Tarzan at the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The lake of the Horibs lies at a considerable distance from the eastern end of the mountains of the Thipdars, perhaps five hundred miles, and where there is no time and distances are measured by food and sleep it makes little difference whether places are separated by five miles or five hundred.

The time has come to read the thirteenth Tarzan book and the fourth Pellucidar book, Tarzan at the Earth's Core.  Today's subject first appeared as a seven-part serial in Blue Book, spanning September 1929 to March 1930.  I'm reading a 1970s Ballantine edition with a Neal Adams cover.  (I actually saw a print of Adams' cover illustration, signed by Adams himself, at an antique store a few years ago.)  You can see that Adams tried to reproduce the unique sky of Pellucidar in the background of painting--as every schoolboy knows, Pellucidar is the world on the inner surface of the Earth's crust, so there is no conventional horizon, you just see the surface geography of your inner world curving upwards, like if you were a tiny bug in a huge bowl (with another bowl placed upside down on top.)  The people of Pellucidar live in a perpetual noon, as the weird sun that hovers in the center of the hollow Earth never moves, and as such Pellucidarians have little or no sense of time, something Burroughs dwells on in these Pellucidar books, I guess part of the wish-fulfillment element of the Pellucidar series, an effort to appeal to the dread of 20th-century people of the schedules and deadlines and tick-tock clocks that allow our modern society to operate.  (Remember that loud stupid Harlan Ellison story everyone loves about how Harlan Ellison shouldn't have to follow deadlines and schedules?  I bet you do.)  

Anyway, Tarzan at the Earth's Core has been printed many times and has had many dramatic covers, and Adams' contribution can stand proudly among them next to those of Frank Frazetta and J. Allen St. John, each of which shows Tarzan fighting for his life against some monster.

You'll probably remember that, in Tanar of Pellucidar, James Gridley discovered a new radio wave and was able to tune in to messages sent by scientist Abner Perry from Pellucidar, messages that detailed how David Innes, founder of an empire in Pellucidar, had been captured by the piratical Korsars.  The premise of Tarzan at the Earth's Core is that Gridley recruits a bunch of Germans to build a superior dirigible with which to enter Pellucidar via an opening in the Earth's crust at the North Pole that Innes had discovered, and then recruits Lord Greystoke, your hero and mine, to lead the expedition.  A squad of Waziri, brave African fighting men who recognize Tarzan as their chief, accompany Tarzan.  For comic relief, accompanying the Germans as cook is an African-American soldier who settled in Deutschland after being captured during the Great War.  Burroughs renders this guy's dialogue phonetically ("'S funny...dey ain't no one stirrin'--mus' all of overslep' demsef") and we spend enough time with him early on that I thought he might play a role in the plot, but he does not; mainly Burroughs uses the cook's perplexity at how there is no time in Pellucidar to remind us readers of this salient fact about Pellucidar, something he persists in reminding us of again and again in a multitude of ways. 

Burroughs' style is smooth and comfortable, so after we get past Burroughs' explanation of what Pellucidar is in the two-page forward it is fun to read about how Tarzan and Gridley meet and about the construction of the dirigible and all that.  Once in Pellucidar, we get a long series of interesting and compelling scenes that mostly entail fighting prehistoric beasts or barbaric men, getting captured and escaping, or climbing mountains.  Tarzan at Earth's Core doesn't build up to a climax really, instead we have these various adventure episodes and cliff hangers in which people face death or captivity but retain life, limb and liberty, and then the plot is all wrapped up neatly thanks to coincidences.  You might say the novel is poorly structured, but the individual action and horror scenes are all fun so I enjoyed it regardless.

Immediately upon arrival, Tarzan goes off on his own and gets lost (with no stars and shadows that never change, it is hard to tell what direction you are facing) and immobilized in a trap and contemplates death as a saber-toothed tiger approaches him--Tarzan, we learn, is what an insufferable hipster might call "not religious but spiritual" and cherishes a hope that there is life after death.

Tarzan of the Apes was not a church man; yet like the majority of those who have always lived close to nature he was, in a sense, intensely religious.  His intimate knowledge of the stupendous forces of nature, of her wonders and her miracles had impressed him with the fact that their ultimate origin lay far beyond the conception of the finite mind of man, and thus incalculably remote from the farthest bounds of science.

When they realize Tarzan is lost, Gridley, a few Germans, and the Waziri, go out looking for him.  The search party blunders into an astounding danger--a big pack of saber-toothed cats are herding a huge crowd of deer, mastodons, giant sloths, "dinotheriums," etc., into a clearing to slaughter and devour them, and Gridley's party gets trapped among the doomed herbivores.  This massacre gives Burroughs a chance to share his own theory of why the dinosaurs and other prehistoric megafauna went extinct, and even a theory on the grim future of mankind; in its earlier chapters Tarzan at the Earth's Core feels like "real" science fiction, what with these sorts of speculations (however wacky) and with all the talk of how to build a superior airship.  But not the science fiction that romanticizes mankind's ability to solve problems and master the universe with science and technology; at the same time that Tarzan at the Earth's Core shows men advancing technologically and demonstrating selflessness and bravery, the novel still is full of that misanthropy we often see in these Tarzan stories, a lot of extravagant silliness about how man is less virtuous than animals:

...man, who is unquestionably the Creator's greatest blunder, combining as he does all the vices of preceding types from invertebrates to mammals, while possessing few of their virtues.

This is fun rhetoric to read, but come on, what "virtue" could we possibly say is possessed by a trilobite or an ammonite, by a skittering skink or slinking snake?  Like the idea that people in Pellucidar have no sense of time because there are no heavenly bodies and no night and day, the idea that animals--even bugs!--are better than people is an idea that makes the novel better by adding a layer of thought and feeling and alienness, but is utter balderdash.   

Tarzan is rescued from the cat who menaces him by a tribe of Sagoths, a savage people with approximately the intelligence of a human but the bodies of gorillas.  They speak the same ape language that Tarzan learned as a boy, so he is able to make friends with one of the biggest and strongest of them.  This prominent Sagoth is exiled from his tribe, and he and Tarzan set off together.  Soon they are joined by a normal Pellucidar human, a man of the mountain country of Zoram.  Like John Carter on Mars, Tarzan in Pellucidar plays the role of the civilizing imperialist who makes the natives less savage, more diplomatic and friendly, and gets the Zoramian and Sagoth, traditional enemies, to become comrades.  

Burroughs' novels generally include a princess and a man--an outsider--who ends up marrying her.  Zoram is famed as a land whose women are the greatest beauties in Pellucidar, and a third of the way into Tarzan at the Earth's Core we meet the expected princess, Jana, known as the Red Flower of Zoram.  We get a long description of her beautiful hair and and barbaric clothes, including her jewelry, made from the bones of a dimorphodon and other small creatures, and then a good chase scene as a chief of a lowland tribe, people whom the mountain tribes hold in severe contempt, and his lackeys try to capture her for the obvious purpose.  In the middle of the chase Jason Gridley appears.

Gridley survived the saber-tooth tiger feast, but was separated from his fellows, and when he got back to the zeppelin he took off in the airship's scout plane to look for his friends.  A pteranodon brings down his monoplane and he bails out, his parachute carrying him providentially right by the beleaguered Jana, who is not only about to be attacked from one side by lowlanders but from the other by hyenadons (when it rains in Pellucidar, it pours.)  Gridley with his Colt .45 revolver and Jana with her spear fight these creatures side by side, driving them off and falling in love, though Gridey doesn't quite grok his own feelings and Jana is reluctant to admit her own.

Adding a note of bitter realism to our male wish-fulfillment fantasy in which guys outfight saber-toothed tigers, pteranodons and cave bears, Gridley says the wrong thing and Jana starts saying she hates him and threatening to murder him and to commit suicide.  Jana performatively runs off and the quarelling couple are legitimately separated by a flood after one of Pellucidar's rare rain storms and Gridley must proceed alone, without a guide; in the process he loses his clothes and his rifle and must face the world as naked as its natives and armed with a spear and a bow he fashions himself.  One of the last things Jana said to him before she left him was that "Only a man may go where goes the Red Flower of Zoram," and by learning how to navigate the obstacles of a world of voracious monsters and treacherous cliffsides without clothes and without firearms, Gridley becomes that sort of man.

Tarzan and his two new buddies head for Zoram after finding the crashed plane and Gridley and Jana's footprints headed that way.  Tarzan is carried away by a pteranodon, and we get additional superior action sequences as he escapes the flying reptile's nest and then has to fight a giant cave bear on a narrow ledge.  The cave bear was attacking a prince of the Clovi people, people who, like the Zoram tribe they habitually raid to steal women, live in the mountains of the Thipdars, and saving the prince allows Tarzan to make friends among the Clovi.  While Lord Greystoke is there, a Clovi raiding party returns with a beautiful captive--none other than Jana, the Red Flower of Zoram, herself! 

Not everybody among the insular Clovi is crazy about Tarzan, and it looks like Lord Greystoke will be executed and Jana will commit suicide as she is forced to marry some local guy.  So the prince of the Clovi helps our heroes escape to a plain inhabited by triceratops and snake people known as the Horibs who ride pareiasaurs, reptiles which Burroughs depicts as being faster than a horse.  Tarzan watches as a squadron of snake people lancers hunt down a triceratops, and then he and Jana are captured by the mounted ophidians.

Meanwhile, Gridley makes friends among the Zoramians by killing a stegosaurus that was attacking Jana's brother.  (At least four times in Tarzan at the Earth's Core, Gridley or Lord Greystoke make friends with people by showing up at the very moment some monster is about to kill them.)  One of the crazier scenes of Tarzan at the Earth's Core is this one, in which the stegosaur glides by jumping off a ridge and lowering its characteristic plates to the horizontal so they serve as wings.  Jana's brother thinks Jana must have been captured by lowlanders, so, while we readers know she is has in fact been in the clutches of the Clovi mountain folk and then the snake people, we observe as Gridley and his new friend seek the Red Flower of Zoram in a village in a swamp.  This swamp is full of giant reptiles of all types, and Gridley is amazed to see a huge snake swallow a trachodon whole.  Further amazement follows as Gridley and friend are captured by Korsars and carried down a river towards the sea.  The pirates' boat is attacked again and again by giant reptiles, and then, finally, by Horibs, whose steeds are just as agile in the water as on the land.  Burroughs gives us a long and mind-blowing horror/battle scene with a surfeit of gruesome wounds and gallons of blood; once the pirate boat is taken by the snake people, Gridley has to watch as the reptile men eat the dead pirates.  Gridley and Jana's brother are carried off by the Horibs to be fattened up for a feast!

In the closing chapters of the novel, Burroughs wraps things up a little too quickly and a little too anticlimactically.  The snake men unwittingly bring Tarzan and Gridley back together, while chance reunites them with the Waziri and then the German airship.  With their modern rifles the Waziri make quick work of the Horibs, then the airship and its bombs awe the Korsars into handing over David Innes.  Somewhat oddly, we don't get a scene of Tarzan and/or Gridley meeting Innes and/or Abner Perry, shaking hands and thanking each other or something.  Despite the uncountable fights and chases they have all been in, the crew that entered Pellucidar on the airship has suffered only one casualty--one of the Germans is MIA.  Gridley decides to stay in Pellucidar to look for mein herr, and when she sees that Gridley is sticking around, Jana finally stops giving him the cold shoulder and the two openly express their love for each other.

(One of my gripes is that Burroughs didn't give the German for whom Gridley is going to search any personality that I can remember, or develop any kind of relationship between Gridley and this German.  Instead of expending time on the black cook, Burroughs probably should have given this German a personality.  Or, had the American cook, maybe through some goofy misstep, get lost in Pellucidar and have him be the man whom Gridley vows to find.)

Tarzan at the Earth's Core is made up of the same basic building blocks of so many of Burroughs' works, but the action scenes and horror scenes are better than average, or at least I enjoyed them more than usual.  The minor characters are not as good as some we have seen, but they aren't bad, and I have already said I enjoyed the stuff about the German dirigible and Burroughs' various evolutionary theories.  It is a little hard to judge, seeing as it has been a while since I read them, but I think I like this one better than the last three or four Burroughs novels I've read. So, thumbs up, I certainly recommend Tarzan at the Earth's Core.

It looks like the fifth Pellucidar novel appeared in 1937, preceded by the fourteenth through nineteenth Tarzan books, so it will be a while before we return to the Earth's Core.  I wonder if Gridley ever finds that German.

Tarzan and the Lost Empire by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“I wish that Nyuto would see me and talk with me,” said Tarzan of the Apes. “Then he would know that it would be better to have me for a friend than for an enemy. Many men have tried to kill me, many chiefs greater than Nyuto. This is not the first hut in which I have lain a prisoner, nor is it the first time that men have prepared fires to receive me, yet I still live, Lukedi, and many of them are dead."

In January, we read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which Tarzan met the descendants of English crusaders who were still living like it was the medieval era right there in the middle of Africa.  In February, we read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which David Innes met the descendants of 17th-century pirates who were living like it was the 1600s right there in Pellucidar.  Well, it's March and today we're going to read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel in which Tarzan meets people descended from Roman legionaries who are living like its the 1st century A.D. right there in the middle of Africa.  Africa really is the most diverse continent! 

Tarzan and the Lost Empire debuted in 1928 and '29 across five issues of the magazine Blue Book.  Four of those issues of Blue Book have cover illos devoted to the latest saga of Lord Greystoke, and these illustrations are laden with spoilers--who could have guessed that Tarzan would fight a lion in this adventure?

I am experiencing Tarzan and the Lost Empire via my $1.25 Ballantine copy of the novel, Ballantine 24171, which has a Boris Vallejo cover.  The cover of the paperback says "complete and unabridged," but I don't know about that.  In Chapter 10 of this edition we find "rein" for what appears (correctly) as "reign" in Ace F-169, the 40¢ edition with the Frazetta cover, and in a 1931 Grosset & Dunlap hardcover.  Now, maybe that is just a typo.  But look at the epigraph I have placed at the head of this blog post, Tarzan telling a member of the Bagego tribe, who are preparing to burn Lord Greystoke alive, that he has been captured many times and escaped many times.  Tarzan, in my Ballantine edition, says "...nor is it the first time that men have prepared fires to receive me...."  But in the Ace and Grosset & Dunlap editions Tarzan says "...nor is it the first time that black men have prepared fires to receive me...."  The word "Negro," capitalized in my Ballantine, is not capitalized in the Ace or Grosset & Dunlap printings, and at least once "blacks" in the older books is replaced in the Ballantine with "Negroes."  Maybe not a big deal if you are reading Tarzan for fun, but something to keep in mind if you are reading these novels with an eye to learning about the period in which they were written or about Burroughs himself and what he actually wrote. 

Burroughs gets right down to business as we begin Tarzan and the Lost Empire.  After Tarzan's little buddy Nkima the monkey opines that the white man is the worst kind of man (Tarzan doesn't count, he being considered by all a creature of the jungle), a white man shows up to request Tarzan's help.  This guy is a German missionary, Doctor von Harben.  His son Erich, an expert linguist and archaeologist and an amateur mountain climber, is missing!  The Doctor and Tarzan, like everybody in the jungle, know of the legend of a white tribe living in the Wiramwazi mountains, and when Erich heard about the legend he decided to investigate it.  But he hasn't returned from this expedition, even though some of his African porters have come back.  These survivors of the expedition to Wiramwazi are pretty close-lipped about what happened, and the Doctor asks for Tarzan's help.  By the sixth page of text, Tarzan is already on his way to Wiramwazi, little Nkima (you can see him on the cover of Blue Book and in Frazetta's cover illo for Ace F-169) sitting on his shoulder.   

In Chapter 2 we join Erich on the slopes of the Wiramwazi.  Erich has been abandoned by all his black hirelings, their superstitious fears of the ghosts said to inhabit the mountains having overcome their courage.  These deserters took all of the expedition's food and rifles with them, but Erich isn't sore--after all, what can you expect from a bunch of Africans?  Anyway, he has his Luger and can hunt rabbits with it as he climbs the mountains in search of their secrets.

For much of the novel the narrative switches back and forth between Tarzan's adventures and Erich's.  As Tarzan proceeds to the Wiramwazi, Nkima, a coward and a blusterer, offers pretty entertaining comic relief.  It is thanks to Nkima's interference that  Tarzan falls while climbing the outer slope of the Wiramwazis and hits his head; unconscious, he is captured by a tribe of blacks, the Bagego.  For centuries, the Bagego have been in contact with the white tribe of the Wiramwazi; the whites sometimes raid the Bagego, and sometimes trade with them.  Among the Bagego there is no consensus on whether the Wiramwazi tribe is made up of flesh and blood men or ghosts--many think the white men are actually the ghosts of the Bagego's ancestors.

Meanwhile, Erich is rejoined by his most loyal black hireling, Gabula, and the two men go through several pages of mountain climbing which Burroughs renders quite entertaining.  On the other side of the Wirmwazi, Erich and Gabula find a valley with a swamp, forest, river and island; when they get down into the valley they are captured by black warriors.  These Africans speak a version of Latin, and bear swords and spears that remind Erich of those used by the ancient Romans!  These blacks are provincials of a small Roman empire, and take Erich and Gabula to the fortified city with an architecture much like that of classical Greece and Rome where live the people who dominate them.  This city is inhabited by a small elite of white people (among them a beautiful woman, daughter of a leading intellectual, Favonia, by whom Erich is smitten),  a soldier and commercial class of mixed-race people whom Burroughs refers to as "brown," and a working and slave class of blacks.  Apparently the  Roman ruling class arrived here almost 1900 years ago and have had no contact with other white people since then; they have made little technological or cultural progress and wear togas and throw people into the arena and so forth.

The Bagego village is raided by brown legionaries commanded by a white officer and Tarzan is captured along with a bunch of villagers.  it turns out here are two Roman cities in the valley beyond the Wiramwazi, each with its own Emperor, and they have been engaged in a cold war for over 1700 years.  The city Erich was taken to is Castrum Mare; Tarzan is dragged to the other, Castrum Sanguinarius.  Erich has managed to make friends over in Castrum Mare because he speaks Latin, but Tarzan can't speak Latin, and in Castrum Sanguinarius he is tossed in the dungeon under the arena, and then dragged before Emperor Sublatus.  Taller, faster and stronger than everybody else, Tarzan escapes the Emperor's court, humiliating the Emperor in the process.  Looking down into a courtyard from a tree, Tarzan spots an aristocrat trying to rape a woman, and, Good Samaritan that he is, he rescues her.  The would-be rapist turns out to be Emperor Sublatus's son, Fastus!  The woman is Delicta, daughter of a senator.

Erich is taken to meet the Emperor of Castrum Mare, Validus Augustus, and the Emperor is fascinated by Erich's knowledge of the history of Rome since the founder of Castrum Sanguinarius left Europe during the reign of Nerva.  Erich is shanghaied into the job of writing down all he knows about European history and even writing Validus Augustus' biography.  Here, at the midway point of the novel, we get exposition about the history of the two Roman cities here in this African valley and a dose of that court intrigue that I find kind of boring, and the novel, which has been fast paced and focused on interesting relationships heretofore, bogs down a little bit.  It didn't help that I briefly mixed up the conniving courtier of Castrum Mare, Fupus, adoptive son of Validus Augustus, with the equally villainous Fastus, son of Sublatus, over in Castrum Sanguinarius.

For weeks, while Erich is in Castrum Mare, ascribble scribble scribble (but taking breaks to flirt with Favonia), Tarzan is in hiding in Castrum Sanguinarius, protected by Delicta's fiancé, a popular officer in the army, and learns to speak Latin (which he could sort of read, already, thanks to his European education.)  But eventually Sublatus's lackeys get their hands on Tarzan and Delicta's fiancé, and they end up in the dungeons under the arena along with many blacks and a spy from Castrum Mare, an aristocrat out of favor with Validus Augustus but popular with the people sent here in a fool's errand.  Burroughs has been hinting that Castrum Mare is the better-run and less corrupt of the two Roman cities*, though the current Emperor is corrupt, and now he makes it very clear.  Also made more clear is that there are many many more Africans in the valley than white people; Tarzan begins to consider leading the blacks in an uprising against the cruel Sublatus regime.

*Heredity and eugenics are recurring themes in Burroughs' work, and we learn that there is almost no crime in Castrum Mare because, for many centuries, criminals have been executed--along with their families!  This keeps criminal tendencies from polluting the gene pool. 

The last third of Tarzan and the Lost Empire is solid adventure fiction, with Tarzan making friends with and becoming leader of the men with whom he is imprisoned and who fight at his side in the arena over the course of a week-long celebration and then in the uprising against Sublatus that Tarzan sparks.  What goes on in the dungeon, as the men plot to escape, and in the arena and during the uprising, the different types of fights that Tarzan and his comrades get forced into, is entertaining.  Burroughs puts a lot of focus on human relationships--the evolving and quite fickle sentiment of the crowd towards Sublatus and Tarzan, and Tarzan's own relationships with his fellow prisoners.  In the climax of the arena sequence, Sublatus, having failed to destroy Tarzan by making him fight men and then a lion, has six apes set upon him, only to see the apes recognize Tarzan as a friend.  These apes form an important part of the uprising, as do the black tribes of the valley and even Tarzan's own tribe, the Waziri, summoned from far away by Nkima.

Having overthrown Sublatus and put the father of Delicta on the throne of Castrum Sanguinarius, Tarzan and the Waziri, along with that spy and others, march at the head of an army to Castrum Mare to rescue Erich.  Erich has been thrown in the arena thanks to the machinations of Fupus, who wants to marry Favonia, but before the games begin the daring Gabula comes from out of nowhere to murder Validus Augustus in front of the assembled populace.  In the ensuing chaos, Erich and Gabula and the other people sentenced to the arena escape to hiding places within the city; Fupus becomes Emperor.  Fupus's agents find Erich and friends just as the army that is with Tarzan arrives and overthrows the unpopular and incompetent Fupus; Erich is saved and can marry Favonia, and that spy is made Emperor.  The novel ends with Tarzan praising the initiative taken by Nkima in bringing the Waziri.

Tarzan and the Lost Empire, the twelfth Tarzan book, is a step up from number 11, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.  The arena, fighting, and mountain climbing scenes here in book 12 are better than the jousting and fighting scenes in its predecessor, and the characters and their relationships are more fun.  The Roman cities embroiled in a cold war in this novel are more interesting than the medieval cities locked in a cold war in the previous novel.  So, thumbs up for Tarzan and the Lost Empire.  I'm looking forward to Tarzan #13, Tarzan at the Earth's Core! 

Detail of illustration from the February 1929 Blue Book

Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Stellara!” he cried. “My darling!” But the girl turned her face away from him.

“Do not touch me,” she cried. “I hate you.”

“Stellara!” he exclaimed in amazement. “What has happened?”

It is time to read the third Pellucidar novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tanar of Pellucidar, which first appeared as a six-part serial in Blue Book in 1929.  We've already read the first two Pellucidar books, At the Earth's Core and Pellucidar, the saga of the development of the empire of American David Innes in the savage inner world that lies far beneath our feet, a world whose sun sits forever at the zenith so your shadow always lies directly beneath you, a world that is home to stone age humans, psychic matriarchal pterosaurs, giant cave bears, plesiosaurs, and an endless array of other dangerous people and animals.  It looks like this novel will shift gears and star not an imperialist reformer from the surface but a native of Pellucidar.  

Like most of Burroughs' output, Tanar of Pellucidar has been reprinted many times.  I'm reading the $1.95 Ace copy my brother sent to me back in 2019 when he mailed me our combined Edgar Rice Burroughs collection.  This paperback, over 240 pages of text (like 60 pages longer than my Ace Pellucidar), has a brilliant Frank Frazetta cover; the composition is terrific--the curve of the muscleman's body, the way the wind pulls his hair, etc., --as are the moody colors.  The man's face and expression are also good--sometimes Frazetta's faces are a little flat or lack expression, but this one is fully realized graphically and emotionally.  A flawless Frazetta classic.

OK, Tanar of Pellucidar, taken as a whole, is the least of the Pellucidar books so far.  It feels long and it feels repetitive, what with people getting captured, escaping captivity, and then getting captured again and how an apparently endless series of love triangles and repeated instances of irrational jealousy keep the love birds at the center of the story apart; and then there are some elements of the story that are derivative and a little silly.  However, some parts of the book (mostly in the last quarter or so) are as good as anything in either of the two previous Pellucidar volumes, and amidst the repetitious escapes and fits of jealousy Burroughs gives us some satirical social commentary about sexual mores and some mind-bending science fiction concepts, so I am still recommending Tanar of Pellucidar, and looking forward to my next forays into Pellucidar and into the wider Edgar Rice Burroughs canon.  

For a blow by blow recounting of the novel's plot and a look at its themes, and my own little criticisms, read on.

Five of the six issues of Blue Book in which installments of Tanar appear 
have cover illustrations promoting Burroughs' serial that focus not on
how Tanar's love interest is constantly jealous but rather on how Tanar has to
fight one oversized mammal after another

**********

The Prologue to Tanar of Pellucidar is about how Burroughs has a friend, Jason Gridley, who has discovered a new radio wave; tuning into this wave on his receiver exposes him to some mysterious signals.  Eventually, somehow, he starts receiving Morse code transmitted by Abner Perry, David Innes' right hand man, from the other side of Earth's 500-mile thick crust.  Then comes the Introduction of the novel, which is in the voice of Perry, who reports that Innes and his empire are in trouble!  A piratical sea-faring race of humans, previously unknown to the region of Pellucidar familiar to Innes, Perry and us readers, has been raiding the empire of Innes and, among other crimes, carried off Tanar, the son of one of Innes' closest native friends, a king of one of the principal constituent kingdoms of the empire.  Innes has set out after Tanar in a boat with one other comrade and with a captive pirate as a guide.  

The main text of Tanar of Pellucidar is written in the third person omniscient, and begins with Tanar captive aboard a pirate ship.  The humans Innes encountered when he first arrived in Pellucidar had a stone age technology, but these pirates bear Renaissance or Early Modern equipment like high-decked sailing ships, arquebuses, and that sort of thing.  Burroughs leans into the stereotypical pop-culture image of a pirate pretty heavily, in a way that I found kind of silly; these troublemakers hail from a country called Korsar and wear gaudy brightly-colored head scarves and sashes, carry cutlasses, and make people walk the plank.  After the exotic and original Mahars and Sagoths of the last two books, a bunch of cartoonish pirates are a real let down, although I should perhaps count my blessings--one of my pet peeves is the romanticization of pirates, and Burroughs portrays these pirates as totally evil.

The Korsars' gunpowder is inferior to that developed by Perry and used by the people of Innes' empire, so Tanar manages to get better treatment from his captors by suggesting to the supreme leader of the Korsars, a man known as The Cid (good grief), that if he and his fellow prisoners are kept healthy they can teach the pirates how to manufacture superior powder.  

Burroughs' heroes generally develop relationships with princesses, and, sure enough, the daughter of The Cid, Stellara, is aboard and Tanar and she see something, each in the other, that is intangible but alluring, much to the envy of Bohar the Bloody One, The Cid's lieutenant, a particularly ugly and emotional pirate.  A freak storm wrecks the ship, leaving many aboard dead or facing an uncertain fate on the ship's scattered boats; when the storm passes the only living souls aboard the drifting hulk are Tanar and Stellara.  Tanar learns Stellara is not really a Korsar, which he sort of expected because she was the only person among the pirates who wasn't acting like a total jerk.  Stellara explains that she is the daughter of a woman of a stone age tribe resident on the island of Amiocap, the island of love.  The Cid captured mom and took her as his mate--according to mom, Stellara was conceived just a few days before her mother was captured, so the Korsars think Stellara half-Korsar, but Stellara is confident she is 100% Amiocapian.

The derelict ship drifts to an island that turns out to be Amiocap.  The stone age people there are skeptical of Starella's claim to be of their race, and similarly doubt Tanar's tale that he is from a kingdom and an empire they never heard of.  While imprisoned and scheduled for execution, Stellara and Tanar begin to get an inkling that they are in love with each other, but they are too shy to open up about their feelings, dooming their love to travel a rocky road.  The first actual expression of that love is Stellara's jealousy when a local girl who brings the prisoners food voices her great admiration for the handsome Tanar.

Mammoths attack the village and in the excitement Tanar and Stellara escape.  Tanar, earlier in his career, was captured by a tribe of the monkey people we saw briefly in At the Earth's Core and they taught him how to travel in the jungle canopy and our hero uses this ability--which he teaches to Stellara--to flee the natives without leaving a trail.  I have to admit I was a little disappointed to see Burroughs pulling a gag out of the Tarzan tool box so soon after giving us the trite pirate stuff and a guy named "The Cid." 

They can't spend all their time aloft, and back on terra firma Tanar and Stellara are forced to contend with a Coripie, the bane of the humans of Amiocap, a sort of subterranean ghoul.  Stellara pitches in during the fight; in fact, the Coripie would have killed and eaten them both if not for her participation in the struggle.  Our heroes then meet a human mammoth hunter; he is fleeing an enraged mammoth, and Tanar helps him kill the beast.  As we readers have been led to expect from earlier in-your-face foreshadowing, this man turns out to be Stellara's father, chief of a nearby village.

Tanar and Stellara take up residence in her father's village.  Here Burroughs hits us with some social commentary.  The people of Amiocap are very open about love; men and women have no compunctions about and face no social pressure against expressing their attraction to each other.  Burroughs tells us that this is psychologically and sociologically healthy and that much of the unhappiness experienced in our own world here on the outer surface of the crust is the result of men and women failing to make manifest their love for members of the opposite sex.  Of course, Tanar is not of this island, and while Stellara has the blood of these people, she was raised among the evil Korsars, so even in this free-love environment neither of our main characters directly reveals his or her love to the other, and this reluctance causes them a lot of trouble, with Stellara, for example, manipulating people to make an oblivious Tanar jealous.

Bohar the Bloody One survived the storm, and, while Tanar is away hunting, Bohar leads a Korsar attack on the village and carries off Stellara.  When Tanar returns and hears this horrible news, he chases after the pirates.  During a brief fight with the Korsars he falls in a hole and lands in the labyrinthine world of the Coripies, who capture him and add him to the local Coripie tribe's larder.  Instead of tearing captives apart to be eaten at once, standard operating procedure among the Coripies, the chief of this tribe of the ghouls has decided to hoard enough captives to hold a big feast at which there will be enough fresh meat for every member of the tribe. 

Most of the captives fated to be eaten alive at the upcoming feast are condemned criminals from this Coripie tribe or captives taken from other Coripie tribes, but with the arrival of Tanar two humans are now on the menu.  The other human is a guy named Jude from the island of Hime.  I wondered if this guy was going to be Burroughs' vehicle to comment on the Jewish people, and I am still not sure if this was Burroughs' intention.  Jude is bitter, depressed, and full of hate for everybody; Tanar suspects this may be because he's been cooped up as a doomed prisoner for so long, and so this may not be a reflection of his original character or the character of his people, but soon enough he will learn the truth.

Jude being so disagreeable, Tanar becomes more friendly with one of the Coripies from a rival tribe of ghouls, Mow, than with his fellow human.  Tanar learns from Mow all about the totally evil culture of the Coripies, who have no word for love in their language; I guess the ghouls are a foil for the free love humans of Amiocap.  Subject to food shortages, the Coripies practice population control, executing any female who gives birth to a third child.  As a result, male Coripies don't have sex with females they like, for fear of setting them up for execution, and instead rape females they don't like, and female Coripies do not love their own children.

Mow knows a secret way out of the cavern that is their prison, though team work is required to use it.  Mow and Jude both hate all the other prisoners, but with his sunny disposition Tanar is able to weld the three of them into a team.  Mow is killed during the escape, but after a long march through dim tunnels, during which Jude's extreme pessimism provides comic relief (this is one of the more entertaining sections of the novel), Tanar and Jude make it to the surface.  Where, in one of the wild coincidences that are so common in Burroughs' work, they immediately stumble upon Bohar the Bloody One who is strangling Stellara because she has refused to have sex with him.

Tanar kills Bohar and he and Stellara finally give voice to their love for each other.  But at the first opportunity Jude of Hime kidnaps Stellara, puts her in a canoe and heads for Hime.  Tanar sets out after them but is delayed by having to fight an array of monsters, one after the other.  Having defeated a sabre-toothed tiger, then crossed the water to Hime, then escaped a herd of bison, Tanar ingratiates himself with a native of Hime by killing a huge wolf that threatens him; this kid is the son of a chief, and he brings Tanar home.    

The people of Hime turn out to be Burroughs' device for attacking the bonds of matrimony.  (It is interesting to see Burroughs presenting this Ted Sturgeon type material as early as 1929--speculative fiction, even adventure-type fiction in which a guy gets captured and escapes every week or so and has to kill a monster every weekday and twice on Sundays, has always been questioning society and proposing alternatives.)  The people of the island are all bitter and angry and the families constantly fight amongst themselves and against others, spouse against spouse, sibling against sibling, spouse against unfaithful spouse's adulterous lover, etc.  Why?  Because divorce and separation are forbidden on Hime, and when the members of a married couple no longer love each other they become so unhappy they not only cheat but get violent and their animosity poisons all relationships around them.  I guess this is the complementary component of the free love philosophy Burroughs demonstrates on Amiocap--people should express their love freely, and then, if you are no longer in love with your lover, you should dump him or her tout suite instead of maintaining the loveless relationship.

Among these endlessly quarreling people Tanar encounters Gura, a young woman who isn't as full of hate and violence as the rest of the Himeans--she is half Amiocapian, her Himean father having kidnapped her mother.  (All across Burroughs' body of work, heredity is very important in determining one's character and behavior.)  Gura helps Tanar escape when her father plots to kill Tanar, he suspecting his wife is in love with Tanar.  In fact it is Gura who is in love with Tanar.  

Tanar and Gura, Jude and Stellara, and the eighteen Karsars who were previously under the command of Bohar the Bloody One all wind up in the same cave.  Stellara, seeing the half-Himean/half-Amiocapian girl with Tanar, gets jealous and tells Tanar she hates him.  The wily Jude escapes, but Stellara, Gura and Tanar all end up on a ship to Karsar--Tanar is separated from the women and doesn't see them aboard ship or when they arrive at the big city (population half a million) that is the capital of Karsar.  We learn a little about the city, perhaps the largest and most technologically and economically advanced in Pellucidar; for example, the bearded and brilliantly attired people of Karsar lord it over a vast countryside of smooth-faced stone age slaves who grow the food the city dwellers eat.  Societies in Burroughs' fiction that aren't absolutely stone-age seem often to have an economy based on slavery.

The last 60 or 70 pages of Tanar of Pellucidar, the parts after Tanar's arrival in the city of the Karsars, are more entertaining and interesting than almost all of what came before in the previous chapters.  The monsters are more gross.  The escape attempts are more tense.  The satire and social commentary is gone, there is more gore, and more of a horror vibe, and the details all feel more unusual and more original.  Did Burroughs draft this stuff at the end and the early chapters first and then pad out the novel's length by writing the repetitive middle?  

Among the captives in the giant-rat-infested dungeon into which Tanar is thrown is David Innes, Emperor of Pellucidar.  Innes and Tanar convince The Cid to treat them well and give them some freedom of movement so they can set up a manufacturing capability in Karsar for the production of  decent gunpowder.  (Karsar gunpowder fails to ignite like half the time.)  They eventually manage to escape with Stellara and Gura after hatching a scheme that is sort of interesting, certainly more compelling than earlier escapes in the novel.  They venture through and beyond the slave-inhabited countryside to cold regions few Pellucidarian have ever explored.  Amazingly, their shadows lengthen, and off in the distance, beyond some kind of weird ocean, Innes sees what he believes to be Sol, the sun about which Earth orbits!  This must be a passage between Pellucidar and the Arctic!  The existence of this passage is among several clues that suggest that the Karsars are the descendants of 16th-century pirates who somehow made their way from the surface of the Earth down here to Pellucidar 400 or so years ago.  (Remember how English crusaders got stuck in Africa in the medieval period and maintained their jousting culture all the way up to the 20th century in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle?  I guess these pirate jokers similarly are still building sailing ships and making people walk the plank after four centuries.)  This revelation, which I guess I should have predicted, makes the silly names and derivative behavior of the Karsars a little less annoying.

Having made this mind blowing discovery, the party turns back and starts the long march to Innes' empire, but they manage to get captured and imprisoned by Karsars yet again.  Tanar and Innes are put in a different dungeon than last time, separately, in solitary confinement.  In probably the best section of the novel, Tanar struggles to maintain his sanity in a tiny lightless cell where he is tormented by swarms of nonvenomous serpents.  Of course he eventually figures out how to escape, but this is the most compelling escape attempt yet in a novel full of escape attempts.  And of course the first people he runs into once he has escaped the dungeon are Stellara and the man who is about to beat her because she refuses to have sex with him, but the ensuing fight, in which Tanar kills this guy, is a pretty exciting fight.  Tanar then cuts off this guy's beard to use in making disguises for himself and Stellara.  The lovers bluff their way out of the city and a long chase follows, and then Tanar and Stellara make it back to Innes' empire.  The novel ends inconclusively, however, with David Innes, apparently, still stuck in solitary under the Karsar city, and on a cliffhanger--in the "Conclusion," Burroughs' friend, Jason Gridley the radio inventor, declares he is going to do something to help Innes.  What could this be?  I'm curious to find out!

Well, stay tuned because ERB will be back on MPorcius Fiction Log soon, after some more recent short stories by divers hands.

Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

We both had to smile at the use of my royal title, yet I was indeed still "Emperor of Pellucidar," and some day I meant to rebuild what the vile act of the treacherous Hooja had torn down.

But first I would find my empress.  To me she was worth forty empires.

The first sequel to At the Earth's Core, Pellucidar, appeared as a serial in five installments in All Story Cavalier Weekly in 1915.  The cover painting of the issue with the first episode almost looks like a repainted crop or detail of the painting used to advertise episode #1 of At the Earth's Core a year before.  An interesting choice, I guess meant to catch the eye of the drug store customer who recalled fondly the first Pellucidar adventure, or perhaps suggesting a pretty woman's face was thought to sell more copies than the body of a muscleman, the bulk of a brontosaurus, a terrifying pterosaur or a roaring sabre-toothed tiger.  Later printings of the book are actually more indicative of the novel's distinctive content and feature such dangerous beasts.  Not long ago, at the same antique store where I spotted a Paperbacks From Hell bargain which I took a pass on, I purchased an Ace edition of Pellucidar with a great Frank Frazetta cover and that is what I will be reading today.*  The image gracing this 1978 Ace paperback, sometimes known as Flying Reptiles, is one of my favorite Frazetta works, and within my breast resides a dear hope that the people at Frazetta Girls will one day put out a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of this painting for me to hang up next to my beloved 1000-piece Vampirella jigsaw puzzle.

*Alas, this thing is full of typos and errors like "sate" for "state" and "described" for "descried" and "purpose" for "propose" which did not appear in a scan of a 1955 British edition I consulted.  For shame, Ace!  

In the prologue to Pellucidar, an amazing coincidence leads to the discovery of a telegraph line buried in the African desert.  The main text of the novels is a transcript of the Morse code signals that come through this device, transmitted to the surface from the inner world of Pellucidar by David Innes, who is the primary narrator of the novel, as he was of its predecessor.

As the main text begins, Innes travels to Pellucidar in his iron mole, which he has packed full of books, firearms and ammo; he arrives in that strange inner world he knows not where.  Amazingly, after marching around for a while, shooting the native wildlife for food and admiring the scenery (like Tarzan and John Carter, Innes has come to love the alien milieu to which he arrived through an unlikely series of events, even the inhabitants of this bizarre world are always trying to enslave or kill him), the first human being Innes runs into is his pal, elderly scientist and fellow American, Perry.

You'll remember from At the Earth's Core that, on his first trip to Pellucidar, Innes was accompanied by Perry.  Innes won the heart of the beautiful native Dian while Innes and Perry made progress in the grand project of uniting all of Pellucidar's primitive human tribes under an empire, the emperor of which was Innes himself, and equipping Innes' loyal subjects with superior weapons, like swords and archery, in hopes of liberating the human race of this inner world from the cruel domination of the diabolical matriarchal pterosaurs known as the Mahar and their brutal lackeys, the gorilla men known as the Sagoth.  Perry has some bad news for Innes.  Thanks to the machinations of the tricky Hooja, a human who himself covets the princess Dian, the human tribes are again in conflict and the Mahar and Sagoths have been giving homo sapiens a right thrashing!  Dian, whom Perry has not seen in ages, even doubts Innes' love for her!

Our ambitious American heroes set out to find Dian and rebuild Innes' empire.  On the way to the most loyal of the many human kingdoms which had pledged loyalty to Innes, they have many adventures, blasting many huge mammals with their rifles, making fur coats so they can cross a snowy mountain range, building a boat so they can cross an ocean infested with icthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.  They meet up with a tribe of humans who are friends of Innes but not part of his anti-Mahar empire yet--these humans have a trade relationship with the Mahars.  A bunch of these people go back to the iron mole with Perry to collect the invaluable equipment and supplies Innes has brought, while another bunch of them accompany Innes on his trip towards the heart of his empire.  Innes' party runs into trouble--Sagoths take them by surprise and Innes is dragged to the Mahar city where he was a slave during his first trip down here!

There are no extant male Mahars and this reptilian race of man-eating scientists reproduces itself via an arcane process of fertilizing their eggs after they have been laid.  These foolish females have only one copy of the fertilizer formula, and in At the Earth's Core Innes stole that book and hid it.  The Mahars demand Innes reveal the location of their guide to sexless reproduction, without which the Mahars will go extinct.  Innes refuses and is thrown in the arena.

Amazingly, another human captive is thrown in the arena at the same time--Innes' wife and empress, the princess Dian!  One third of the way through the book, these lovebirds are reunited.  Also amazingly, an influential Mahar whom Innes did a good turn arrives in town during the gladiatorial games and when she sees Innes down there about to be eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, she has the ferocious feline carried from the arena by three of the animal-level intelligence pterosaurs who serve as the Mahar leadership's bodyguard.

The Mahars give Innes another chance to earn his freedom by returning the book.  He is inclined to refuse again, but Dian is a smart cookie with a deep faith in her husband and in the modern technology of the surface people which she has heard about from hubby and Perry.  Dian explains to Innes that it doesn't matter if the Mahars regain the ability to reproduce--if Innes is free to unite the humans of Pellucidar and teach them how to use modern technology, no number of cold-blooded psychic rhamphorynchazoid bitches will be able to withstand the attack of homo sapiens Pellucidaris!  While if Innes remains shut up in this Mahar city, the disorganized human tribes won't be able to hold their own stand against even the current number of Mahars.  Like every good husband, Innes admits his wife is right and takes her advice, agreeing to go get the book in return for his and Dian's freedom--of course, until the book is returned, Dian will be a hostage among the Mahars.

(One of the interesting thing in the first two Pellucidar books is how the Mahars initially view the humans as mere cattle and we humans get the idea the Mahars are totally evil monsters, but, as things progress, the Mahars begin to realize that the humans are reasoning beings and Innes and we readers get a sense that maybe the Mahars can be trusted to keep their word.)

When Innes reaches the cave where he hid the book he finds it is absent!  When he gets back to the Mahar city, he learns that somebody purporting to be his agent, now long gone, has already delivered the book to the matriarchal flying reptiles and the Mahars in return surrendered Dian into this joker's custody.  It was the crafty Hooja, who figured out where the book was and has again separated Innes from his lady love!

Innes sets off after Hooja and Dian through the land of shadow.  You see, suspended in the air at the center of the Earth is something like a sun which warms and illuminates the inner surface of the Earth's crust upon which all the people and beasts of Pellucidar tread.  Hanging a mile above this surface, rotating but never changing its position, is a sort of planet or moon, a huge sphere with its own hills and valleys and so forth, and its own gravitational pull.  This moon casts a shadow on the surface of Pellucidar that never moves.  Within this shadow, where plants grow far less robustly, there is a kingdom of humans who use diplodocus as beasts of burden, Thuria; the Thurians have expressed an interest in joining or allying with Innes' empire, seeing as they have long been subject to the oppression of a nearby Mahar city, and recently been attacked by a newly founded kingdom based on an island just outside the shadow, a kingdom that is allied with the Mahars and employs many Sagoth soldiers--the kingdom ruled by Hooja!

(Hooja as a recurring character really adds something to these Pellucidar books, even though his death is underwhelming, he being among those drowned as a boat sinks, instead of dying in a showdown with Innes or Dian.  Of course, maybe this means he can reappear in a later book--cross your fingers, Hooja fans!)

On his way to Thuria and then Hooja's island, Innes has some good adventures, some of the best scenes of the book.  Among these capers is his taming of a hyaenadon; it is good Innes has this monstrous dog fighting by his side, because while he is sleeping somebody steals his revolvers and his rifle.  The hyaenadon also provides Burroughs a chance to give Innes more of an inner life with his descriptions of how the man loves dogs.  The thieves also stole the token Innes bears that proves his identity as Emperor, and the lack of it gets him accused by the Thurians of being an agent of Hooja.  Oops!  So, instead of being at the head of a Thurian army, Innes sets off for Hooja's island kingdom in hopes of rescuing Dian all by his lonesome.         

His dog having left him, Innes is quickly captured by the natives of the island, seven-foot-tall farmers, sort of half human, have beast types.  These peaceful giants are the first farmers Innes has met in Pellucidar.  The beastmen hate Hooja and his invaders, and Innes tries to get them to join forces with him in a war on Hooja, but they figure Innes is Hooja's spy and put him to work in the melon patch.  One of Burroughs' jokes here in Pellucidar is that the beastmen tell Innes he will be executed when the melons are harvested, so Innes tries to delay the harvest, fostering the growth of weeds.

A force of Hooja's men and Sagoths attacks the beastmen's settlement, and the beastmen realize Innes really is their friend when he shows them how to drive off the attackers.  Innes is freed and guided to Hooja's HQ.  The first person he meets there is a human whose village Hooja's thugs took over, a man who is in league against Hooja with none other than Dian, who, though a captive herself, helped this guy to escape Hooja's dungeon.  

Again we see that Dian is very brave and very capable.  You sometimes hear people moan that women in old SF stories are mere damsels in distress who need rescuing, but when I read old SF books I often encounter women like Dian who are clever and brave and resourceful.  A more sensical feminist complaint is that immortalized in the Brueghel Test: resourceful women in old genre fiction generally employ their abilities and demonstrate strength of will not by pursuing some peculiar personal interest of their own, or fighting to improve the condition of their sex or social justice more broadly, but in trying to build or preserve a relationship with a man, the good characters making sacrifices and taking risks to protect a man's life and freedom, the villainous female characters trying to manipulate and dominate men.

Anyway, this guy directs Innes to where Dian is being held, and there are good fight scenes and action scenes as Innes, Dian and their pal escape Hooja's thugs...only to be captured by Hooja's lackeys again.  Luckily a page later the beastmen farmers rescue them.  Then somebody on a diplodocus kidnaps Dian, but Innes' pet hyaenadon returns and makes possible the rescue of Dian.  All these action scenes are individually entertaining, but their impact is somewhat lessened by the fact that after one of our guys  performs prodigies of valor and benefits from astounding pieces of luck he or she will just get captured all over again.

The last two chapters of Pellucidar tell the story of the big naval battle between Hooja's primitive fleet of little boats and the fleet of feluccas equipped with lateen sails and black powder artillery that Perry has constructed off screen and, after Hooja's defeat, how Innes and Perry set up their empire, uniting humanity and friendly non-humans into a federation of kingdoms, seizing all the Mahar cities and driving the matriarchal pterosaur-women off to uncharted territory, establishing an economic system based on barter--no money or resales allowed!--teaching the savage Pellucidarians about mercy, and so on.  This material is kind of utopian and appears in summary form rather than dramatic form, and also reminds us of how John Carter made himself Warlord of Mars and taught the people of Barsoom how to better behave.  Like his Barsoom and Africa stories, Burroughs' Pellucidar stories both celebrate white imperialism and the alleged noble aspects of the "close to nature" lives of barbarians, savages and animals.  We might roll our eyes at this effort to have your cake and eat it too, or, more sympathetically, suggest Burroughs is presenting a utopian synthesis of what is good about modern Western civilization with what is (supposedly) good about life in environments and societies that are more "natural" and less "artificial."   

I enjoyed Pellucidar and of course recommend it.  This sequel differs in tone from At the Earth's Core, being much more optimistic and positive.  I've noted above how the Mahars are a little more sympathetic, the scenes about the wonderful relationship between people and dogs, and the presence of pacific non-human farmers, and the novel's happy ending in which a just society with no money is created in Pellucidar by Innes and Perry.  Again and again Innes and Perry develop healthy and productive relationships with animals and people, relationships which are complementary and foster personal growth in the individuals within the relationships and positive change in the world beyond the relationship.  Another way Pellucidar is "lighter" than At the Earth's Core is its relative lack of horror elements; At the Earth's Core was full of scenes in which people and animals were tortured, dismembered, or lost eyes, and there is very little of that in Pellucidar; though people in the thousands get killed in the wars and fights it depicts, the gore element is much reduced.

A good adventure story with some utopian elements.  There are a bunch more Pellucidar books and I'll be reading more of them in the near future, but first we'll be back to reading short stories that have been anthologized and thus, presumably, represent above average specimens plucked from the vast sea of 20th-century genre fiction.

At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

For a moment I was puzzled to account for the thing, until I realized that the reptiles, being deaf, could not have been disturbed by the noise my body made when it hit the water, and that as there is no such thing as time within Pellucidar there was no telling how long I had been beneath the surface. It was a difficult thing to attempt to figure out by earthly standards—this matter of elapsed time—but when I set myself to it I began to realize that I might have been submerged a second or a month or not at all. You have no conception of the strange contradictions and impossibilities which arise when all methods of measuring time, as we know them upon earth, are non-existent.

Let's return to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs with the first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth's Core, which debuted in 1914 in serial form across four issues of All-Story Weekly.  The cover illustration of that first appearance appeals to readers' interest in women in chains, but such masters as Frank Frazetta, J. Allen St. John and Bob Eggleton have graced many of the book reprints of At the Earth's Core with terrific reptile-centric covers.  In 1976 a very fun film based on the book and starring fan favorites Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro hit the big screen and in 2015 at a thrift store in Iowa I bought a hardcover movie tie-in edition of At the Earth's Core; that is the version of the novel I will be reading today. 

At the Earth's Core has a prolog in which a man who is acquainted with members of the Royal Society tells us that he unexpectedly ran into another white man among Arabs in the African desert; the main text of the novel is the author's recounting of the wild tale related to him by this gentleman, who was astonished to learn his adventure began ten years ago--he thought it was just one year!

This main narrator is David Innes, a native of Connecticut and physical fitness hobbyist who inherited a successful mining business.  Innes is friends with Perry, an old scientist and a religious man who, with Innes' financial backing, developed a superior engine and used it to power a colossal vehicle of his own design, a sort of ship that could bore through rock and earth.  Burroughs, like a legit science fiction writer, comes up with solutions for the problems presented by travelling through dirt and solid rock, like ways to refresh the air in the machine, how to make sure the occupants are seated upright no matter the direction the "iron mole" is travelling, where the earth dug away by the drill nose of the vessel must go, and so on.  Innes is our leading man, who does the fighting and who gets involved in love triangles, while Perry plays the role of comic relief and of wise man--he gets scared and prays and swears when there is danger, and it is he who identifies the exotic fauna they encounter (his hobby is paleontology) and figures stuff out by reading alien documents that providentially fall into his hands.  Much of the plot of At the Earth's Core is driven by Perry's inventions and aspirations; the rest is propelled by Innes' relationships.

The iron mole's test voyage, crewed solely by Innes and Perry, quickly goes awry, neither brainiac Perry nor muscleman Innes  finding himself able to steer the machine.  The iron mole drills downwards for days, carrying our heroes hundreds of miles below the Earth's surface.  Just as the vessel's air supply is about to run out, after digging through bands of rock and ice of radically diverse temperatures, the machine unexpectedly emerges into a region that offers cool fresh air!  Has Innes and Perry's conveyance accidentally been turned round and come back to the surface?

Of course not; the adventurers have emerged in a subterranean world alongside a placid sea, below a sun that forever sits in the center of the sky.  This is Pellucidar, a world on the inner surface of the hollow sphere that is the Earth, somehow held there by a gravity that pulls people away from the center of the planet, where hangs a small sun.  Burroughs puts some real effort into describing this world, most mind-bendingly, the psychological effect of living in a milieu where the sun doesn't move, so there is no sense of time--Burroughs even suggests that there is no such thing as time, that it is an illusion.  Even if this stuff is unconvincing--all the talk of time in At the Earth's Core I personally consider absolute balderdash--it adds texture and additional levels of interest to a story that is, of course, mostly about a guy who meets a princess in an alien world and gets involved in her wars, like most of Burroughs' compositions.  

Almost at once, Innes and Perry are set upon by a huge prehistoric mammal, and only escape destruction thanks to the intervention of some naked monkey-people and their teeming pack of ferocious canines.  These jolly primitives, whom Burroughs describes as having the skin color and facial features of "the Negro of Africa," have no tools or weapons, but they have a village fifty feet above the surface in the branches of trees, as well as a crude arena into which they throw Innes and Perry to be devoured by a hyaenodon.  Before the hyenadon can overpower them, furry gorilla people who have clothes and weapons attack, putting the monkey people and hyaenodon to flight and adding Innes and Perry to their chained line of captive humans.

The gorilla-people lead the chained humans past a sea teeming with battling plesiosaurs and icthyosaurs and giant turtles to the city of their masters, the Mahars.  Innes makes friends with a beautiful woman chained next to him, Dian, and she teaches him the language of her tribe.  Also among the captives is Hooja, who covets the beautiful Dian.  When Hooja gets fresh with Dian, Innes punches him out.  According to the custom of the humans of Pellucidar, this makes Dian Innes' property--he is expected to formally take her as a mate or give her her freedom, but Innes doesn't know this idiosyncrasy of local culture yet, and Dian is insulted and gives Innes the silent treatment.

When the party of gorilla men and captives passes through a dark tunnel, Hooja, a deft hand at picking locks, escapes and takes Dian with him.  Now that Dian is gone, another captive explains Pellucidar sexual relationships to Innes, and also helpfully points out that Dian is the princess of her people.

Innes and Perry end up in the city of the Mahars, where humans by the thousands serve as slaves to the dominant race of this inner world.  The Mahars are intelligent pterosaurs up to eight feet long who are deaf and communicate among themselves via some mental power and with lesser races, like the gorilla men, their servant and soldier class, through sign language.  The slavery our heroes endure doesn't involve particularly taxing work or particularly severe surveillance--Innes and Perry are assigned jobs like shelving books and find free time to make swords out of scrap metal that is laying around.  From the Mahar documents he is supposed to be dusting, Perry learns the history of the flying psykers--the current Mahars are all female, having figured out a way to artificially fertilize their eggs and then dispensed with the males.  Innes conceives a scheme to topple the hegemony of these scaly matriarchs and put homo sapiens where he belongs in Pellucidar as on the surface--on top!   

We readers are administered a hearty dose of gore and brutality when, as exemplary punishment for their fellow humans and as entertainment for the Mahars, two disobedient slaves with whom Innes and Perry are not acquainted get thrown into the Mahar's elaborate arena with two huge prehistoric mammals, a gargantuan bovine and a titanic feline.  Chaos erupts when one of these colossi ends up out of the arena and among the audience; Innes seizes this opportunity to sneak out of the underground city and back out into the wider world.  He meets a tribe of human fishermen who have a business relationship with the Mahars; as so often happens in these Burroughs stories, our protagonist ingratiates himself with strangers by helping them fight a monster.  We get an additional helping of horrible gore as this fisherman guides Innes to a Mahar temple, where they watch as the Mahars hypnotize and eat human women and children--because they are hypnotized, these humans do not flinch as their limbs and breasts are eaten off!  Yikes!  Male human slaves are devoured, without benefit of hypnotism, by the low-IQ pterosaurs who serve as the intelligent Mahars' watchdogs and bodyguards.

At the Earth's Core is a something of a peripatetic novel, one in which the narrative, instead of proceeding directly from point A to point B to point C, instead wanders here and there a bit.  The episode of the primitive monkey people, for example, seems to serve little plot purpose, though it is entertaining--why have Innes and Perry captured by the good-natured savages and then captured by the barbaric henchmen of the Mahars, why not just have them get captured first by the gorilla-men?  Similarly, Innes escapes the city of the Mahars, witnesses some horror scenes, and then just goes back to the city.  There is also some foreshadowing that doesn't pay off.  All this "extra" material is fun or otherwise affecting, so doesn't weaken the novel, but on reflection the plot is far from streamlined.

Anyway, Innes decides to return to the city of the Mahars to be with Perry and work on their scheme to overthrow the Mahars and civilize and Christianize the humans of Pellucidar.  When Innes is reunited with the old man, Perry suggests it was only an hour ago that they parted in the arena, while Innes, who has been marching for miles and miles, rowing canoes, fighting monsters, and witnessing atrocities, feels like months have passed.

The Mahars interrogate Innes, the strangest slave they have ever owned--no escaped slave has ever returned of his own volition, and no human has ever claimed to be from another world.  The psychic matriarchal feminist rhamphorynchusoids determine Innes must be lying about being from some outer surface world and sentence him to live vivisection--the Mahars may not have invented the bow and arrow or discovered electricity, but they are skilled biologists and eugenicists.  Innes, in chains, watches as the Mahars vivisect a shrieking living man, but luckily contrives to escape before being put on the operating table himself.  

Innes and Perry then put into operation their plan to destroy the Mahars--two natives, Hooja, who has been recaptured by the Mahars, and a another guy, have joined their crusade.  Innes slays four Mahars (three of whom were asleep when he launched his attack) and the men skin them and don their scaly hides as a disguise.  They steal the only copy of the formula for the fertilization chemicals the Mahars use to reproduce without male participation, and manage to sneak out of the city.

For months--maybe years!--the four men march across Pellucidar, overcoming obstacles and fighting off monsters.  The gorilla-men of the Mahars are on their trail, and catch up to them just before the fugitive slaves reach a human tribe.  The party splits up, the treacherous Hooja sneaking off and Innes going it alone in a successful effort to divert the gorilla-men away from poor old Perry and the hulking native who has to carry the Yankee inventor.  Innes has good fortune--a huge cave bear ambushes and massacres the entire company of gorilla-men.

Perry and his native companion escape to a human settlement, but Innes gets lost amid mountains and canyons and does not reunite with them for some time.  By chance he runs into Dian, the beauty who has been incessantly on his mind since her escape from the slave raiding party, just as she is being attacked by a pterosaur.  Innes kills the flying reptile and then has to contend with Jubal the Ugly One, a seven-foot tall he-man who has been after Dian, and whom she has been avoiding, the whole of her postpubescent life.  More horror material from Burroughs--Jubal is a famous fighter of monsters, and his body bears testimony to his many battles; the flesh of one side of his face, including an eye, is missing, the bones of his skull exposed.  Having defeated this brute, Innes still has to figure out how to win the heart of Dian, who keeps saying she hates him.  Of course, she really loves him, and when he gets frustrated enough to throw aside his civilized gentlemanliness and just grab her and kiss her against her (apparent, performative and false) will, she melts in his arms.  

Dian is keen on Innes' plan to unite the human tribes and teach them how to make bows and maybe even gunpowder and firearms and exterminate the Mahars and their gorilla-men.  The two lovers seek out Perry and begin to put the plan into action; Dian's tribe is one of the first to join the human coalition, of which Innes is declared Emperor!  But our heroes find that producing gunpowder is more difficult than anticipated, so Innes takes the iron mole back to the surface to get the science books that will spell it out for them.  But the iron mole again proves impossible to steer and Innes ends up in the Sahara instead of New England.

As the novel ends the author of the prolog has again taken up the narrative.  He tells us Innes has collected the books and other equipment he wants to bring back to Pellucidar with him, but doesn't know if Innes has made it back to Perry and Dian down in Pellucidar.  Like the first Barsoom book, the first Pellucidar book ends on a cliffhanger!

At the Earth's Core is a quite good adventure story with plenty of science fiction elements that speculate on how you might get to the Earth's core, what a society of deaf feminist monsters might be like, how the lack of a view of the sky might affect you psychologically, the nature of time, etc.  Of course the plot relies on wacky coincidences and at its center has a guy meeting and falling in love with a princess, as do so many Burroughs plots, so if that gets on your nerves I can't recommend At the Earth's Core to you.  But let's consider some ways At the Earth's Core may be different from other ERB classics.  I think the fight scenes in At The Earth's Core are a little more believable than many of those that take pace on Barsoom and in Tarzan's Africa--Innes doesn't single-handedly outfight huge animals or hordes of men all the time like John Carter and Lord Greystoke do.  The novel also has a sort of horror or grand guignol flavor to it, thanks to the fact that people and animals are forever getting mangled and dismembered.

I really enjoyed At the Earth's Core and look forward to our next journey down to Pellucidar.  There are five or six more Pellucidar books, so I suspect we have plenty of mutilation and musing about the nature of Time ahead of us.  But first we'll have a blog post addressing one of our bread and butter topics here at MPorcius Fiction Log.