Long before DC or Marvel, Edgar Rice Burroughs built a shared universe.
First we have the narrator of so many of his framing sequences, the Edgar Rice Burroughs who’s related to John Carter, encountered David Innes in At the Earth’s Core, learned the story of Tarzan from old British government files, communicated telepathically with Carson of Venus and got interstellar messages from the hero of Beyond the Farthest Star. None of these series characters interacted, though Carson Napier was shooting for Barsoom when his spaceship landed on Venus.
The exception is Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, Burroughs’ one crossover novel.
As you’ll recall from Monday’s post, Tanar of Pellucidar ends with David Innes in the hands of the invading Korsars and Jason Gridley vowing to rescue him. Saying goodbye to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jason recruits Tarzan as the man best equipped to navigate the savage jungles of the inner Earth. They don’t have Abner Perry’s mechanical mole but knowing about the polar openings into Pellucidar is a game changer: they and their crew (including, unfortunately, a shuffling-darkie stereotype for the cook) fly a dirigible through the North Polar hole. The adventure is on!
Unfortunately it soon becomes clear that in Pellucidar, with its strange geography and endless sunlight, even Tarzan can become disoriented. He gets lost; Jason gets lost; the crew have no leaders. Can the expedition survive, let alone rescue David Innes?
Watching the cast battle cave bears, lizard people and barbarians (not to mention a flying stegosaurus!) is lively fun. It’s also somewhat plotless. Burroughs only gets back to the nominal mission of the outworlers at the end of the book and resolves a lot of the plot through coincidence. At one point, Jason digs himself out of a cave prison and literally emerges under Tarzan’s feet.
It’s still fun, and clearly Burroughs is now thinking of Pellucidar as an ongoing series. This book establishes that David’s Empire of Pellucidar only covers a fraction of the the inner earth’s land masses; from the Empire’s perspective, the rest of the hollow earth is unexplored territory. By the book’s ending, the Empire has beaten back the Korsars and the lost expedition members have been found — except for Lt. Von Horst, who’s missing somewhere in the jungle. That leads directly into the next book, Back to the Stone Age.
In the opening, Von Horst is captured by a flying monstrosity. Instead of killing him, it paralyzes the German, then leaves him in the nest with other victims .. and the creature’s soon-to-hatch eggs. Each day one of the creature’s young eats one of the paralyzed humans, then flies off. Von Horst can do nothing but watch as one by one, the victims die, leaving the infant monsters closer and closer to eating his paralyzed self …
Spoiler: he survives. Now it’s a matter of fighting back to the dirigible alongside a beautiful cavewoman who finds Von Horst the most obnoxious, irritating man she’s ever met — clearly that relationship is doomed, am I right? It’s familiar stuff but Von Horst is unusually snarky for a Burroughs protagonist. And I can’t resist a story that remakes Androcles as a Lion but with a woolly mammoth instead of a cat.
There’s one odd detail, a tribe that appears to be the souls of surface-world murderers condemned to eternal torment in Pellucidar. That’s a very un-Burroughs concept, the only hint of the supernatural in Pellucidar (or really any of his books).
By contrast, Land of Terror feels like Burroughs was just going through the motions. Apparently I’m not the only one to think so as all his regular magazine markets rejected it. Searching for Von Horst, David winds up the slave of an Amazonian tribe, then of a tribe of lunatics who’ve also captured Dian the Beautiful (ERB relying on coincidence again), then a prisoner on a floating island. Then things wrap up, extremely abruptly. ERB going through the motions is still more entertaining than many writers striving their best, but it’s the weakest in the series. And oh, how I hate Burroughs writing women-dominated tribes (we see them in Tarzan and the Venus series too), a heavy-handed object lesson in how both men and women are happier if they fit into 20th century gender roles.
Happily Savage Pellucidar lets the series wrap up on a win. Like a number of his later books, it’s composed of four novellas that fit together into a novel; though written after Land of Terror they came out in magazine format slightly before a book publisher took a chance on Land. The last of the four did not, however, come out until it turned up among Burroughs’ papers in the 1960s.
Given Burroughs wrote these in the early 1940s, I’m sure having the Empire fighting the brutal tyrant Fash is a pun. However the war is merely a premise ERB can use to scatter everyone to the wind and put them through the usual adventurous paces. What makes it stand out is that the women get better roles than usual. Dian proves extremely capable in a solo adventure and the cheerful liar O-aa steals the entire book. Her default reaction to trouble is to lie and bluff (“Beat me and my five brothers will kill you — and I’ve killed more men than they have!”) and she’s much more of a spitfire than the usual Burroughs heroine.
In one section of the book a city’s priesthood enshrines her as a living goddess, thereby solidifying their control of the people. When O-aa starts pushing against their tyranny, they demand she fulfill her role as written in the sacred texts; she asserts a completely different role, reminding them that she knows the laws of heaven better than they do — she’s a goddess, remember? Then she makes up new rules on the spot. The priests have no idea how to handle her, particularly when the people would tear them limb from limb if they hurt her.
Like some of ERB’s other late-series books, Savage Pellucidar has a number of contemporary references. One of the late Tarzan books includes a joke about Johnny Weismuller; here there’s a reference to “Pegler and Mr. Brown” (I had to Google it). It doesn’t spoil the fun.
Like other Burroughs creations, we’ve seen more material set in the inner earth since Savage Pellucidar, from the Doug McClure movie to Walt Simonson’s Tarzan vs. Predator at the Earth’s Core. I will pass on trying to cover any of that.
Covers top to bottom by Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, Frazetta and Lee Weeks.
