Long after scientists and geographers figured out the Earth was round, they still hadn’t figured out what was inside it.
As Walter Kafton-Minkel discusses in his Subterranean Worlds, some theorists imagined a ball of fire, others a vast pool of water left over from Noah’s flood, others a gigantic heart. Or was it possible, as Edmond Halley suggested in the 1600s, that the world was hollow, a series of concentric spheres inside each other? Or as the mathematician Leonhard Euler suggested 75 years later, completely hollow with a miniature sun at its center?
Science put paid to all these theories in the 1700s but that didn’t stop non-scientists from embracing them. Not only crackpots but writers: Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance, turned Halley’s theory into a series of seven novels set in the hollow-Earth realm known as Pellucidar, starting with At the Earth’s Core in 1914 (all covers by Roy Krenkel).
When I first read the book as a tween, I hadn’t yet read Burroughs’ earlier Princess of Mars and didn’t realize how much they resembled each other. Like John Carter, David Innes enters an alien world and becomes enslaved by a nonhuman race. Just as John Carter alienated Dejah Thoris by not understanding Barsoomian customs, David does the same when defending Dian the Beatiful. I see the similarity now, but it doesn’t spoil the book. It remains a fun read.
Like many of Burroughs’ books, this one opens with a framing sequence to ease readers into the story. Burroughs, hunting in Africa, meets Innes in the desert and hears his incredible tale. An American businessman, Innes financed an experimental mechanical mole designed by inventor Abner Perry. When the two men take the mole for a test run, the steering equipment locks up. It doesn’t stop drilling until they’ve passed through the Earth’s crust into Pellucidar.
Here the geography of the surface world is reversed: where we have continents, Pellucidar has seas and where we have seas, they have dry land. The occupants include human tribes, dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, man-apes (in one of Burroughs’ racist moments, Innes equates one tribe of monkey-men to Africans) and deadliest of all, the Mahars. Intelligent reptile women (they eliminated the men after developing parthenogenesis), they’re telepaths who prey upon humans. David gets to see a Mahar feast, which involves hypnotizing their human meals to stand passively as the Mahars rip them apart. It’s a chilling scene.
One of Pellucidar’s most distinctive features is that the inner Earth’s sun never sets, providing constant, unchanging illumination. In that environment, David and Abner discover time is a mental construct. Innes spends several chapters escaping the Mahars and having multiple adventures. When he returns to Abner, the scientist has spent their time apart eating dinner, sleeping, and waking up. There are some other clever details such as a reclusive culture that measures manhood, in part, by how many secret paths from their hidden village someone can memorize.
David becomes the leader of the human revolt against the Mahar overlords. The revolt is still ongoing when he and Dian take the repaired mechanical mole back to the surface. No sooner do they depart than David discovers the conniving Hooja the Sly, who wants Dian for himself, has replaced her with a Mahar female, her identity hidden in blankets. As on the original trip, there’s no way to turn the mole around and return to Pellucidar.
After Burroughs sees the Mahar he has no doubts about David’s story and agrees to equip him for the journey back underground. David sets up a telegraph station at his desert camp, planning to run a cable behind the mole as it returns to Pellucidar. That way he can contact Burroughs with more tales of his adventures. The neighborhood Arabs, however, are unsettled by all this weirdness; David’s last message to Burroughs is that they’re about to attack, but he’s hoping to escape with the Mahar in the mole first (he couldn’t bring himself to kill the lost, terrified creature). Burroughs subsequently learns the camp’s location has been buried in a desert sandstorm, leaving him no way of knowing whether David survived. Is it possible that somewhere out in the desert, a telegraph receiver is telling the story from Pellucidar?
We get our answers the following year in Pellucidar. In Burroughs’ best framing sequence, he gets a letter from someone who read the first novel and found it amazing. Amazing in the sease that anyone would publish such utter drivel. Except he went on a desert hunting trip of his own and found a buried telegraph receiver with a cable running into the sand … please tell him it was just a story!
Burroughs, of course, arrives as soon as possible, establishes contact with David and catches up on his exploits. On his return, David discovered Hooja had built his own power base by undermining the anti-Mahar alliance David forged. Now David has to rebuild the alliance, survive the prehistoric perils of the hollow Earth, and find both Dian and Abner.
This is a dynamic adventure and it gives the Mahars more personality than “evil.” However it does suffer from Burroughs fondness for coincidence. When David’s thrown into a Mahar arena, for instance, guess what beautiful woman is thrown in to die with him? Yep.
Then there’s the ending. In a matter of a few pages we learn the Mahar are driven out of David’s realm (the Empire of Pellucidar), then David and Abner go full on Connecticut Yankee, using modern tech to drag Pellucidar into the 20th century. Most noteworthy, they’re able to use the orbit of the inner sun’s moon as the basis for a system of timekeeping, putting their new world back under the rule of the clock.
It looks to me like Burroughs was done with Pellucidar: with civilization and clocks, the adventures were over. Given ERB never had any hesitation turning out sequels, I’m guessing David’s adventures didn’t sell enough to justify a long series like Barsoom or Tarzan. Or maybe Burroughs never conceived of it as more than a two-part tale; he wrote a few of those, after all.
Why, then, did he return to the inner Earth in Tanar of Pellucidar 13 years later? I’ve researched this and haven’t found an answer (which is not to say one doesn’t exist out there somewhere).
Like Pellucidar, this has a great opening. Jason Gridley, a new resident in Burroughs’ suburban community of Tarzana (yes, it’s a real place) rolls his eyes at ERB’s stories (a telegraph wire to the center of the Earth? Seriously) but that doesn’t stop him showing Burroughs his experimental radio transmitter. Radio was still cutting-edge tech in the 1920s and Jason’s gone beyond the edge, with his super-powerful Gridley Wave frequency. When it reaches Abner Perry in Pellucidar, Jason realizes with a shock that ERB wasn’t bullshitting.
Abner’s story walks back most of the changes Burroughs made to Pellucidar: the natives are happier with their own tech level (though the Empire’s forces use modern weapons) and living by the clock made them so miserable David gave up on it. Abner then narrates the story of how a new regional power, the piratical Korsars, captured David and the young caveman Tanar. What follows are the usual hairbreath adventures, escapes and True Love expected from any ERB adventure.
We learn the Mahars, driven from the Empire, have become even worse off as the Korsars move into their territory. We (and David) also learn of a new way to access Pellucidar: the North and South poles are open to the surface world (a theory first proposed by John Cleves Symmes in the 19th century), allowing access to anyone who makes it across the ice (which is how the Korsars made it in). In a nice touch, when David and his companions reach the northern opening, the Pellucidarians freak out: the horizon goes down when all their lives they’ve seen it going up. Where the hell is this place?
The story ends with Jason vowing to save David. With the polar openings it’s possible to fly into Pellucidar — but who can they get to lead the expedition in a world like that?
Tune in Wednesday to find out!
