THE READING RHEUM: LAND OF TERROR (1939/1944)

 When I blogged my review for SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR, I mistakenly thought that it was the next to last of the series, since the first three parts of SAVAGE were printed in magazines in 1942, while LAND OF TERROR didn't get any serializations whatever and went straight to book publication in 1944. However, I didn't note the year in which ERB is supposed to have completed TERROR, which is recorded as 1939. What may have happened is that ERB submitted TERROR to all of the usual magazines, got turned down over a period of years, and started SAVAGE in 1942 despite TERROR's failure to generate serialization income. Then, possibly due to constraints on ERB's time, he didn't finish writing the last part of SAVAGE until 1944-- and then either it didn't get submitted to magazines (about two years after the third SAVAGE-section was printed) or it just went into a safe, until getting printed very belatedly, both in AMAZING STORIES (where I first read it) and in an Ace Books publication. According to Wiki, 1944 was also the last year in which ERB produced a substantial amount of writing, his productivity naturally declining in his final six years of life. A final irony is that in my estimation, TERROR is the best of the adventures to focus only upon David Innes, and I see no good reason for the SF-magazines of the forties to have turned it down, unless the ERB brand was just getting a little "old-timey" even in that time-period.                   

   I complained in my review of the first two David Innes books that Innes seemed too much "an incarnation of Manifest Destiny" than a person. This wasn't an explicit critique of the colonial mindset that informs a lot of Burroughs works, though. My stance is that it is possible for an author to produce good literature even if the author subscribed to problematic beliefs, and though ERB has often been pilloried for his politics, often his critics make snap judgments based on incomplete knowledge. For instance, I mentioned in reviewing AT THE EARTH'S CORE that the first human species Innes encounters is that of "Black monkey-men with tails," which to many would seem a slam-dunk proof of racism. Yet late in TERROR, even though ERB again mentions the monkey-men in a stray recollection by the hero, Innes also spends a protracted period as the somewhat-unwilling guest of a tribe of "handsome" Black humans, who only spare him the fate of slavery-- which fate they usually extend to white Pellucidaran captives-- because he can teach them useful techniques. Yet if ERB were a thoroughgoing racist, could he write a somewhat satirical passage like this one:                                               

The men are monogamous and very proud of their bloodline. Under no circumstances will they mate with a white, as they consider the white race far inferior to theirs. I could never quite accustom myself to this reversal of the status of the two races from what I had always been accustomed to; but it really was not as difficult as it might appear, for I must admit that the blacks treated us with far greater toleration here than our dark-skinned races are accorded on the outer crust. Perhaps I was getting a lesson in true democracy.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        ERB doesn't entirely repudiate his screed about trying to advance the Stone Age world, but in the later novels he includes many more acidulous remarks comparing the violence of primitives versus that of "sophisticated" humans, like this one.                                                   

 

Silently I fitted an arrow to my bow and waited until the entire file was well within the ambush. I bent the bow and took careful aim. This was savage warfare, warfare of the Stone Age. Of course, we lacked poison gas, and we couldn't drop bombs on women and children and hospitals; but in our own primitive way we could do fairly well; and so I released my arrow, and as it sunk deep into the body of the last man in the file, I gave the signal for the Ruvan warriors to attack.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       And though TERROR is not the first novel to include such observations, it's the only one I considered to possess high-mythicity, due to establishing a strong symbolic opposition between Innes' "Yankee ingenuity" and the bizarre rules of the Earth's Core. For instance, for most of the series, ERB established that every native Pellucidaran has an innate ability to "home in" on his place of birth, no matter how far he may be from said locale. Most of the time, this concept just made it easy for the heroes to get to a given destination with the help of a native guide from said domain. But during Innes' sojourn with the Black people known as Ruvans, this becomes problematic because the Ruvans inhabit one of several "floating islands," meaning that Innes' navigation problems become extremely complicated-- all in an entertaining manner, of course.       

               

All that said, TERROR is, like all the other books in the series, very episodic, and two of the shorter episodes may owe something to ERB's 1924 TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN. In that story, the ape-man meets a tribe of hairy women who dominate their weak menfolk, and a race of humans who use technology to become as small as ants. Innes is briefly enslaved by another tribe, the hairy, man-dominating Women of Oog, but unlike Tarzan, Innes doesn't stay in the Oogians' domain long enough to reform their aberrant culture. And instead of men as small as ants, Innes also encounters ants as large as men, who hold Innes and a Ruvan tribesman prisoner. How do the embattled humans escape? Well, there's this giant ant bear, and...                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Innes and his wife Dian also remain captives of the Jukans, who are  all more or less crazy and may be a spoof of the madness of civilization. Dian doesn't get as much action here as she would in the final novel, but toward the end, when ERB was in a hurry to wrap things up neatly, she's said to have slain the man who kidnapped her before being reunited with Innes-- surely one of the few times a Burroughs heroine brought about her own rescue.    

THE READING RHEUM: SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR (1942/1944)

I've still not read all of the ERB oeuvre, but SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR definitely comes at the top of any list of "the women-led books of Edgar Rice Burroughs." It might also be the only one on the list, But Still...                                                                                                                   

By saying this, I'm not by extension agreeing with the modern idea of "equity:" that there ought to be, in boys' entertainment, just as many female heroines as there are male heroes. Burroughs wrote rousing adventures for male readers, though unlike some similar writers, he did include a fair amount of romance that could in theory appeal to female readers. I'd argue, though, that often, once ERB finished hooking up his male heroes with their romantic interests within the bonds of marriage, he sometimes didn't know what to do with them, with the obvious exception of Tarzan. So often, as in many of the serials, he would "spin off" a new hero with nominal connections to the "parent hero," and said hero would then have his own romantic arc. In the Pellucidar series, this pattern applies to both the preceding novels to SAVAGE: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR and BACK TO THE STONE AGE.                                                              

  Yet, although there is a new romantic arc in SAVAGE for young warrior Hodon (who serves in David Innes' army) and the feisty tribeswoman O-aa, technically this novel is still a David Innes novel, even though he doesn't have a major role until the latter half of the tale. Moreover, his mate Dian the Beautiful gets as much narrative emphasis as he does. Usually, even the more tempestuous ERB ladies tend to exist to test the hero's resolve. But in this novel, I would say that Innes, Dian, Hodon and O-aa share ensemble status in this novel alone.                                                                                         

Like all of the other Pellucidar novels, the story is comprised by an episodic series of "escapes from captivity" and "search and rescue missions." Thus there's no point in summarizing the incidents, though the best sequences are those in which both Dian and O-aa are forced to serve as "earthly goddesses" to superstitious city-dwellers. Unlike many ERB heroines, these Stone Age beauties are unflinchingly violent in defending themselves. When Hodon steals a kiss from O-aa mere hours after having first met her, she cuts a slit in his chest with her stone knife, and later she stabs one of her captors to death with a spear. Dian and a male warrior have a standout scene having a bloody battle against a plesiosaur, and both females prove clever in playing upon the foolish ways of civilized people. Not that Stone Age cavepeople haven't been as dotty in previous books in the series, but we just don't see many of them this time out.                                                                                                     

           
    SAVAGE also offers ERB's best comical villain. This is an old man from 1800s Connecticut, made functionally immortal by his time in Pellucidar, but because he can't remember his name after so many years, the Pellucidaran natives dub him "Ah-Gilak," meaning "old man." Sometimes ERB calls him "the old man whose name was not Dolly Dorcas," which I won't explain but which I found moderately funny. Even before landing in the Stone Age world, Ah-Gilak was forced to eat from human corpses to live, and he delivered a strong liking for the flesh of his own species. ERB gets a lot of mileage from this goofy old codger, who's only an ally out of convenience but always poses some degree of menace.                           

  Though ERB started this novel in 1942, following it in 1944 with LAND OF TERROR, the last in the series, for many years it was not fully extant. To explain, I'll content myself with linking to this excellent writeup of the novel's history and conclude by stating that SAVAGE stands as one of the best books in the series, eclipsed only by the TANAR novel. Oh, and though this is a David Innes novel, I deem it a minor crossover because it does include a brief scene with Stellara, the female mate of Tanar-- and the two of them, by my logic, exist in their own "sub-universe" rather than being part of Innes' regular cosmos.                                               

THOUGHTS ON THE DUNE MYTHOS

I don't know when I'll get the time to reread Frank Herbert's original DUNE and thus do an "official" Reading Rheum review of it. But since I have read the book three times, I have a reasonably good recollection of its major tropes and conceptual scope. My main aim here is to set down some general ideas about the novel so that I don't repeat myself when I cover the David Lynch film on my movie blog.   

  I've also read a pretty fair sampling of Herbert's other science-fiction novels, and though I've not looked at any of them in the last twenty years, my overall recollection is that none of them exhibit the mythic imagination of DUNE. But most of them follow the pattern of good didactic science fiction: they set up some intellectual problem, based on some metaphenomenon predicated upon sci-fi's famous "one gimme" rule, and proceed to discuss the societal or psychological ramifications resulting from the phenomenon. But there's usually not a lot of symbolic depth in purely didactic arguments, though, as I've argued frequently on this blog, sometimes the didactic and mythopoeic forms of discourse can work together to good effect.  But this didn't happen with most Frank Herbert books, which are mostly concerned with didacticism-- much like the majority of the DUNE sequels, though I admit I've not reread any of these in twenty years either.                                                                                                    

I haven't taken any surveys of science fiction fandom, but the dominant impression I've gained from both personal conversation and message boards is that almost no one likes any of the sequels better than Original DUNE. One can find fans who like BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN a great deal more than the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, or THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK more than the 1977 STAR WARS. But in a statistically dominant sense, DUNE is the "first child" that everyone likes, and all the sequels are the equivalent of red-headed stepchildren.                                                         

My perhaps-superficial, definitely-not-researched impression is that when Herbert conceived DUNE he drew upon a number of intellectual interests-- the ecology of sand-dunes, the effects of psychotropics on human perception, and perhaps most of all, the mystique of the savior-- and allowed himself to build on all of these concepts in a manner more mythopoeic than didactic. The didactic impulse was certainly there, though. Herbert stated in interviews that he set up the Campbellian heroic structure of DUNE with the long-range intention of undermining the savior-mythology behind the rise of the heroic Paul Atreides. This authorial intent is particularly strong in GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, where the great Messiah of the Spice mutates into something akin to a sandworm. And yet, Herbert sold his myth-world so thoroughly that most readers were as immersed in that world as Herbert himself was when he created it. The author created a beautiful dream just so that he'd be able to wake the dreamers from their illusion and reveal, "see, you shouldn't have fallen for my glamorous hoax." Instead, many if not most readers saw Herbert's deconstruction of his original dream as the real illusion-- again, judging purely by the general fannish opinion that the later books were inferior to the original. (I will add that I found a few of the early sequels at least interesting in their own right, including GOD EMPEROR, but some of the later books are entirely forgettable.)                                                                  

    
  Speaking as I was of influences, some critic, whose name I did not preserve, remarked that the sandy wasteland of the planet Dune had an interesting predecessor in science fiction literature: "the sands of Mars," as Arthur C Clarke called them. And the foremost mythographer of Mars in early science fiction also dealt in a lot of the same elements of combative adventure and medieval intrigue as Herbert: the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now, the Mars books of Burroughs are as bereft of didactic insights as the majority of Herbert books are lacking in mythopoeic power. The unremembered critic argued that Herbert had to some extent built upon Burroughs' high-adventure mythos and imbued it with far greater subtlety and intellectual heft, and I agree that this is certainly possible, even if Herbert only knew the John Carter series by reputation. But I'd argue that there's another Burroughs series that may have had more structural impact on Herbert, and that's the Tarzan series, which, more than the Mars books, Herbert could have known from cinema had he never cracked one of the original stories. The trope common to both Tarzan novels and Tarzan movies might be boiled down to "good colonists fighting bad colonists for the control of tribal resources." Tarzan, the scion of good colonists, doesn't "go native" like various Joseph Conrad protagonists, but rather "goes ape," which contingency makes the ape-man into a superhuman figure. (A drug-free one, by the way.) The morality of Tarzan's interactions with Black Africans, corrupt Europeans and ruthless Arab slavers was not something Burroughs could have addressed intellectually, even had he wished to do so. But when in DUNE we see two great Renaissance-style families vying to take control of Planet Dune's spice-commodity-- the noble family Atreides and the decadent Harkonnens-- what we're seeing is an old wine decanted into a new, and perhaps more elaborate, bottle. It's to Herbert's credit that in the early novels he doesn't ever reduce the entire three-way struggle to pure politics-- though I can't speak to the later ones.       

THE READING RHEUM: BACK TO THE STONE AGE (1937)

 With this 1937 installment of the Pellucidar series, Edgar Rice Burroughs seems to be getting tired of his own tried-and-true formula. STONE is a direct sequel to TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE , though none of the main characters appear in this book except in flashback. (The main hero does encounter David Innes toward the end of the story though, so STONE is like the previous book a crossover.) At the end of that tale, Von Horst, a crewman from Tarzan's dirigible, gets separated from his group and has to wander Pellucidar, avoiding nasty beasts and nastier tribes, and of course finding romance. In my review of the Tarzan installment, I remarked that probably the only reason ERB made the crew German back in 1929 was because his readers would have assumed that Germans had the greatest expertise with dirigibles. Although ERB had devoted two earlier Tarzan novels to having the ape-man fight Germans in Africa, possibly the author meant to let bygones be bygones. However, by the time ERB published the novel, the Nazi movement in Von Horst's country had gained full sway, and for that reason Von Horst may be the only German national to be the hero of an American novel during the rise of fascism.                                                                                                               

  Anyway, one of Von Horst's first exploits in Pellucidar involves his getting captured by a giant pterodactyl that injects paralyzing poison into victims and takes them back to its aerie for later consumption. In the monster's den, the hero manages to escape with two members of different tribes, one a noble savage, the other a sneaky traitor who betrays the other two. However, though the bad savage gets Von Horst imprisoned by the savage's cannibalistic people, the gallant German also encounters another captive, La-Ja, who will be his romantic interest for the rest of the novel. Though she's feistier than many ERB heroines, she's also seemingly less sensible. As Von Horst liberates a group of deserving types from the cannibals, La-Ja refuses to take orders from the hero. In a rare departure from Burroughsian chivalry, he's forced to clout her unconscious to save her life. For most of the rest of the novel, she scorns Von Horst and refuses his aid as she makes her way back to her own domain-- and the lovelorn man can't help from following her about and protecting her. La-Ja does redeem herself at times in that she comes to Von Horst's defense when push comes to shove, but her constant raillery gets a little boring at times.                                                                   

  ERB's inventiveness with exotic tribes also becomes strained here. There are bison-men, who have bison-like features and habits, and mammoth-men, who are humans who tame and ride mammoths. A separate strain of the first Pellucidar book's Black Monkey-Men appear, made distinct from the earlier group in that these humanoids have tusks and are yet another tribe of cannibals. Von Horst also encounters a second group of tusked cannibals, the Gorbuses, who are all deathly white. One curious detail: the only Gorbus with whom Von Horst speaks seems to recognize a few English words, but ERB never explains this, nor the Gorbuses' imperfect memories of some terrible murder they committed, which they think resulted in their miserable existence in Pellucidar. Some critics think ERB flirted with a metaphysical conceit here, hinting that the Gorbuses were really condemned souls in freakish bodies, rather than the usual biological anomalies. In any case, all of these tribes feel half-baked, as if ERB was just marking time.            

  The rocky road to romance for Von Horst and La-Ja also has a rote feel to it, in marked contrast to the well-conceived pairing seen in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR. But it's during Von Horst's sojourn with the Mammoth-Men that ERB offers a rare window on female sadism. For involved reasons, the hero can only escape captivity with the help of an ugly cavewoman named Grum. By the traditions of Grum's tribe, she can force the object of her desire, a big guy named Horg, to marry her if she gets a male champion to defeat Horg in battle. Von Horst duly beats down Horg, and after the warrior is unconscious, Grum both hits and kicks him, telling Von Horst she plans to hold the whip hand in the marriage. Von Horst muses that he's known civilized women who cherished the same desire for marital supremacy, though I'm not sure the author ever depicted any female character of such rapacity.     

THE READING RHEUM: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (1929)

 TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR, ERB's fourteen-years-later sequel to the 1915 PELLUCIDAR, is one of the author's better spinoff stories, but it's best known for launching his "crossover project." In addition to spinning off the title character with only a token reference to former star David Innes, the authorial prologue-- in which ERB chats with radio-expert Jason Gridley about the supposed reality of ERB's fantastic stories-- sets up the action of the sequel TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. During the chat, ERB and Gridley supposedly get a very long radio-broadcast from Innes' buddy Abner Perry, telling them the entire story of prehistoric hero Tanar and ending on the revelation that Innes is still in the hands of enemies. At this point Gridley declares that he'll marshal forces to rescue Innes, said forces including the Lord of the Jungle, while Gridley gets a secondary hero-role as well as the standard romantic arc.                                                                 

  I'll touch on two quick points before getting to the main TANAR plot. The first is that, during the prologue, Gridley expresses the same opinion I did in my review of PELLUCIDAR: that Hooja the Sly was one of ERB's better villains, but that as far as ERB is concerned, the Sly One was sincerely killed off. The second concerns those now politically incorrect Black Monkey-Men from the first Pellucidar novel. The tribe does not come on stage in the course of TANAR, but the hero has a flashback in which he remembers being held captive by the tailed people, during which time they taught him the skill of bounding about the tops of trees. This past history comes in handy when ERB wants his caveman hero to swing through the forest with his lady love in his arms. If there wasn't such a time discrepancy between the first two books and the third one, I'd think that was the only reason ERB introduced the monkey-guys.                          

Anyway, fourteen years after the conclusion of PELLUCIDAR, David Innes' prehistoric empire is threatened by seafaring invaders called Korsars. Innes' forces repel the attackers, who unlike the primitives possess huge sailing ships and firearms. However, Tanar-- the son of one of ERB's many tedious noble savages-- is taken aboard one of the ships. Tanar encounters the ruler of the Korsars, an older man known as "The Cid," and the ruler's teenaged daughter Stellara. The Cid-- whose people will later be revealed as descendants of Barbary pirates who blundered into the earth's core--wants Tanar to reveal the process by which Innes' scientists compound gunpowder, since the Korsars' formula is faulty. Tanar is a warrior and knows nothing about chemistry, but he allows the Cid to think that he Tanar can be of assistance. As for Stellara, she and Tanar go the same way as every other ERB couple: falling in love at first sight and not being able to express themselves.                                     

  In fact, though Tanar's episodic adventures wandering about the earth's core are just par for the course, the romance between the hero and his lady is better than the average Burroughs romance. ERB captures much of the hormonal confusion of youth as Tanar and Stellara quarrel while displaying unconditional loyalty toward one another. In two of the roaming adventures, ERB creates a couple of primitive societies he may have meant to be mirror-images of one another. The first is Amiocarp, a tribe in which the members express love very openly, in marked contrast to Tanar and Stellara, who can't manage to know their own hearts. The second is Hime, a tribe in which all the members constantly show hatred and contempt for one another, which represents the fractiousness between hero and heroine-- though of course true love wins the day in the end.                         

This time the heroine has two unwanted suitors. The first one, Bohar, is encountered on the Korsar ship during Tanar's captivity, and halfway through the book Tanar kills this rival. Then, very late in the story, Tanar and Stellara get hauled to the Korsar base, and ERB belatedly reveals that the Cid intends to marry off his daughter to a brute named Bulf, whom Tanar also slays in due course. Strangely, the Cid doesn't ever have a reckoning for his crimes, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't appear in the later books. This might be understandable if the Cid was genuinely the father of Tanar's beloved. However, thanks to one of ERB's more intricate birth-mystery plots, Stellara reveals that she knows that she is not the child of the Cid, even though he thinks that she is. (Their few scenes together also display only contumely toward each other, so one assumes the Cid was not much of a daddy.)                                                                           

                                                                                                                                       Further, since childhood Stellara has known that she was the child of a primitive chieftain, and that her mother was stolen in a Korsar raid before being "married" to the Cid. There's some amusement-value in the author's decorousness about sex, since it goes without saying that for the Cid to believe Stellara his progeny, he has to have had sex with the deceased mother at some point. A contemporary author might have pictured Stellara as lusting for vengeance upon the false parent who raped her mother. But that wasn't in ERB's wheelhouse for whatever reasons. The author does devote some space to having Stellara find her way to her original tribe, where she meets her real father. But ERB seemed to be avoiding any discussion of the relationship between the heroine and the Cid-- who never even learns, so far as the reader knows, that he was tricked into raising another man's child. And even though the Cid doesn't suffer for his act of rape-- I don't even think he has any major scenes in TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE-- one might imagine that the slaying of Bulf, who explicitly would have taken Stellara by force given the chance, provides a substitute for the non-punishment of the novel's main villain. (ERB also never imagines what would have happened had The Cid forced himself on Stellara's mother more than once, but the erudite reader may argue that he did, but never learned that he was "firing blanks," as even people of ERB's time would have comprehended.) ADDENDUM: After TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, Gridley gets another one of those loquacious radio broadcasts, this one relating the entire story of the 1931 FIGHTING MAN OF MARS.         

THE READING RHEUM: PELLUCIDAR (1915)

 I didn't mention in my review of AT THE EARTH'S CORE that the book ended with a cliffhanger in which hero David Innes ends up back on the surface, separated from the primitive interior world of Pellucidar. But compared to the suspenseful ending of A PRINCESS OF MARS, both the concept and the resolution of CORE's cliffhanger in the sequel seems lazy by comparison. It's my unsupported opinion that ERB wasn't nearly as invested in Pellucidar as he was in Barsoom and even Caspak. Certainly, throughout the remainder of PELLUCIDAR the author doesn't expand much on this pocket prehistoric cosmos.                                             

Though the sequel is just as episodic as CORE was, ERB no longer has to devote time to explaining his world, so overall there are more action set-pieces. David Innes still seems like a cypher, an incarnation of Manifest Destiny, eager to convert all the primitives to 20th-century progress. Admittedly he does this to liberate the humans from the ravening Mahars, though these ruthless reptiles only appear a couple of times in PELLUCIDAR. Dian the Beautiful isn't improved by more narrative-time either. She almost gets a Xena-moment as seen in the Roy Krenkel cover above, but exigent circumstances sideline her potential as a heroine. Her best character-moment may be indirectly explaining how she never got raped during her captivity by the villainous Hooja, revealing to Innes that she still has on her person a poison that would have prevented "the fate worse than death." The novel holds a smattering of okay character moments for the various humans Innes encounters. Still, the most involving scenes in the book involve Innes taming a savage hyenanodon as if it were a surface-dog. When a book is more interested in the hero's dog than in his lady love, there's a problem.                                                   

   I must admit that I forgot what a threat Hooja was since I last read this novel. He and Innes share no scenes here, and Hooja was mostly offstage throughout the first book after Innes beat him up for getting grabby with Dian. But compared to a lot of weakling villains in ERB, Hooja does his enemy a lot of damage. He's not any better characterized than Innes and Dian, and his being offstage lessens his impact. But he's smart enough (unlike most humans of the pocket world) to recognize the nature of the science-marvels that Innes and his elderly buddy Abner Perry bring to Pellucidar, and to copy those marvels to garner power for himself. Hooja is apparently slain at the end of this book, but I guess I won't know if ERB really knocked off one of his better villains until I finish the PELLUCIDAR series.                             

  Due to his prolonged absence since the end of the first novel, Innes spends most of this book trying to unite all the human tribes against the Mahars, though ERB's idea of diplomatic relations always a consists of saving this or that tribal member from peril. After lots of episodic dangers, Innes gets the chance to consolidate his empire in the last twenty pages, though the author is smart enough to let some of the evil reptiles escape capture/death. From peeking at the next book in the series, I know that Innes' empire gets torn down almost as quickly, though he's restored to his throne at the end of the fourth in the series, TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. I suspect the other three books may be more one-offs than part of a greater continuity.               

   In my review of CORE I speculated that ERB probably wouldn't re-use the tailed Black monkey-men, and PELLUCIDAR shows I was half-right. The monkey-men never come on stage again, but when Innes runs into a tribe of hairy white men whose eyes are supposedly like those of sheep (?), ERB has Innes compare the two tribes in his mind. The hero notes that the Black people didn't seem to have a real language, but they did have civilized habits not seen in any of the White tribes, like building huts and holding livestock. The sheep-eyed people have a language, but they seem pretty dumb otherwise. They occupy the top of an escarpment, and when their tribe is attacked by invaders coming up the mountainside, Innes has to point out that the sheep-guys ought to toss rocks down onto their enemies' heads. Clearly ERB had no agenda in describing all of his imaginary evolutionary quirks. His approach would be best likened to the fantasists of Marco Polo's day, who would spin stories of tribes in Asia with all sorts of bizarre nonhuman aspects. In these books, it seems that ERB only wanted to divert his audience-- though I'll only be sure when I make my way through the last three in the series.                                  

THE READING RHEUM: AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1914)

 

I never read the entire Pellucidar series back in the day, and frankly didn't remember much about the books I did read. But given that Pellucidar might be deemed ERB's third best-known series-concept and given that I enjoyed 1929's TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, I got hold of the entire series. Whether I get them all read and reviewed here is anyone's guess.  (Quick illustration note: pleasant though Roy Krenkel's cover-painting is, no one in CORE rides dinosaurs, though it's possible that something similar happens in later books.)                                                                                                     

The Pellucidar series resembles that of ERB's second-best-known series-concept: the Mars books, which had one really famous hero but also devoted one-shot stories to other protagonists on Mars. Yet CORE's main hero David Innes is not nearly as evocative as John Carter or Tarzan. Innes is something of a cypher even compared to some of ERB's more obscure characters. The young hero makes it financially possible for scientist Abner Perry to design the drilling-machine, "The Iron Mole," that burrows down beneath Earth's crust and finds a totally independent pocket-world with dinosaurs, cavepeople, and its own independent light-source. I don't think even in 1914 most readers believed in the possibility of a "hollow earth," but there's something enormously evocative about the idea of digging down into the earth-globe and finding a whole world therein. Additionally, the natives of Pellucidar supposedly doesn't experience linear time as do residents of the surface world. ERB doesn't really develop this notion, and all I can say is that the author had some attraction to the idea of characters being able to escape "time's winged chariot, hurrying near."                                                                                                         

The Pellucidar books also resemble the Mars books in that the hero falls in love with a native woman of this savage world and thus becomes fired with the desire to remake the domain into a place of higher civilization. However, ERB takes an odd approach to his standard formula. While in captivity of slavers, Innes encounters, and promptly offends, the hyperbolically named maiden "Dian the Beautiful." Then Dian disappears from most of the first two-thirds of the book. She finally reappears in the last third, gives Innes a hard time for a couple of chapters, and then true love asserts itself. Like Innes, Dian's not much more than a sketch of a formula-character. Her main function in the plot is that from the first she's being pursued by a hulking warrior, the Biblically-named "Jubal the Ugly," whom Innes must defeat in single combat at the conclusion. The fight's the best action in the novel, and ERB even gives it a patina of the old "civilization defeats savagery" trope.                                               

   If there's any concept into which ERB did invest a lot of thought, though, it's that of Pellucidar's master race, the Mahars. These intelligent pterandons command a race of gorilla-men, the Sagoths, who capture human slaves and turn them over to the Mahars for scientific experimentation and, more often than not, for eating. ERB worked more than a few commentaries on omophagia into his stories, and in all likelihood the Mahars represent his best example of man-eating monsters. He even makes the point that to the Mahars, humans are no more than the beasts that humans themselves consume-- though that rationale doesn't make the creatures any less horrific.                                                                                                     

   All of ERB's books are episodic, but CORE seems particularly so, as very few of Innes' adventures add up to much in terms of emotional impact. ERB also doesn't come up with any compelling society except that of the Mahars, though many modern readers will be offended by the first society Innes encounters: tree-dwelling humanoids with tails, who bear a strong resemblance to the Negroes of the surface world. I have seen ERB use Black characters as the butts of jokes, not least in the first TARZAN novel, but I didn't glean any particular agenda this time. Innes gets carried around by the Black tree-dwellers for a while, but they don't do anything malicious or stupid. Then Innes is captured by Sagoth slavers, and the tailed tree-dwellers aren't seen again in CORE. ERB is justly famous for his studied ignorance of his era's evolutionary theories, though he often used his version of evolution to explain a lot of his fantastic creations. I'm not sure the writer was even aware of the distinction between the major primate groups of monkeys and apes: that the former usually have tails and the latter never do. I theorize that for ERB it was a jape to put tails on humanoids who were not related to monkeys in the least, but who acted like humans in having dwellings and domesticated animals. Seven years later, in the book TARZAN THE TERRIBLE the jungle-lord visits a different prehistoric land, Pal-Ul-Don, and there he meets two groups of tailed (but not tree-dwelling) humanoids, one white and one black. My guess that the tree-dwellers of CORE were just a one-off may be confirmed if, as I suspect, that particular society makes no further appearances in the Pellucidar book-series.  

THE READING RHEUM: THE RED HAWK (1925)

Curiously, the cover to the 1963 Ace paperback, in which the company reprinted the short ERB novels MOON MEN and RED HAWK, looks like it belongs with a standard Burroughsian SF-romance along the lines of the Mars books. But the scene, showing a normal sized man dueling a nine-foot armored giant, derives from the end of the concluding novel RED HAWK, the one with the least amount of standard science-fiction content. (In the book the giant doesn't have blue skin or pointed ears, but-- creative license.)

Like MOON MEN, RED HAWK takes place entirely on ERB's future-Earth. In MOON MEN the key conflict only appears to concern the tyrannized Earth-humans attempting (and failing) to throw off the chains of the virtually indistinguishable humanoids from the Moon, the Kalkars. But arguably the real focus is the resistance to ethnic assimilation. The good guys, all of whom are Americans, have managed to keep themselves genetically separate from the invading Kalkars. Yet the Americans are far less persecuted by the literal aliens than by their offspring, who are hybrids of Kalkars and Earth people. The American leader is the descendant of the heroic Julian from the first book, while his worst enemy is a descendant of the villainous Orthis-- and both characters perpetuate their legacy through women from the Moon, Julian through a Va-na woman and Orthis through a female Kalkar.

Three hundred years later, the scope of the conflict has taken several odd turns. If any conflict still takes place in big cities, the reader never hears of it, and the narrative concern with religious suppression utterly vanishes. Instead, the heirs of Julian and Orthis now both lead nomadic tribes in the American Southwest, and the tribes have taken the names of their progenitors: "Julians" and "Or-Tis." There's no more distinction between pure Kalkars and half-breeds, and for all one can tell, all Kalkars on Earth may be mixed-race. In contrast to the first two books, these Kalkars have gone out of their way to practice eugenics so as to distance themselves from common humanity, in that the males are on average seven feet tall. (Apparently the females stay average-sized, since there's a scene in which the hero mistakes a non-Kalkar woman for a Kalkar.) 

Said hero is the twentieth scion of the original Julian, but his main name is Red Hawk, and all the people in his tribe have names like those of Native Americans, as well as wearing Native American attire and living in teepees. (They also practice scalp-taking, though ERB does not show this.) But both the Julians and the Or-Tis (which is both a singular and plural noun) are pretty evidently White people who have, for reasons never explored, taken to living like Native Americans. (That the two tribes are not Indians is made clear by ERB's introduction of real, dark-complected people called "In-Juns," more on whom later.) The social organization of the Kalkars is not very well explained. They're not parasites like the old Kalkars, but just unrelenting brutes who treat their women like slaves. Though the line of Orthis was originally allied to the Kalkars, now the Or-Tis tribe has separated from their former patrons, though the Or-Tis and the Julians harbor more hate toward one another than they do for their giant-sized enemies.

What makes all this "Fake Indian" business fascinating is that ERB ends up pursuing the exact opposite theme from that of MOON MEN, in that Julian-Hawk becomes the fulcrum of a movement TOWARD assimilation between the Or-Tis and the Julians. Hawk is actually a fairly chauvinistic hero at the start. Then he's captured by the Or-Tis, whose leader offers the possibility of a peace between them. When Hawk refuses, he's imprisoned with a renegade Or-Tis man. This prisoner claims that the current leader is an impostor, and that there's a real direct scion of the original Orthis out there somewhere, who wants a real peace with the Julians. In actuality, the unnamed man really is this true valid leader, though he barely figures in the main plot, except in that he's the brother of the obligatory Burroughsian heroine.

After escaping the Or-Tis tribe, Hawk falls in with a curious tribe of pygmy-sized people who live in very small teepees and who call themselves "Nipons," after their ancestor, the normal-sized "Mik-do." These Japanese pygmies, whose small stature goes unexplained, are also enemies of the brutal Kalkars, and the Nipons' greatest enemy is a nine-foot giant named Raban. Hawk, being chauvinistic again, thinks Raban is just a superstitious fantasy. But upon leaving the Nipons, Hawk encounters a Kalkar man with a female prisoner, and he nobly kills the Kalkar raider even though he assumes his prisoner is Kalkar too. 

The woman Bethelda is a little more contentious than a lot of ERB heroines. Though grateful for her rescue, she withholds her true secret: that though she's not a Kalkar, she is an Or-Tis. Bethelda eventually reveals all and criticizes the warrior for holding her people responsible for the sins of an ancestor long dead. By this time, they've fallen hard for each other, so this leads to the usual ERB trope of the female being captured and the male rescuing her. And her captor is none other than the mythical Raban, who is also the nine-foot-tall armored guy on the cover. After Raban's inevitable conquest the human tribes are united, in part through the wedding of Hawk and Bethelda, and the Kalkars are at last driven to the sea.

If this wasn't already such a long post I'd linger over a lot of Burroughs' character beats here. ERB was a formula writer but he worked in a good range of dramatic and comic scenes here, far more than he has in MOON MAID and MOON MEN combined. Once he even came back to previous themes, for after dropping the matter of cannibalism that occupied a few MOON MAID chapters, the topic arises again in Raban, who purports to eat his victims. And since ERB never gives a reason for his Japanese pygmies, maybe he was just playing with Nordic myth-images, giving readers a world with both "giants" and "dwarfs."

But since I have to wrap up with something, I'll discourse on the Fake Indian thing. On one level, it's tied into Caucasian fantasies about being a nature-dwelling savage outside the bounds of civilization, like the 1984 film RED DAWN. But there's a little more to it.

Burroughs actually had been a ranch-cowboy for a time in his youth, and served with the Seventh Cavalry for a year before his health got him discharged. During his army hitch he claimed he rode with troopers seeking out the Apache Kid, as seen in this post on the FRONTIER PARTISANS blog. So though he didn't interact with the Apaches on a personal basis that we know of, he had some acquaintance with real Native Americans. It's often been noted that the Mars books place John Carter in the middle of conflicts between tribes of "good alien Indians" and "bad alien Indians," and though ERB didn't write a lot of westerns, I think it's evident that he worked a lot of Western archetypes into his books. Thus, even though the real "In-Juns" in RED HAWK have no agency in the novel, one of ERB's most unique lines in all of his stories is spoken to Red Hawk by an old Indian woman, who didn't get the standard message on the Vanishing American:

Like the coyote, the deer and the mountains, we have been here always. We belong to the land, we are the land-- when the last of our rulers has passed away, we shall still be here, as we were in the beginning, unchanged. They come and mix their blood with ours, but in a few generations the last traces of it have disappeared, swallowed up by the slow, unchanging flow of ours. You will come and go, leaving no trace, but after you are forgotten we will still be here.

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE MOON MEN (1925)

To quickly recap from my review of ERB's 1923 MOON MAID: that novel's "sequel" was actually written first as a stand-alone story set on a future-Earth dominated by Communism. When that project didn't sell, ERB reworked it into the sort of "science romance" for which he was known. MOON MAID established the existence of a race of humanoids on the moon, and at that novel's conclusion the bad humanoids, the Kalkars, apparently wipe out the good ones, the Va-nas. The one survivor, Nah-ee-lah, is taken to Earth as the wife of MAID's hero Julian V, while Julian's enemy Orthis, an Earthman who collaborated with the Kalkars, remains on the moon, plotting his next move.

Four generations later, the narrator tells how the enmity between Julian and Orthis was resolved: that the two met one another in a spaceship-battle, and when Julian got the upper hand in the struggle, Orthis achieves a pyrrhic victory by blowing up his ship and that of Julian V. But Orthis also leaves behind his seed in a Kalkar woman, and thus, when Julian V's descendant Julian IX reaches manhood, he will contend with the descendant of the original Orthis.

Following the death of Julian V, craven Earth-rulers pave the way for the Kalkars to invade and take over the planet. Obviously in the original story it was probably just Russians and their allies, but the end result is the same: Americans are dominated by tyrants who keep normal humans in bondage and forbid them from worshiping God. Continuing ERB's motif from the first novel, in which Kalkars are described as lazy scum who want others to do all their work, the Earth-Kalkars are the same, and it's their constant tyrannies that cause the powerful young Julian IX to start a revolution.

Surprisingly, ERB spends much more time setting up the revolution than showing it, possibly because he really wants to convince the readers of the Kalkars' evil (and thus, indirectly, of Earth Communism). Yet we don't really see that many "pure Kalkars." I mentioned in my MOON MAID review that ERB illogically referred to the moon-Kalkars as "mongrels," which was impossible in ERB's setup, since the Kalkars and Va-nas were a homogenous people despite their division. But in MOON MEN, most of the villains in the novels are what ERB calls "half-breeds," resulting from the unison of the moon-humanoids with Earth-women, whether willing or not. In this trope I see a strong similarity to Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD, in that Doyle's character Roxton claims that the casual enslavement of Bolivian Indians is largely the fault of Caucasian/Indian half-breeds. Naturally, Julian IX and all of his American friends and relations are treated like "pure" humans, though no one brings up the fact that one of Julian IX's ancestors was an alien Va-na. ERB even claims that the unseen pure Kalkars are not as cruel as their half-breed spawn, because the latter feel like they must be extra cruel to humans because of their mixed heritage. Or-Tis, one of the local commanders of the Kalkars, is the foremost of these, though ERB creates a lot of lesser evildoers on whom the hero vents his wrath before the big climax.

The matter of ethnic mixing also surprisingly comes up in regard to the hero's inevitable romantic interest, a young woman who takes shelter with Julian IX's family. Julian IX falls into immediate love with her-- with the amusing note that he thought his mother the world's beautiful woman until he met this young girl-- and she with him. Inevitably, the nasty Or-tis tries to get control of the girl to debase her, even as his ancestor pursued Nah-ee-lah. The ethnic mixing I mentioned, though, is signified by the heroine's name, "Juana St. John." Why ERB gave this character a Hispanic first name and an English surname will probably never be known. A charitable view might be that he didn't think mixing between different ethnicities was wrong in itself, as long as the products believed in God and hard work. But one will search through the novel in vain for any details on Juana's Hispanic heritage.

Though Juana is a little less of a damsel than Nah-ee-lah, neither she nor any of the other MOON MEN characters are very evocative, and the novel has a downer ending in that the revolution actually fails and Julian IX is executed-- though again, with the implication that he has left behind the seed of a heroic male descendant. I doubt the original stand-alone novel ended this way, and the conclusion is probably the result of ERB's decision to continue another chapter in the saga, set over ten generations later. That said, the end of MOON MEN is very close to that of ERB's probable inspiration, Jack London's 1908 IRON HEEL.

MOON MEN has no mythic core; ERB just keeps blathering about American values and God and the horrors of miscegenation. But I will exonerate the novel of one suspected "crime." I didn't mention this in my MOON MAID review, but there's an odd detail there in which it's asserted that the moon-Kalkars all have hooked noses. Any time one reads of characters being given prominent noses, there's a tendency to think that the author is evoking, consciously or not, a bias against Jewish people.  And since the moon-Kalkars are analogues to Earth-Communists-- and since some famous real-world Communists possessed Jewish heritage, like Marx and Trotsky-- I wondered if ERB had worked some anti-Semitism into his series. However, MOON MEN has no mention of hooked noses, and I suspect I won't find any in RED HAWK. More, one of the main support-characters is an elderly Jew, Samuels, whose Jewish background is as respected as the Christianity of the other good guys. Samuels suffers a "noble death" at the hands of the oppressors, and so I tend to dismiss the theory of anti-Semitic influence upon the series, unless I find something really egregious in RED HAWK.

THE READING RHEUM: THE MOON MAID (1923)

I hadn't read Edgar Rice Burroughs' THE MOON MAID or its two sequels in thirty or more years, and remembered little about them, much less the complications of their origins, as summed up by this site:

Edgar Rice Burroughs began work on The Moon Maid in June of 1922. The Moon Men had already been written but was yet unpublished. The Moon Maid was published as a five part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly on May 5, 12, 19, 26; June 2, 1923. The first edition hardback which contained all three parts of the story was published by McClurg in February 1926. It cut out almost twenty-five per cent from the magazine version (mainly from The Moon Men). The Ace paperback edition, 1962, restored the original material. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote The Moon Men in April and May of 1919 under the working title Under the Red Flag. It was published as a four part serial by Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 22, 28; March 7, 14, 1925. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of Russian communism. The sequel to The Moon Men was first published as a three part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly September 5, 12, 19, 1925. 

So in essence, ERB attempted to branch out and write UNDER THE RED FLAG as a sort of Earth-bound future history, more or less along the lines of Jack London's 1908 THE IRON HEEL. His publishers wanted something more in the vein of his previous successes Tarzan and John Carter, so he wrote THE MOON MAID, revised RED FLAG into MOON MEN, and then concluded the series with a years-later wrap-up in THE RED HAWK. I may or may not get a chance in the near future to re-read the second two parts, which as noted were subsumed into Ace Books' MOON MEN. So, though I've read summaries of what happens in the other two books, I'll confine remarks in this post to THE MOON MAID.

The title alone suggests the first John Carter book, A PRINCESS OF MARS, but though I consider MAID a mythic novel, it's not even close to the level of inventiveness of the first three Carter books. Like many ERB books it begins with a frame-device, in this case a man telling the entire story to another man. This time both the story and storyteller inhabit future-eras of Earth's history, and the frame establishes in a vague way that the storyteller is a reincarnation of the story's hero (who, spoiler alert, dies in the second novel). 

The story proper begins with protagonist Julian V captaining a spaceship from future-Earth of the 2000s, on its way to Mars. But the ship's crew includes Julian's rival Orthis, who like the hero came up through Earth's military hierarchy but who fiercely hated Julian for always being the better man in all departments. Orthis sabotages the ship so that it crashes on the Moon. Julian and Orthis are quickly separated from the ship and its forgettable crewmen, and both fall into the hands of an intelligent quadriped species, the Va-gas. While Orthis conspires with these feral creatures, Julian encounters a hot young humanoid named Nah-ee-lah, the "maid" of the title, and helps her escape the Va-gas. After various exploits, during which Julian and Nah-ee-lah fall in love but don't express their feelings, they reach (albeit separately) the maid's home city of Laythe. But not only does Laythe face trouble from within, from a rebel uprising (led by a guy who wants to move in on Nah-ee-lah), there's a "mongrel" race of Moon-humanoids, The Kalkars, who end up annihilating the city. The novel ends with Julian and Nah-ee-lah escaping to Earth, where I assume Julian has just enough time to sire at least one offspring for the events of the next book. In that book, the Kalkars, aided by the renegade Orthis, will succeed in conquering Earth. Thus MAID is a setup for that event, and as a result Julian V's story doesn't so much end as wind down temporarily, albeit conveying some of the cliffhanger-vibe seen in PRINCESS OF MARS.

Julian V, Orthis and Nah-ee-lah are all adequate but unexceptional representatives of their respective roles. ERB does his story no favors by resorting to the hackneyed idea that Orthis simply hates Julian for being his superior, and that Julian V hates him back in response. Despite ERB's muddled attempt to provide some convoluted theory of a strange identity between Julian V and his future incarnations, he comes off as a crude John Carter imitation, and Nah-ee-lah, the only named female in the story, is a routine helpless femme who doesn't assume any greater dimensions, as does Dejah Thoris.

The antagonists supply all the mythic content of MOON MAID. Late in the book Nah-ee-lah gives Julian a compact history of how Laythe (possibly named from the river of the dead from Greek mythology), the usual pre-lapsarian society, creates its worst antagonists. The four-legged Va-gas originate as herd animals who escape the control of the Laytheans, though it's not clear as to when they develop intelligence. Having been bred to provide meat to humans, the Va-gas perhaps understandably enjoy feasting on the flesh of the Laythean people. However, during Julian's time with them he's horrified to witness that the quadripeds also eat their own kind, even those fallen in battle with enemies, and this naturally does not set well with the Earthman's morals. In one memorable scene, the ability of cannibalism to eradicate familial bonds is seen when Julian describes the females of the tribe chowing down on their dead relations, with mothers eating sons and wives husbands.

The Kalkars derive their name from a Laythean work meaning "thinkers." They became an offshoot from their own people thanks to their forefathers, who liked to sit around and imagine injustices-- which is ERB's on-point critique of the instigators of the Russian Revolution. The Kalkars sow chaos within the ordered, guild-like structure of Laythean society, but Laythe somehow survives while the Kalkars form their own separate tribe. But Orthis, having escaped the Va-gas, uses his knowledge of Earth-tech to help the nasty mongrels conquer the ordered hierarchical society, thus presaging a similar conquest on Earth. Even if one doesn't agree with ERB's take on the rise of real-world Communism, in the Moon-world he creates two malign beings of opposed natures: one characterized by too little thought, and the other by too much (bad) thought.

I don't know about the other two parts, but MOON MAID is part of a loose continuity with the Mars books. It's through Earth's radio contact with Mars that future-Earth perfects space travel with the use of Martian "rays," and Storytelling Julian even mentions John Carter, though it's not clear just what he knows about the Martian hero.

QUICK CROSSOVER CORRECTION

 In ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2 I wrote:

This is the most important aspect of escalation with relevance to cultural significance. It does not matter that Ivanhoe had just one literary outing while Fu Manchu had twelve novels and four short stories; what matters most is that they became cultural touchstones. Once this happens, these iconic characters, no matter how much they may be changed in later adaptations, have had their stature escalated to the highest level possible for a purely literary character; the level of Qualitative Escalation.

At the time I wrote these words in 2021, I hadn't yet formulated the linked terms of "novelty and familiarity," first seen in slightly different form in 2022's THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD. Once I had made this formulation, the description of Qualitative Escalation became strained. Yes, Ivanhoe became a "cultural touchstone" despite the fact that in his original medium he enjoyed only one story, and possibly would have become just as "escalated" had Scott not included the subplot of Ivanhoe's crossover with Robin Hood. But if I truly restricted Qualitative Escalation only to famous works, then it would be impossible for me to term the minor Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS in the ranks of crossovers, because its hero only enjoys one appearance but never becomes a touchstone of any kind.

So I will revise the exclusionary terms of my criteria for Qualitative Escalation. I was seeking in that criteria to come up with a form of "durability" to parallel that of the Quantitative type. But an icon's assumption of the stature of superordination, whether that icon appears just once or not, is de facto a Qualitative Escalation in comparison to all the subordinate icons within the text. So Tan Hadron, though never able to match Ivanhoe in any other way, does possess the same superordinate status.

This does not apply, however, to "back-door pilots," episodes of regular serials (usually but not always television shows) which attempt to launch new serials. A few such pilots may take over almost the whole run-time of a given episode, so that the pilot-characters can amass more time onscreen than the regular serial-icons. Nevertheless, such pilot episodes are still under the aegis of the ongoing serial's main characters, and if said episodes do not generate even one independent monad, and are not adapted from previous narratives, then the characters have no crossover-mana whatever. One comic-book example of this practice are the three issues of Marvel's INVADERS, in which Roy Thomas created the "Kid Commandos" team in order to hustle the sidekick characters out of the title. In this essay I expressed the notion that I might regard that team as an "adjunct" to the regular superordinate icons, but I now reject that line of thought to be consistent with my statements on other forms of "pilots" that go nowhere.