Talk:Shared fictional universe

The Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard are set in an earlier timeframe than the 1920's era Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, but are set in the same shared fictional universe, along with writings by Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth.

Is there evidence in Howard, Smith and Lovecraft's letters that they considered their stories to be set in a shared world? It's clear that Derleth (after Lovecraft's death) wrote stories set in Lovecraft's world, as did various others in anthologies edited by Derleth and later others. But I'm skeptical of this claim that Howard and Lovecraft, or even Lovecraft and Smith, were intentionally writing stories in a shared world. I think I would have heard about it in some other source before now if it were true. --Jim Henry 14:56, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

If no one comes up with evidence of this within a couple of weeks, I'll remove it to a new section on posthumous retroactive shared worlds, with this as one example and posthumous sequels by other authors to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Frank Herbert's Dune series, L. Frank Baum's Oz series... there are many of that kind, but I'm not sure they fit the strict definition since they were not originally intended as such by their original authors. --Jim Henry 15:04, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Done. --Jim Henry 20:45, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Merge?

This should be merged with Shared universe. I'm not sure which title should be kept. --Jim Henry 20:45, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)