The book follows Shandon through the Commonwealth, as he is forced to learn and grow in the course of a three-part journey. Clarence Shandon, gifted with a white streak in his hair from which he’s nicknamed ‘Silverlock.’ A former business student, Shandon’s completely ignorant of books and literature, so does not fully realise into what sort of land he has fallen: a land where every character, every name, comes from fiction or mythology. Silverlock imagines a Commonwealth of Letters inhabited by the world’s great fictional characters. And League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style mash-ups have precedents as well I have not read Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld books, nor have I read John Kendrick Bangs’ Associated Shades novels, which date back to the 1890s, but I have read John Myers Myers’ 1949 novel Silverlock, and came away from it with a few thoughts. Crossovers, it has been said, date back to Homer writing of heroes coming together to fight the Trojan War. In fact, though, this is really nothing new. At an extreme, a work like Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen imagines a world where every character derives from some other source, comes from some other story imagines a world where all stories overlap and so make a strange collective setting. Fan-fiction interrogates texts we thought we knew, crossing characters from one tale over into another. A film like The Avengers blends together characters from five other movies. It’s been said that this is the age of the mash-up: of art formed from the fusion of other works of art.
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