Edgar Rice Burroughs, Pirates of Venus

Pirates of Venus is the first book in the Venus series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, published in serial form in 1932 and in book form in 1934. This was the last of his book series. Compared to the Tarzan, Mars (Barsoom), Carnak and Pellucidar cycles it’s just a tiny bit disappointing. Burroughs was very good at creating imaginary worlds that radically differ from our own world. His world of Venus (the inhabitants call it Amtor) is not quite as imaginative.

Carson Napier is bored with his life. He needs an adventure. So he decides to go to Mars. He’s a keen rocket hobbyist and he is convinced that he can build a rocket that could reach Mars. He builds the rocket and it is launched successfully, with Carson Napier as the sole passenger. Unfortunately he made a mistake in his calculations and he ends up heading towards the Moon instead. The Moon’s gravitational field alters his course and he assumes that he is going to be headed off into the limitless void of space. 

But at this point he gets a lucky break. He ends up on Venus.

He discovers that scientists were both right and wrong about Venus. The planet is indeed covered in thick layers of cloud but it is no uninhabitable. He encounters one group of inhabitants immediately, the Vepajans. They live in the trees. Literally in the trees - they live inside the trunks of the trees. These are not like trees on Earth. These trees grow to a height of 6,000 feet and the trunks of some of them have a diameter of 500 feet or more.

The Vepajans are friendly but they warn him not to try to approach the girl in the garden. Naturally he does approach her and he falls instantly in love with her but she gives him the brush-off in no uncertain terms.

Carson gets captured by the birdmen of Venus and after a number of unpleasant experiences he turns pirate. The book then becomes a pretty decent pirate adventure yarn, but in ships that use what sounds like a 1932 idea of what nuclear power might be like.

There’s plenty of action and Carson doesn’t forget about the girl. Despite her coldness he is sure that she secretly loves him.

Apart from the fact that Amtor is not quite as interesting as Carnak or Pellucidar there’s another problem with this book. Burroughs decides to indulge in some political satire. His target is communism. Sadly the satire is incredibly heavy-handed.

Carson Napier is your basic Edgar Rice Burroughs hero, largely interchangeable with all the others. Burroughs had a formula and he stuck to it. He know how to make that formula work and how to produce exciting stories. His world-building could be extraordinarily impressive. Pellucidar remains one of the great fantasy worlds.

Pirates of Venus is entertaining, the city in the trees is a nice idea and like all Burroughs books it’s well-paced.

It’s also worth mentioning that you only get a partial plot resolution at the end. There’s a kind of cliffhanger which sets things up for the next book in the series.

If you’re new to Burroughs then start with the first of Pellucidar stories, At the Earth’s Core, or the first of the Carnak novels, The Land That Time Forgot, or the first of the Mars books, A Princess of Mars. Pirates of Venus is a lesser work. Recommended, if you’re already a hardcore Burroughs fan.

Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs created a number of extraordinarily well thought out imaginary worlds, of which Pellucidar was one of the most interesting. The Pellucidar cycle began with At the Earth’s Core in 1914. The first of the sequels, Pellucidar, followed in 1915. It was published as a four-part serial in All-Story Weekly. It appeared in book form in 1923.

The adventures of David Innes beneath the surface of the Earth seemed to have come to an end at the conclusion of At the Earth’s Core but Innes still has a lot of unfinished business in Pellucidar. Most of all he has to find Dian the Beautiful again.

Pellucidar is not just a world beneath the Earth. It’s an inside out world. The surface of Pellucidar is the inner surface of the hollow Earth. It has its own sun, right at the centre of the Earth. There is of course no horizon since this world’s surface curves upwards.

And, curiously enough, there is no time in Pellucidar. Which is to say that while time obviously passes there as it does elsewhere there is no means of measuring the passage of time. There is no night, just endless eternal day.

Pellucidar is a Stone Age world. There are several intelligent species. The most advanced are the Mahar, winged reptiles who communicate entirely by telepathy, and even they are fairly primitive technologically. The humans of Pellucidar are firmly mired in the Stone Age. There are also several species of both ape-like men and man-like apes.

In At the Earth’s Core David Innes had managed to unite a number of human tribes to establish the Empire of Pellucidar, with himself as emperor. On his return he finds that his empire has collapsed. And his empress, Dian the Beautiful, has disappeared. He does manage to find his old friend Abner Perry and with his help he intends to regain his empress and rebuild his empire.

This book is certainly not lacking in action. There are the narrow escapes from certain death that you expect in any adventure tale but there are also full-scale sea battles. Innes encounters some old enemies and acquires some surprising new allies.

Innes is a pretty standard adventure hero. He’s brave and resourceful and determined and extremely noble. Abner Perry is more interesting. He’s basically a coward but he’s still an extremely useful sidekick and in his own way he’s stubborn and determined.

The various intelligent species of Pellucidar are all quite distinctive with the Mahar being particularly interesting. They’re an odd mixture of cruelty and honour.

This is pure pulp fiction in style but it’s definitely exciting.

Burroughs had a particular gift for world-building. And over the course of his career he created a whole series of fascinatingly different imaginary worlds.

Pellucidar is in some ways very much like prehistoric version of Earth, complete with species extinct on the surface of the Earth for millions of years. In other ways it’s a seriously strange and alien world and Burroughs makes good use of some of its subtly strange qualities. In a world in which there are no stars and the sun is always directly overhead finding your way about can be challenging. If you sail out of sight of land you have no means of navigation whatsoever. You are simply lost, as happens to our hero at one point. The impossibility of measuring time also plays its part in the plot.

Burroughs was one of the masters of pulp adventure fiction and Pellucidar is fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Jungle Girl

Jungle Girl is a 1933 lost world tale by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Given that Burroughs was the creator of Tarzan of the Apes you might expect this to be a female Tarzan-type story but it isn’t. It does however have a jungle setting and a jungle girl, of sorts.

Gordon King is a young American exploring the jungles of Cambodia. King was trained as a doctor (which will later prove crucial to the story) but being a wealthy young man he has decided that archaeology might be more fun than practising medicine. He is hoping to discover traces of the vanished Khmer civilisation, perhaps even something as exciting and significant as the ruins of Angkor Wat. Being a city boy with no experience of trekking through forests he is soon hopelessly lost. And then he stumbles over a rock with some curious and unquestionably ancient inscriptions. He is still lost however and is on the point of giving up and just patiently waiting for death. When he sees an old man dressed in a yellow tunic and carrying a red parasol he assumes he has become delirious. Even in his (supposed) delirium he manages to shoot a tiger that is about to make supper out of the old man. He also sees a party of soldiers dressed in bronze armour and an elephant with a howdah and a beautiful girl in the howdah. Obviously more delirium dreams.

Having passed out from hunger, exhaustion and despair he wakes up to find himself in a small stone building. The stone hut is home to a hunter and his wife and child, and the wife nurses Gordon back to health. Gordon may be a city boy but he is a natural athlete, having been a champion track-and-field competitor. His specialty was throwing the javelin, a sport at which he set a world record. This skill makes him a fine hunter and he is soon accompanying the husband on hunting trips.

There is a major surprise in store for Gordon King. He will discover that the old man with the red parasol, the bronze-clad warriors and the girl on the elephant were not symptoms of delirium. The old man was the high priest of Lodidhapura. The girl, Fou-tan, was on her way to join the harem of King Lodivarnam. He has stumbled upon something far stranger than the ruins of the ancient Khmer civilisation. He has discovered that this ancient civilisation still exists, hidden deep within the jungle, entirely cut off from the outside world. The people of Lodidhapura believe that their jungle comprises the entire world, and that there are only two cities in the world, their own and the neighbouring city of Pnom Dhek.

This lost civilisation knows nothing of anything that has happened in the outside world for many centuries, possible even for a millennium. It is however a thriving civilisation in its own way. King Lodivarnam can put into the field many thousands of warriors and hundreds of war elephants. The city itself is vast and splendid, the king’s palace is large and magnificent.

And what of the girl Fou-tan? She is a girl of Pnom Dhek who had run away to escape a forced marriage, was captured by the soldiers of King Lodivarnam and is now destined to be his latest concubine. This prospect fills her with despair, for King Lodivarnam is not only known for his cruelty he is also a leper!

This is not the only reason that Fou-tan does not wish to share the king’s bed. She and Gordon King have fallen in love. 

Gordon King’s determination to somehow save Fou-tan will involve him in a series of thrilling adventures, and thrilling adventures were the sort of thing Edgar Rice Burroughs was very good at. He was also remarkably good at what science fiction and fantasy fans call world-building - the ability to create complex and fascinating imaginary worlds. The world of Lodidhapura is certainly complex and fascinating. There is more to King Lodivarnam than is at first apparent - he is a man who has been dealt a tragically poor hand by fate but he will turn out to be more than a simplistic villain. There are villains in this story but most of the characters are more complicated than this and they have reasons for doing the things they do.

Lodidhapura is neither a utopian paradise nor a city of evil. It is a society bound by tradition, for both good and ill. Its citizens have the usual array of human frailties, and human strengths. The major characters are on the whole neither wholly good nor wholly evil. 

Gordon King belongs to the square-jawed action hero tradition but he is not infallible nor is he a super-man. He is brave, reasonably intelligent and determined. His love for Fou-tan inspires him to perform heroic deeds, and while a hero motivated by old-fashioned decency and by love for a beautiful and spirited girl might be an old-fashioned sort of hero that is in my opinion no bad thing.

The 1941 Republic movie serial Jungle Girl was advertised as being based on the Burroughs novel but it actually has no connection whatsoever with the novel apart from the title. Republic bought the rights to the novel purely in order to get the title (which was obviously a great title for a 1940s movie serial).

Edgar Rice Burroughs is a writer who is somewhat unfairly neglected these days. He had a talent for writing stories that combined high adventure with some very intriguing ideas. His ability to create highly original imaginary worlds can be seen to full advantage in his Carnak stories (beginning with The Land That Time Forgot), his Pellucidar novels (beginning with At the Earth's Core) and his Martian novels (such as A Princess of Mars). Jungle Girl is perhaps less ambitious and certainly less fantastic but it is nonetheless a very fine novel of adventure and a very satisfying lost world tale. Highly recommended.

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes

Tarzan remains Edgar Rice Burroughs' most famous creation. Apart from the huge sales of the many Tarzan novels the character appeared in numerous movies and television series. Like Sherlock Holmes Tarzan is an indelible part of our popular culture. People who’ve never read a Tarzan book know who Tarzan is.

Tarzan of the Apes, first published in book form in 1914, was the first of the series and is therefore crucial in not only introducing the character but in giving us the story of his birth and his childhood among the apes.

Lord Greystoke and his wife are marooned on the West African coast after a mutiny on the ship in which they were travelling. They do not survive for more than a year, but their newborn son (and heir to the title of Lord Greystoke) does survive after being adopted by an ape who has lost her own offspring. The young Lord Greystoke is named Tarzan by the apes.

The apes among whom Tarzan is raised are not gorillas. They are an imaginary species of ape, slightly higher on the evolutionary ladder than gorillas. They are a sort of missing link between mankind’s ape ancestors and modern humans, still basically animals but possibly possessing rudimentary language skills. Tarzan claims also to understand the language of elephants and other animals so the question as to whether the apes really possess a language as such is perhaps debatable.

Tarzan might not be as strong as an ape but he grows stronger than an ordinary man and this allied with his superior intelligence allows him to survive, and eventually to become the chief of the band of apes. He is now Tarzan, King of the Apes, a fearsome hunter and killer. Tarzan exults in his hunting prowess but he has vestiges of a human conscience and kills only to survive.

When the apes encounter hostile African tribesmen Tarzan proves to be equally successful as a hunter of men.

The hut in which his human parents lives until their deaths becomes a sort of shrine to Tarzan. Although he he is unaware of his human parentage he comes to suspect that he is not an ape but a man. From books in the hut he learns to read but not to speak English.

Then comes the day he encounters his own people again. The eccentric Professor Porter, accompanied by his daughter Jane and his colleague Philander, has also been shipwrecked after what seemed to be a crazy treasure hunt proved to be surprisingly successful. This encounter will eventually lead Tarzan to Paris and to the United States.

Tarzan will also discover love, with Jane Porter, but he has two rivals, one of whom provides an unexpected link to his past.

Burroughs was always fascinated by the ideas of lost worlds and of evolution going in unexpected directions and while these ideas are dealt with in a different way here compared to say the Peklucidar or Barsoom books, they’re still present. The ape society in which Tarzan spends his childhood and youth is typically Burroughsian.

This Tarzan is both more savage and, paradoxically, more civilised than the Tarzan of the movies. He’s truly a man caught between two cultures, and between the two sides of his own nature. Highly recommended.

A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars, published in 1912, was the first major success for Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was the first of his many Martian or Barsoom novels.

John Carter is a gentleman of Virginia in the period just after the American Civil War who suddenly finds himself on Mars. Early science fiction writers came up with all sorts of fanciful methods of transporting their heroes to other planets. Burroughs solves the problem very simply but in a manner that cleverly leaves as many options as possible open for sequels. This was something that Burroughs did habitually but it’s interesting to see him doing it in such an early work.

John Carter has a kind of out-of-body experience in a remote cave and then wakes up on Mars, which he will soon learn is known as Barsoom to its inhabitants.

Life on Mars faces many difficulties, most especially the scarcity of water and the precariousness of the atmosphere which can only be maintained by artificial means. Mars was not always like this but it has been for millennia a dying planet, the home to dying civiisations. This is one of the earliest examples in science fiction of the dying world. Although Barsoom is not quite dying - the Martian civilisations had developed very sophisticated technologies, technologies that still function despite the decline of the civilisations that gave birth to them. The air and water supplies remain stable as long as the technology functions.

Barsoom is home to several vaguely human-like creatures. There are the giant white apes about which we are told little. And there the Green Martians, described in great detail. They are the first Martians John Carter encounters, human-like in some ways but with six rather than four limbs and with tusks. They are intelligent but savage. Their society is a militaristic communistic society. Duels to the death are an everyday occurrence. Green Martians laugh readily but their laughter is always provoked by cruelty, violence and torture. Their offspring are raised communally and without any real family life they have become vicious and violent.

They are not all bad though and John Carter will form surprising friendships with several of these green men and women.

The third group of human-like creatures are the Red Martians, very much like humans apart from the fact that like all the human-like inhabitants of the planet they are egg-layers. Their skin has a pronounced reddish hue, just as the skin of the Green Martians has a greenish hue.

John Carter discovers he has one huge advantage over all the Martians - being from a planet with much stronger gravitational forces than Mars he is much stronger than they are, and much more agile. This will not only save his life but also earn him recognition as a warrior and leader.

He finds love on Mars, with the beautiful Red Martian princess, Dejah Thoris. He also finds himself in the middle of several wars, unsurprising since Barsoom’s inhabitants are addicted to war.

Burroughs had a gift for creating imaginary worlds that are truly alien - worlds where the physical, biological and social rules are quite different as compared to our world. In Pellucidar (the world inside the Earth) for example gravity is inverted. On Barsoom the continued existence of an atmosphere is dependent on machines.

He had an equally strong gift for telling entertaining stories and A Princess of Mars is a great deal of fun.

At the Earth's Core, Edgar Rice Burroughs

At the Earth's Core, published in 1922, was the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels. I’ve always found his books to be highly entertaining and ingenious in their imagining of strange worlds and that’s certainly the case with this one.

The book opens with a framing story, as the narrator encounters a solitary and rather disheveled European somewhere in the wastes of the Sahara Desert. The man is named David Innes and he has a strange story to tell.

Professor Perry has invented a machine called the Prospector, although he sometimes refers to it as the Iron Mole. It’s an enormous manned digging machine a hundred feet long designed to burrow deep below the surface of the Earth. David had been an ex-student of his and was a wealthy young man and he’d agreed to finance the professor’s project.

When they take the Prospector for a test run things go horribly wrong. The machine gets out of control and takes them much much deeper into the Earth’s crust than they anticipated. As the temperatures rises alarmingly and their air supply nears exhaustion they prepare themselves for death but then the temperature plummets, rises again, and then plummets again. The machine then breaks through the Earth’s crust. They assume that they emerged somewhere on the surface, but in fact they are now in the strange inside-out world of Pellucidar.

The Earth is hollow, and the world of Pellucidar occupies the inside surface of the planetary crust. Obviously there are major problems making such a world sound even vaguely plausible. Where would they get their sunlight from? Or indeed any light at all? How would gravity work in such a world? Burroughs comes up with some pretty nifty ideas for solving these problems. They’re all ridiculous of course, but they’re clever and once you accept the idea of an inside-out world they do have a certain crazy logic, and even certain elegance.

There are people in Pellucidar, but they’re not the dominant race. The rulers of Pellucidar are the Mahars. They’re winged dinosaurs, rhamphorynchus in fact, although much bigger than the actual rhamphorynchus that once inhabited our outer world. They have no ears but are able to communicate with each other by some means that never becomes entirely clear to our intrepid inner-world explorers. They are intelligent and literate. They are served by the subject race of the Sagoths, a kind of apemen, less intelligent but useful as the Mahars’ foot-soldiers. Menial work is done by human slaves.

Professor Perry and David are soon captured by the Sagoths, to be pressed into service as slave labourers. Among the other captives of the Sagoths David meets Dian the Beautiful. She is a princess of one of the human tribes, proud and beautiful. David’s attempts to befriend her come to grief when he accidentally offends her, princesses being fairly easy to offend.

David eventually escapes but he will have to return to the Mahar city to rescue Professor Perry. He is also determined to find Dian again, and he is starting to form plans to liberate Pellucidar from the Mahars. There will be many hazards, Pellucidar being full of gigantic and extremely fierce animals, many of them long extinct on the upper world, and many much larger in size than the animals of our world. Combined it the menace of the Mahars and the Sagoths he is setting himself quite a task.
It’s all outrageously entertaining and Pellucidar is a strange and fascinating world brought vividly to life (as is the case with Burroughs’ other imaginary worlds). It has beautiful princesses, savage monsters and a brave and noble hero. These are features that might be sneered at today but there’s a lot to be said for them. They work for me anyway.

Burroughs died in 1950. His work remained popular for many years and experienced a revival in the 70s when the sword & sorcery genre was at the peak of its popularity. Sadly he’s been rather forgotten since then but the good news is that so many of his books are now once again available, mostly in print-on-demand form.

He’s an under-appreciated writer whose influence on the science fiction and fantasy genres is seriously underrated.

Definitely recommended.

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his Caspak Trilogy, starting with The Land That Time Forgot, in 1918. It became an instant classic of the Lost World genre of adventure fiction. It also happens to be one of the strangest of all Lost World tales.

These days the word trilogy has taken on an ominous quality. We imagine immense volumes the size and weight of house bricks. The whole of the Caspak Trilogy however amounts to no more than a relatively short novel. It comprises three very short novels, The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot and Out of Time’s Abyss. Each of these three novels recounts a different series of adventures, with different protagonists, on the mysterious island of Caspak. The three separate narratives are drawn together at the end of the final volume.

The Land That Time Forgot takes place in 1916. A steamship is torpedoed by a German U-boat. The only survivors are a young woman named Lys and a man named Bowen Tyler who, in one of life’s little ironies, is an American engineer who designs submarines for various navies including the Imperial German Navy. These two survivors are picked up by an ocean-going tug that later encounters the very same U-boat, and through a mixture of luck and daring the crew of the tug ends up capturing the U-boat and its crew. Their attempts to sail the submarine to England are thwarted by the efforts of a communist agitator and they end up hopelessly lost.

It seems their troubles might be over when they make a landfall, but the large island they have found is a very bizarre island indeed. It was originally discovered by an obscure 18th century Italian explorer. There is only one means of reaching the interior of the island, by navigating the U-boat through an underground river. The island is in the polar regions but the interior is warm and covered in lush vegetation. It’s also inhabited by long-extinct animals including dinosaurs, and a variety of creatures that are either human-like apes or ape-like humans.

So far it’s your standard lost world scenario, but as our heroes progress northwards through the island they find the animals, while still long extinct elsewhere, are increasingly modern. And the man-like creatures are closer and closer to modern humans both anatomically and culturally.

The explanation for this odd evolutionary continuum, and for the the absence of any children, is a tour de force of imaginative weirdness which I don’t intend to spoil for you.

The first book gives us Tyler’s story. The other two books follow the adventures of a rescue party sent to find Tyler, and of another party separated from the original band who arrived on the submarine.

The whole trilogy is a fun pulpy tale of encounters with terrifying creatures, of improbable escapes and dashing heroism, and of three unexpected love stories. It’s the truly strange nature of Caspak itself though that is most disturbing and most memorable. If you like your weird fiction with extra weirdness then this certainly qualifies.