appalled by their tyranny, he has turned against them, daring to challenge their centuries-old supremacy. Together with two henchmen whose superhuman skills match his own, Caliban sets out on the trail of the deadliest of the Nine: the mad goblin Iwaldi, the very incarnation of evil...

Print length

196 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Titan Books
Publication date

June 11, 2013
File size

845 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[A] jolting conception, brought off with tremendous skill." (The Times)" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Philip José Farmer was a multiple award-winning science fiction writer of 75 novels. He is best known for his Wold Newton and Riverworld series. In 2001 he was awarded the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Prize and a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. He passed away in 2009. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00AP2UWKG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Titan Books (June 11, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 11, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 845 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 196 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #1,032,099 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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25 ratings

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Stephen Vincent Kempton

Farmer's Man Of Bronze

Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book has a strange history. It is a direct sequel to Philip Jose Farmer's A Feast Unknown. Feast written in 1969 is a story of two characters Tarzan & Doc Savage, called Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith in this incarnation. In the story these two find out they are brothers and both the sons of Jack The Ripper. Feast is in my opinion a masterpiece of uber-violence and sex. Feast had a very small printing through Essex House a small British Porn publisher. It is also recently reprinted by Titan Books.

The Mad Goblin (a Doc Caliban solo story) was written and published a year later in 1970 as half of an Ace Double Paperback and had a very mainstream release. The Lord Of The Trees (a Lord Grandrith solo story) was the other side of the double. The two novels are intertwined but not to the point of distraction. In other words events happening in the other book are just referred to.

This being written for a 1970 mainstream publisher the sex has been removed and resolved as a plot point in Feast and the Violence has been toned down. All though a fight between Doc and his two trusty aides and a 1200 lbs. Grizzly Bear in The Mad Goblin is extremely violent and brutal.

The story is about Doc Caliban and two young aides Pancho and Barney the sons of the Monk & Ham counterparts who where written out of the story in the first novel. The story opens with the three adventurers invading a German Castle belonging to Iwaldi (the Mad Goblin) a member of The Nine who secretly rule the world.

Since it is now 1969 things have evolved for Doc who has some new inventions he developed since his 1940 adventures. Like Blood Building capsules and spray on quick healing flesh. The bad guys also have some new inventions like motion detection lights (hey that's real now) and radio controlled attack animals.

While not as ground breaking as a Feast Unknown, it reads like a very good Doc Savage story.

Farmer started writing a third Doc Caliban story The Monster On Hold but never completed it before his death. I hope one day Win Scott Eckert or one of his writing partners finishes and someone publishes that book.

Highly Recommended.

6 people found this helpful

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The Bronze Paragon Is On The Hunt

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2015

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The Mad Goblin stars Doc Caliban, Farmer's Doc Savage analogue from A Feast Unknown. However, this novel, like its companion piece The Lord of the Trees, does not contain any of the over the top sexual imagery from Feast. This is a straight up Doc Savage pastiche. It's set in the 1960's, and told in a modern style brilliantly by PJF.

The events of this novel and Lord of the Trees occur concurrently, with half brothers, Caliban and Lord Grandrith taking the fight to the Nine. Caliban has taken Iwaldi, the titular Mad Goblin as his target.

The Mad Goblin is a lot of fun, there are some really cool scenes, such as the bear fight, and the scenes beneath an ancient castle in general. This is a great book that I think Doc Savage fans will enjoy.

It hooks up with Lord of the Trees during the climax, for an amazing battle scene between the Cloamby Brothers and the Nine at the sight of Stonehenge. Definitely a thrilling pulpy adventure, but told by a master of fiction. Highly recommended.

3 people found this helpful

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cmysticism

Farmer hits the mark again with his interpretation of a classic pulp character

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2014

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Though I enjoyed the entire Lord Grandrith/Doc Caliban trilogy penned by Philip Jose Farmer, beginning with A FEAST UNKNOWN and continuing with the Grandrith solo novel LORD OF THE TREES before giving Caliban his due with a solo outing in this third volume, THE MAD GOBLIN was the best of the three IMHO. The readers who complained about the explicit satirical sexual violence and other extreme elements from A FEAST UNKNOWN shouldn't shy away from reading the two subsequent novels, since PJF got the "torture porn" satire out of his system after the first volume, and took a straight pulp adventure route sans the overly explicit elements for the second and third volumes of the trilogy. And he really hit his stride for a series that constituted his first foray into the realm of pulp fiction and para-scholarship with THE MAD GOBLIN.

These alternate universe versions of early 20th century pulp super-stars Tarzan and Doc Savage were depicted the way PJF always wanted to see them: As great human beings who battled the inner human foibles that all humans are saddled with as strongly as they did the various evil-doers with whom they clashed; as opposed to paragons of nobility who were nearly as bereft of sin or base tendencies as a certain guy named Christ. Doc Caliban was a scientific genius as well as a marvelous physical specimen of human attainment, with technical inventing and medical skills that matched his great physical might, fighting skills, and strategical acumen as a natural leader on the crime-fighting field. But while his more familiar dimensional counterpart Doc Savage was portrayed as more or less asexual, Caliban had a normal drive that he did his best to suppress in order to keep his mind on his all-important work... except for his dalliances under the table (figuratively, but probably literally also) with his extravagantly beautiful cousin Trish Wilde. PJF's versions of the characters transgress in ways their "official" literary counterparts would never be depicted as doing (at least not back in the old days), and as a result, we relate to them in addition to admiring them, even if they do turn our stomachs at times.

THE MAD GOBLIN continues the story begun at the end of A FEAST UNKNOWN, where James "Doc" Caliban and his half-brother John Cloamby III, a.k.a., Lord Grandrith vow to pool their resources into hunting and killing the tremendously powerful secret cadre of near-immortal oligarchs known as the Council of Nine, whom they shamefully operated in servitude to for many years in exchange for their priceless life-extending elixir. That is, until they found out the Nine manipulated them into battling each other as part of a brutal ritual to see who would replace the member of the Nine that had just recently died... this being the dreaded XauXaz, the grandsire of both men. Deciding to make up for their years of servility to the evil Nine after this major wake-up call, the two operate on different fronts to take down the Nine. Grandrith's front is told in the first sequel to PJF's "Secrets of the Nine" trilogy, LORD OF THE TREES; Caliban's part is told in the third volume that is the subject of this review.

The result is one of the best Doc Savage adventures ever, even if it was "only" an alternate reality counterpart of the Man of Bronze. Doc Caliban does his esteemed dimensional lineage proud as the Man of Bronze of his timeline. In fact, PJF's portrayal in this novel served as a good precursor to his later penning of the fully authorized Doc Savage novel ESCAPE FROM LOKI, depicting his first major adventure, and how he met the allies who would become his Fabulous Five team. And for this novel, PJF gave us pastiches of the offspring of Doc's two most famous aides, Andrew "Monk" Mayfair and Theodore "Ham" Brooks, who inherited their parents' traits to the point that Pauncho van Veelar and Barney Banks may as well have been younger versions of the originals brought forward in time. Their friendly banter and rivalry, highly reminiscent of their parents', makes for a strange coincidence that the reader is able to accept just to have these familiar personalities along for the ride with Doc Caliban.

Recruiting Pauncho and Barney alongside Trish, Doc Caliban launches a savage (pun intended) hunt and offensive against the Nine, specifically taking on the renegade member of the immortal oligarchs known as Iwaldi, an ancient dwarf who is forced to fend off attacks from, and stay one step ahead of, both his former comrades and Caliban and his crew. Iwaldi is actually the titular character of the novel, as "The Mad Goblin" is a nom du guerre given to the diminutive terror, and it's quite fitting considering the incredible combo of resources and ruthlessness he has at his beck and call. A more dangerous foe has rarely been faced by Doc Caliban's famous dimensional counterpart (save perhaps for John Sunlight), and Doc and his team face a challenge that is almost beyond even their ability to overcome. The amazing assortment of gadgets and inventions invented by Doc and used as weapons, healing aides, breathing aides, sensory aides, disguise purposes, etc., are there on full display, and PJF has an amazing grasp of this aspect of the character. As always, he did the research -- and then some -- before penning this tale.

The most fantastic and suspenseful sequence of the entire book, IMO, is the grueling unarmed battle Doc, Pauncho, and Barney are forced to engage in with a mighty Kodiak bear, perhaps the greatest and most painful challenge faced by any dimensional iteration of the Man of Bronze. If you think Tarzan's battles with lions were impressive, wait until you see this!

The Titan edition of the book is the best one ever published, as it includes a timeline detailing the history shared by the Nine, Caliban, and Grandrith, culled from many sources, and how it intertwines with the reality of the "mainstream" Wold Newton Universe, which is home to the familiar versions of the characters. This timeline was courtesy of Win Scott Eckert, today's chief caretaker of the concept introduced by PJF back in his two ground-breaking para-biographies, TARZAN ALIVE: A DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GREYSTOKE and DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE, which soon followed PJF's "Secrets of the Nine" trilogy in publication. This carefully crafted timeline will make clear all connections between the two universes that some readers may have found confusing.

The best of a terrific trilogy, this book is highly recommended for all fans of pulp adventure, as well as all fans of Doc Savage, as this pastiche will give you a frank interpretation of the character that may offend some, but will truly fascinate others. I truly hope to see more Doc Caliban stories and novels in the future, as writers like Win Scott Eckert and Christopher Paul Carey -- each of whom helped PJF complete a novel he started (THE EVIL IN PEMBERLEY HOUSE and THE SONG OF KWASIN, respectively) -- have done a good job of serving as PJF's successors, continuing the worlds he built for future generations. PJF wrote a fragment for an unfinished Doc Caliban follow-up novel called A MONSTER ON HOLD, and it would be awesome to not only see it completed, but also for new Doc Caliban novels and novellas to appear.

2 people found this helpful

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frankschildiner

A pulp masterpiece!!

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2014

Verified Purchase

Philip Jose Farmer introduced me to the world of pulp, especially Doc Savage and Tarzan. PJF, a Granmaster of Science Fiction, created an alternative pulp world, one far more intense and realistic than ever written to that date. This tale, The Mad Goblin, introduces the reader to Doc Caliban, a pastiche of the legendary pulp hero Doc Savage. Doc and his two aides battle against the evil ancient immortals who ruled the world since ancient times. This tale is as good as the best Doc Savage tale and better than many. A truly amazing story and I recommend it to all readers!

Other books in the series include:
1. A Feast Unknown
2. Lord Of the Trees
3. The Mad Goblin

2 people found this helpful

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