In his latest "Off the Shelf" column for Science Fiction Weekly, a review of Joe Lansdale's much anticipated Flaming London, Paul Di Filippo has some interesting things to say about a matter close to my heart:

It's hard to know where the postmodern urge to appropriate famous fictional characters and blend them with historical personages into new ironic meta-adventures first originated. Mainstream historical novels have always employed real people, of course, as characters. Then, "sequels by other hands" have resurrected famous characters created by, say, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens for extended lives. But the unique mix exemplified in Joe Lansdale's new book probably stems from two genre titans: Philip Jose Farmer and Michael Moorcock. Their efforts to emulate old forms of genre fiction and to create fresh hybrids opened up vast new vistas of collage and pastiche. Second-generation writers like Alan Moore, with his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman, with their Back in the USSA (1997), crystallized the format. In some sense, these romps are alternate histories. But they defy the sober, linear speculations of mainstream counterfactuals in favor of wild effects.

Paul certainly speaks from a position of experience. The stories in his brilliant Lost Pages walk a fine line between plausible counter-factual and the kind of post-modernist play he discusses here, and his contribution to Pamela Sargeant's Conqueror Fantastic anthology, "Observable Things," in which Cotton Mather recounts a childhood encounter with Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane, is one of my favorite stories of recent years.

One aspect of Paul's review, and the above paragraph in particular, that I find particularly interesting is that he namechecks the four authors I consider to have had the biggest influence on my development as a writer: Farmer, Moorcock, Moore, and Newman. It's little wonder that so much of what I do attempts to "emulate old forms of genre fiction and to create fresh hybrids."

In anticipation of Flaming London's release I picked up the reissue of Lansdale's Zeppelins West a few months ago, and it's next on my To Read pile, right after Xavier Maumejean's strange and fascinating League of Heroes, which covers much the same ground to different effect.