Win Scott Eckert first read Philip José Farmer's "fictional biography" Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, and become hooked by the concept of the Wold Newton family.

Farmer's two fictional "biographies" of the fictional characters Tarzan (Tarzan Alive) and Clark Savage, Jr. (Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life) proposed that the actual meteorite which landed in Wold Newton, Yorkshire, England, on December 13, 1795, caused a genetic mutation in the occupants of a passing coach.

Raffles, (Conan Doyle's) Professor Challenger, Sir Percy Blakeney, (Poe's) C. Auguste Dupin, Lord Peter Wimsey, Bulldog Drummond and Nero Wolfe;[2] James Bond, Mr. Moto, Philip Marlowe, Kilgore Trout, Sam Spade, Professor Moriarty (A.K.A.

Subsequently, the early history of the WNU has been expanded forwards and backwards in time to incorporate the very early history of Conan the Barbarian (through the works of Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Roy Thomas and others), right through to the far-future exploits of the many characters in the Star Trek universe.

[1] Eckert served as an expert consultant on "crossovers involving characters from pulp fiction and Victorian literature"[3] for the lawsuit brought against Twentieth Century Fox over their similarities between their adaptation of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and an earlier screenplay entitled Cast of Characters.

He is the coauthor with Philip José Farmer of the Wold Newton novel The Evil in Pemberley House, about Patricia Wildman, the daughter of a bronze-skinned pulp hero.