Tag Archives: Edgar Rice Burroughs

July 20, 2025 · 5:30 am

A liar, a spy, an artist: books I’ve been reading.

Oops — after reviewing the first six volumes in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar series, I never got around to writing up the final collection, Savage Pellucidar. Like a number of his later books, this was four interconnected novellas published separately; the fourth and final installment was lost until the 1960s when it turned up in Burroughs’ files. The results are much more entertaining than the previous volume, Back to the Stone Age.

(Cover by Frank Frazetta)

This has David Innes’ Empire of Pellucidar at war with the brutal tyrant Fash (I’m assuming a pun as these came out during WW II) but that’s merely a premise to get everyone scattered and running around for the usual adventures. What makes it stand out is that the women get a larger role than usual. Dian the Beautiful proves extremely capable in her solo adventure but the cheerful liar O-aa (“If you beat me, my five brothers will kill you — and I’ve killed more men than they have!”) steals pretty much the entire book (particularly when she’s enshrined as a Living Goddess and proves harder to handle than the priesthood expects). Heavier than usual in contemporary references; of course this was the era Burroughs would crack jokes in Tarzan books about Johnny Weismuller, but I had to google “Pegler and Mr. Brown” to make sense of it. Still a fun finish to the series.

Ever since reading A Spy Among Friends I’ve wanted to reread Tim Powers’ take on treacherous spy Kim Philby, Declare. As I belong to a “Genre Book Club” (everyone picks a book from a specific genre to discuss) and July’s genre was historical, that proved incentive enough.

Protagonist Andrew Hale draws MI6’s attention early in his life, for reasons he doesn’t quite understand (nor do we for a long time). We see him in WW II, working with and falling for Elena, a Spanish communist and loyal Soviet agent (this was back when the USSR was among the Allies fighting against the Axis); in 1948, before, during and after a disastrous mission to Mt. Ararat; and in 1963, as he goes to engineer a final confrontation with Philby, the most effective and damaging of several Soviet agents working in British intelligence.

After the opening in the nightmarish aftermath of the Ararat mission, the first third of the book is mundane with hints of something supernatural going on. Powers says in the afterword that he wanted to write a John LeCarré novel and it’s very much in the LeCarré vein: complicated missions, shifting loyalties, superiors who are often untrustworthy. Then Hale has his first encounter with the supernatural element — primarily described as djinn, but also as Nephilim — and lord, they are terrifying and awesome (in the “inspiring awe” sense). Things get more supernatural after that, though there’s still a lot of LeCarré.

The novel suffers a little on rereading. Now that I know more of Philby, I think the novel shortchanges his impressive spy career; Powers says he was more interested in the unexplained odds and ends of Philby’s life but I think more of the big picture would have helped. And Powers isn’t as good writing spy stuff as LeCarré (who is?) so I found some stretches a little draggy. But that was partly me: it was one of those weeks when our pets and their needs generate enough mental chaff I can’t focus on reading as much, and the book’s dense (I might have set it aside, if not for the book club). Still, one of Powers’ best.

ALTER EGO is Alex Segura’s sequel to Secret Identity, the story of lesbian Latina working at the mid-seventies Triumph Comics (probably modeled on Atlas Comics, which among other things produced Howard Chaykin’s The Scorpion, seen above with a Chaykin cover) and getting involved with murder over her creation, the Lynx.

In the present day, Triumph has been shuttered for 40 years. Annie, a Cuban-American comics creator turned film director, was thrilled as a kid to discover a Latina could make comics; with her movie career on hiatus, the son of Triumph’s founder invites her to join in the company’s revival by drawing a new Lynx series. Annie can’t resist, but once again death is lurking …

Segura does a great job capturing the feel of modern creative work in an environment where Annie’s latest film got shelved for a tax write-off and lots of executives look at art and story as just “intellectual property” they can monetize. Unfortunately the bad guys’ scheme (spoilers!) is too stupid for words: once Triumph starts publishing comics, they’ll make movies based on the comics and reap billions from the Triumph Cinematic Universe! Which will pay off the debts they’ve run up with the Russian mob! That’s certainly worth a murder or two, right?

Seriously? DC, which has the most recognizable superheroes on the face of the Earth, hasn’t been able to make a go of a cinematic universe; Universal’s Dark Universe crashed and burned, and their horror films are famous too. Using characters who haven’t been seen in 40 years is hardly a slam-dunk, even if the comics take off. Possibly Segura takes it as a given readers will get this but it doesn’t occur to Annie, even in her private thoughts.

There’s also the same problem I had with the Lynx in the previous book: nothing about it screams “classic comics.” Annie’s story for reviving the Lynx is close to Alan Moore’s revival of the British hero Marvelman and the more recent Sentry at Marvel (at least some takes on that character); that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work but I’d think a comics nerd like her would be aware of this. And a comment about how the Lynx teaming up with her best friend’s ghost made her standout in the Bronze Age makes no sense: both DC and Marvel were big on supernatural stuff, with Spider-Man teaming up with Ghost Rider (as on the Gil Kane cover here), Batman with Spectre and so on. I don’t think I’ll be back if there’s another sequel.

All rights to images remain with current holder.

From Angola to Tschai, from Metropolis to Pellucidar: books

NJINGA OF ANGOLA: Africa’s Warrior Queen by Linda M. Heywood looks at a 17th century ruler who fought a long resistance against Portuguese colonization and slave-trading, eventually establishing herself as a Portuguese vassal (as opposed to complete subjugation) through a mix of military action, diplomacy, religion (converting to Christianity accomplished a lot, though Heywood thinks it was a sincere act of faith as well as good politics) and effective spectacle — like many great rulers, Njinga knew how to put on a show.

Unsettling in showing that the African culture could be as brutal and ugly as colonialism and everyone on both sides thought nothing of trading slaves like currency. Also good on showing the complexity of the politics: at one point the Jesuits scotched a peace deal because they resented that Njinga had negotiated it through Capuchin priests. While European historians for decades portrayed Njinga as barbaric and oversexed she was a hero in both Angola and Brazil (the Portuguese shipped a lot of slaves there from her part of Africa).
Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure quartet has Earth agent Adam Reith respond to a distress call from the planet Tschai only to be shot down at the beginning of CITY OF THE CHASCH. Tschai turns out to be occupied by several alien species and their human followers, plus the sinister native Pnume; humans independent of the aliens have developed the typical bizarre cultures of a Vance world. With no allies and no way to contact Earth, can Reith survive, let alone learn who downed him?

That first book was only okay but SERVANTS OF THE WANKH picked up considerably (and if you laughed at the title, you’re not alone). Here there’s much more emphasis on how Reith negotiates Tschai’s strange societies, more complicated by the number of them trying to con or manipulate him (it reminds me a lot of Eyes of the Overworld). When I first read this, I was stunned that the love interest from the first book wound up going homicidally insane, then dying (“What, she’s not his Dejah Thoris?”) but now I wonder if it isn’t more of Vance’s sexism — and the woman was so bland, she became more interesting when she went psycho.

DC UNIVERSE: Trail of Time by Jeff Mariotte is a spinoff Superman novel which opens with Clark Kent plodding away in a dystopian Metropolis under a red sun when he learns Lois has been murdered for investigating a shadowy figure named Vandal Savage. The Phantom Stranger and Jason Blood then reveal that this is an artificial timeline created by Savage, Felix Faust and Mordru which will soon replace the real Earth unless the heroes stop them with the help of Dr. Occult, Zatanna, Bat Lash, Jonah Hex, El Diablo and Brian Savage.This is very much a product of its late George W. Bush era in the dystopia’s military industrial complex (“Every time we defeat an enemy there’s always another one we have to start arming against.”) and some of its comics details (Phantom Stranger as a Lord of Order) but overall a solid job. However constantly referring to Brian as “Scalphunter” doesn’t work for me — yes, it was the name of his old series (discussed at the link) but he never called himself that and didn’t take scalps, so it comes off rather racist.

Edgar Rice Burroughs returns to the story of David Innes, Emperor of Pellucidar, in LAND OF TERROR, but unlike Back to the Stone Age it feels like he’s just going through the motions. Searching for Von Horst (the protagonist of the previous book), David winds up slave of an Amazonian tribe (wildly misogynist writing — Burroughs cannot conceive of gender equality so he assumes men in charge is better), then the prisoner of a tribe of lunatics who’ve also captured his empress Dian the Beautiful (ERB’s fondness for coincidence again) then later a prisoner on a floating island before things wrap up even more abruptly than in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. Burroughs going through the motions is still more entertaining than many other writers but this is the weakest in the series. Fortunately I recall the seventh volume, Savage Pellucidar, as improving on it.

#SFWApro. Art top to bottom by HR Van Dongen, Jim Aparo and Jose Garcia-Lopez.

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December 3, 2023 · 5:31 am

From Pellucidar to Spain, with points in between: books

BACK TO THE STONE AGE by Edgar Rice Burroughs catches us up on Lt. Von Horst who got separated from Jason Gridley’s expedition in the previous book. In the opening he’s captured by a flying monstrosity that paralyzes him, then leaves him in its nest as food for when its young hatch out. It’s one of the creepiest scenes ERB ever wrote.After that it’s fun but more familiar as “Von” struggles to survive while protecting the cave-woman he winds up traveling with, even though she does think of him as Obnoxious and Irritating. Still, Von is an unusually snarky Burroughs protagonist and I can’t resist a story that remakes Androcles and the Lion but with a wooly mammoth. One odd detail, though, is a tribe that appears to be souls of surface-world murderers condemned to Pellucidar. That’s a very un-Burroughs concept and the only hint of the supernatural in the hollow earth.

MOVING PICTURES by Katherine Immonen and Stuar Immonen is a graphic novel concerning two 1930s sisters who trade places; one of them leaves France, the other winds up under interrogation by the Nazis hunting the paintings she may have hidden. This got a lot of good reviews but it didn’t interest me at all.

Nor could I get into DOWN DAYS by Ilze Hugo, a novel set in South Africa after it’s been devastated by a strange, laughing disease. Hugo writes well but I couldn’t get more than a few chapters in. I’m not sure why.

KILL THREE BIRDS: A Kingdom of Aves Mystery by Nicole Givens Kurtz (whom I’ve met at cons but this is still a sincere review) is a fantasy mystery set in an African culture where castes divide along bird lines: vultures handle death and funerals, doves lead the faith, eagles enforce order, hawks have the true sight that solves crime). The protagonist, Hawk Prentice, arrives in a small community after a murder and despite the assurances Such Things Don’t Happen Here discovers the root cause lies in the victim’s tangled family (to my relief, the issue wasn’t incest). The identity of the killer was fairly obvious but the setting and the characters were interesting enough that I didn’t mind.

In the 1930s, after Spain elected a leftist government, two generals went to war to overthrow the government and put fascists into power. TOMORROW PERHAPS THE FUTURE: Writers, Outsiders and the Spanish Civil War by Sarah Watling looks at various English and American women who got involved in the war as photographers, reporters, nurses or simply polemicists including Jessica Mitford, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and African-American nurse Salaria Kea.

This approach gives a good perspective on the women and the international interest in the war: left-wingers saw a chance to fight fascism, fascists saw a chance to create an ally, the U.S. and most non-fascist governments backed off rather than support a left-wing, communist-inclusive government. Unfortunately it proves an awkward approach for telling the history of the war as none of the women were at key events such as the Guernica bombing. Watling also gets pretentious whenever she muses about the role of the artist in such events. Worth the reading even so.

#SFWApro. Cover by Roy Krenkel, all rights remain with current holder

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October 22, 2023 · 5:15 am

Books read from various series

BASIL OF BAKER STREET by Eve Titus is the novel that inspired The Great Mouse Detective, with Basil and Dr. Dawson coming to the rescue when the child-napping Terrible Three try to force the mouse residents of 221B Baker Street out into the cold so they can take over the property for crime. Amusing, and I do like that Basil is an intentional Holmes imitator, living in 221 so that he can model himself on the master detective.

COUNT CROWLEY: Amateur Monster Hunter by Dave Dastmalchian and Lukas Ketner is V2 in the series. In the first TPB, protagonist Jeri got a gig as a midnight-movie host only to discover the gig also involves monster-slaying. Here she has to deal with a possibly friendly werewolf, a definitely hostile vampire, going to AA meetings and her predecessor’s stubborn resistance to mentoring a woman. Enjoyable, with more 1980s period references than the first book.

Mae, the Korean American protagonist of THE DARKEST NIGHT: Witch Queen #1 by AD Starrling kicks off her series facing the kind of power Harry Dresden didn’t encounter for a half-dozen books or more, making me wonder if the baseline for urban fantasy has shifted (much like comics where cosmic battles are almost routine). Like The Girl Who Sees it’s very heavy on exposition and for the same rationale — even though Mae is the Witch Queen destined to rule over the magical world, she knows nothing about magic so she needs to have it all explained to her. While I give Starrling credit for squeezing in a lot of action (way more than most such info-dumpy novels do), the exposition killed my interest. I did like the Korean aspects Starrling worked into the book though.

Dave Robinson’s Doc Savage pastiche, DOC VANDAL: Against the Eldest Flame gives the protagonist an origin that’s owes as much to Edmond Hamilton’s futuristic Doc Savage, Captain Future — Vandal was raised on a lunar base by an alien computer — and a colorful dieselpunk setting that includes airships, talking gorillas and Nazi zombies. In this kickoff adventure, Nazi gorillas kidnap Doc and his team, taking them not to Germany but to a lost city of dinosaur people where a living-flame being plans to take over Doc’s body to escape it’s current prison. This starts slow but picks up steam as it goes along, though it’s at best comparable to mid-level Doc Savage novel.

While many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales take place in the same universe (The Moon Maid, the Carson of Venus series, Barsoom, Tarzan and Pellucidar, at a minimum), his only full-on crossover was TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE. In a direct sequel to Tanar of Pellucidar, Burroughs’ friend Jason Gridley heads into Pellucidar via the polar opening in hopes of rescuing David Innes from the Korsars. Knowing Pellucidar is largely jungle, he logically recruits Tarzan to help navigate the landscape; however it turns out that in the perpetual sunlight of the inner Earth, even Tarzan can get lost, as does Jason himself. Can they survive, let alone reach David?

Watching the cast battle cave bears, lizard people and barbarians (not to mention a flying stegosaurus!) is lively fun, though Burroughs only gets back to the nominal mission at the end, and relies as he so often does on coincidence — digging out of a cave prison, Jason literally emerges under Tarzan’s feet, for instance. Fun, even so, but the black cook’s Stepin Fetchit characterization and dialog is painfully racist (having the Noble Savages of the Waziri along doesn’t help). This walks back the ending of Pellucidar even more than the previous book, establishing Innes’ empire is a mere fraction of Pellucidar’s land surface. The ending, with one of Gridley’s team still missing, leads straight into the next book, Back to the Stone Age.

#SFWApro. Cover by Frank Frazetta; all rights to images remain with the current holders.

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September 17, 2023 · 5:15 am

From the Inner Earth to Asgard: books read in various series

It took Edgar Rice Burroughs 15 years after Pellucidar to return to the hollow earth with TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR, which I presume means it didn’t sell as well as Barsoom or Tarzan; perhaps that explains why instead of focusing on David Innes, protagonist of the first two books, the central character is Tanar, an ordinary (for Pellucidar) young man in Innes’ inner-earth empire.

Like the previous book, this one has a great opening. Jason Gridley, a new resident in Burroughs’ suburban community of Tarzana (yes, it’s a real place), is a radio buff whose experimental radio frequency, the Gridley Wave, reaches Abner Perry in Pellucidar — a shock to Gridley, who’s been rolling his eyes at ERB’s insistence the stories of Pellucidar are true. This leads into Perry narrating the story of Tanar, captured by the piratical Korsars and undergoing the usual Burroughsian hairbreadth adventures, escapes and True Love. Pretty good, and some effective moments such as Pellucidarians freaking out when David leads them to the polar opening at the edge of the world — why doesn’t the horizon keep rising the way it does in Pellucidar? Contrary to my memory, it also mentions the Mahars, now even more beaten down by the attacks of the Korsars. This ends on a cliffhanger setting up a crossover with Tarzan in the next book.

GHOST DANCE JUDGMENT: A Novel of Golgotha by Rod Belcher returns to that weirdest of Weird Western towns after spending time in the wider world in Queen of Swords. In addition to the usual bizarre details such as a house that eats people, the residents, particularly the core cast, are caught between the ghost dance — a shamaness is literally raising a ghost army to massacre white settlers — and the Army showing up in force, intending to use the ghost dance as an excuse to go genocide.

Using the ghost-dance movement didn’t work for me. I’m not sure anyone could make it work because while Native Americans have grounds for an uprising against the US, I don’t want to see the white settlers butchered either; that’s a hard needle to thread. Plus we know the tribes aren’t going to win and the book’s efforts to end on a hopeful note didn’t satisfy me either. On the plus side, the usual weirdness of the series still works, as does the plot by Wyrm cultists to exploit the chaos and free their dark god. Overall I enjoyed even though it’s a mixed bag.

ARCHER AND ARMSTRONG: American Wasteland by Fred Van Lente and Pere Perez is chronologically the finish of the series, as the final volume consists of flashbacks (or so I understand). Searching for Archer’s birth mother, the heroes go up against the Church of Scientology (with the serial numbers filed off) who are apparently keeping her captive. It turns out that avatars of every iconic figure are also trapped in the church, from Elvis Presley to a legion of Lee Harvey Oswalds (one is a lone gunman, one’s a KGB assassin, one’s a CIA patsy). This ends on an ambivalent note about what’s coming next for the guys (“All I’m saying is, you’ve got to choose.”) but I think it sticks the landing.

MARVEL MASTERWORKS: THOR Vol. 5 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby continues their amazing mid-sixties run on the series. We open with Thor confronting the alien Colonizers who are about to add Earth to the possessions. When they realize Thor’s power, however, they strike a deal to spare Earth if Thor will battle Ego, the Living Planet, then we’re back on Earth where Jane has been captured by the High Evolutionary, then there’s a war with the trolls — and in the middle of all that, Jane Foster gets her chance to become a goddess of AsgardAs I noted at Atomic Junk Shop that issue stinks in several ways but clearly Lee and Kirby wanted to move on, leave Jane behind and bring in Sif as the new love interest. Overall, though, this is cool stuff.

#SFWApro. Art by Roy Krenkel, Michael Walsh and Jack Kirby (top to bottom), all rights to images remain with current holder.

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July 30, 2023 · 5:14 am

Two old stories, two tales of crime: books read

I read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At the Earth’s Core two years ago but good as it is, I only now got around to the sequel, PELLUCIDAR. At the end of the first book, Burroughs didn’t know whether David Innes, explorer of the hollow Earth, had lived or died, nor could he locate the telegraph wire from Pellucidar to the surface world. In the opening of this book (perhaps ERB’s best framing sequence) he gets a letter from a reader saying he’d read the first book and was amazed … that anyone would publish such tripe. Only while traveling in the desert, he stumbled across a telegraph receiver clacking away …

United with his correspondent, Burroughs learns how Innes returned to Pellucidar to discover conniving Hooja the Sly One has undercut Innes’ anti-Mahar alliance (the reptilian tyrants of the hollow Earth) to build his own power. David must find his fellow surface-dweller, scientist Abner Perry; find his lost love Dian the Beautiful; rebuild the alliance against the Mahars (though they’re given more complexity than just Evil); and survive the prehistoric perils of the timeless world.

This is a dynamic adventure though it suffers from Burroughs’ usual love of coincidence. When David’s thrown into a Mahar arena, for instance, guess what pretty woman is thrown in with him? Yep. However the ending is as abrupt as Sorceress of the Witch World: the Mahar are driven out of David’s realm in a few pages, then David and Abner go full on Connecticut Yankee and import modern tech to bring Pellucidar as much in line with the modern USA as possible. Even given he presumably wanted to wrap up the setting, nobody (as Black Gate says) wants to see Pellucidar turned that dull. No surprise a lot of this got walked back when the series continued. Regrettably I don’t think we ever saw more of the Mahars, nor explored Pellucidar’s inner moon.

The disappointing second season of Outer Limits included an adaptation of one of Eando Binder’s (pen name for Jack and Otto Binder) Adam Link stories which prompted me to dig out the ADAM LINK, ROBOT collection and read them all (it’s not huge). What’s striking is how much this 1930s series feels like the later X-Men: Adam has to prove to humanity that despite his vastly superior power he isn’t a threat, nor will creating more robots pose a Great Replacement. We watch as Adam struggles to prove himself in court cases, by exposing criminals and finally taking on an alien invasion.

This is fun stuff, though lightweight compared to some treatments of the same issue. However I’m really impressed by the Binders’ handling of Adam’s robot mate, Eve. I expected the worst given Adam’s statements that not even his super-brain can understand women, but it turns out Eve is capable, smart and doesn’t wind up dying tragically so Adam can suffer alone. That’s cool.

THE STEAL: A Cultural History of Shoplifting by Rachel Shteir traces shoplifting from Elizabethan London (Shteir doesn’t make it clear if that’s when it first became a problem for stores or simply the earliest records she could find) with stops along the way to look at kleptomania, Winona Ryder, anti-shoplifting methods and tech, and Abbie Hoffman and others who advocate stealing as a way to push back against capitalism. Interesting but the anti-capitalist rationale — “It’s okay to steal from Wal-Mart or Food Lion, not mom and pop stores” takes the principle too seriously — reminds me of the rationales people parrot for digital piracy and I’ve never found those convincing. Interesting though.

QUELCH’S GOLD: Piracy, Greed and Gold in Colonial New England by Clifford Beal looks at obscure early 1700s New England privateer John Quelch who like so many in that line of work opted to target profitable prey — Portuguese gold shipments from Brazil — rather than his assigned mission to harry and loot the French, enemy to England and its colonies. While Quelch’s haul topped that of Blackbeard and many other better known maritime outlaws, he picked the wrong career at the wrong time: where the American authorities of the previous century had been happy to turn a blind eye to piracy (it pumped money into their community), the times were changing and a colonial kangaroo court would send Quelch to the gallows. A good look at piracy, commerce, law and New England attitudes in a particular time and place.

#SFWApro. Top cover by Roy Krenkel, don’t know second artist; all rights to images remain with current holders.

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January 3, 2021 · 5:10 am

From Pellucidar to prep school: books

When I first read AT THE EARTH’S CORE years ago, I hadn’t yet read Edgar Rice Burrough’s earlier Princess of Mars and didn’t realize how much they resembled each other. Like John Carter, David Innes enters an alien world — Pellucidar, the land inside the hollow Earth — and becomes enslaved by an alien race. Just as John Carter alienated Dejah Thoris at first by defending her without claiming her as his wife (on Barsoom, that implies he sees her as a whore), David Innes does exactly the same thing when fighting for Dian the Beautiful.

That said, this is a fun book to reread. Innes finances an experimental mechanical mole designed by inventor Abner Perry, but it locks up on its maiden voyage and doesn’t stop drilling until the pass through the Earth’s crust and enters Pellucidar. The perils here include dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, various types of man-apes (in one of Burroughs’ racist moments Innes compares one trace of monkey man to black Africans) and the Mahars, a race of telepathic reptile women (they eliminated their menfolk after developing the secret of parthenogenesis) that preys upon humans. In one scene Innes watches them engage in a ritual feast and seeing their hypnotized prey stand there, letting the mahars rip them apart, is chilling.

Another unique feature of Pellucidar is that with no day and night — the inner-Earth “sun” is a gaseous ball at the Earth’s center that provides constant, unchanging illumination — time ceases to exist. It turns out it’s a purely mental construct; while Innes escapes the Mahars and has multiple adventures, Perry has dinner, sleeps and wakes up, thinking less than a day has passed. There are other nice touches, such as a reclusive culture where your manhood is measured partly by the number of secret routes out of the village you can memorize.

The story does have a better framing sequence than Princess had. It opens with Burroughs meeting Innes after he’s returned from Pellucidar. ERB helps equip him for the journey home, but it’s unclear whether David made it before the neighboring Arabs attacked. Although Burroughs set up a telegraph relay for Innes to communicate with the outer world, we learn in the ending that a sandstorm has wiped out the landmarks in the area; he has no way to find the telegraph and learn if Innes made it back to Pellucidar or not (something resolved in the sequel, of course).

Edited by Kevin McCarthy, “THEY’RE HERE …” Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute proved just as useful for Alien Visitors as it was when I was writing about the film for Screen Enemies of the American Way. One article, for example, points out that no matter what interpretation you put on the ’56 film — anti-communist, anti-conformity, anti-consumerism — it’s success isn’t because of the underlying message but because aliens replacing everyone around you (and you’re next!) is an inherently creepy concept. The assorted essays cover Jack Finney’s career (they paint his nostalgia for the 19th century with affection I don’t share) and interview with Kevin McCarthy (remarkably entertaining), backstage stories on the first three films (this came out right after the 1993 Body Snatchers) and pondering about what the various films mean. Good, though it has its share of dud entries as well.

As a kid, Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings books — about J.C.T. Jennings and his best friend Darbishire and their experiences at Linbury Court Preparatory School — were among my very favorites, reread endlessly. So for Christmas I asked TYG to buy me an omnibus edition of the first four novels, then I spent Boxing Day reading Jennings Goes to School. Here the two protagonists arrive at school, meet the rest of the future cast, learn school slang, play soccer, run away from school, write a mystery novel (“All you have to do is think up some characters and a plot.”) and unintentionally send in a false fire alarm. Buckeridge’s flair for comedy, Wodehouse-style writing and incomprehensible kid conversations (“Isn’t it lucky I’m not him, sir?”) is as much fun as I remember. I was surprised, looking Buckeridge up online, to learn that this was actually written in the 1950s as I assumed them to be contemporary when I read them 15 or so years later. But from the point of view of a pre-teen boy, I guess the world hadn’t changed that much.

#SFWApro. Cover by Roy Krenkel, all rights remain with current holder.

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April 5, 2011 · 7:12 pm

Mars Needs—Virginians?

There are many books that don’t live up to by memories of the first time I read them (as you’ll have noticed if you read my Movies and Books entries), but I was delighted Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian trilogy is as good as I remember.
While Burroughs is best known for creating Tarzan, his first book was A Princess of Mars, in which Virginia gentleman and Civil War veteran (by 1912, the idea of the Gallant Heroes On Both Sides had replaced old images of the South as traitors and slavers, so that was doable) John Carter is trapped by Apaches while prospecting for gold in the Southwest. Somehow his spirit is yanked form his body and transported to Mars (where it’s fully solid). Mars is a dying world where the limited resources (an air-making factory is the only thing sustaining life) have made the people hard, strong and singularly warlike.
Carter falls in first with the Tharks, a tribe of six-limbed green men, where he falls for their beautiful prisoner, Dejah Thoris (red-skinned, like the dominant human race of Mars). As he tries to return Dejah Thoris to her people while winning her love, he has to cope with monsters, green warriors, invading armies and other threats. Having finally won his woman and an honored place among the red men of Mars, he then sacrifices his life to keep the oxygen plant running, and wakes up restored to Earth.
It’s not often a writer can create a fictional archetype, but Burroughs created two. Tarzan is the definitive jungle man and Princess of Mars established the “planetary romance” a subgenre would go on to give us Adam Strange, Alan Akers Scorpio series and (god help us) John Norman’s Gor. While Burroughs wasn’t the first of this type or the last, he’s the one that endured best (Gor may endure, but it’s not the swashbuckling adventure that does it).
In its day, the novel seemed so outré, Burroughs submitted it under the pen name Normal Bean (i.e., I’m Not Crazy). It was a smash hit and led to the sequels Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars; other Martian books followed, but the first three (which I reread in an omnibus edition finely illustrated by Thomas Yeats) form a united whole and stand apart.
In Gods, John Carter returns to Mars after ten years and finds himself in pell-mell battle first against the Therns—a white race that uses religion to control the rest of Barsoom—and then against the black pirates of a subterranean land. In Warlord, John Carter literally crosses pole to pole to rescue the imperiled Dejah Thoris. Both books move faster than Princess, which may mean Burroughs had a quick learning curve, or just evidence of how awkward origin stories are.
The books aren’t perfect. Burroughs relies heavily on coincidence; I can buy him materializing on Mars near his best friend in Gods, but to then wind up in a cell that by sheer coincidence holds his son?
We never get an explanation for Carter’s transportation (which I’m okay with) or how he learned to control it to travel back and forth to Earth (which bothers me more). Nor is there any explanation for the stated fact he’s also immortal; this makes him a fit mate for Dejah Thoris (Martians can live for a millenium) but I can see several other ways Burroughs could have made that work without dragging in a mystery.
And of course, Burroughs is the product of his time. Dejah Thoris is way tougher than most heroines of a century ago—faced with certain death, she never screams, faints or cries—but her role in the book is to love John and be rescued from A Fate Worse Than Death (which she’s threatened with a lot). If you require a story where the woman has a purpose apart from the hero, I don’t think this will work for you.
But I’ve got to admit, they sure work for me.