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Another Childhood Classic Disappoints: Thuvia Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Another Childhood Classic Disappoints: Thuvia Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Thuvia of Mars paperback editions (Ace 1962, Ballantine 1969, Four Square 1962). Art by Roy Krenkel, Jr., Bob Abbett, and Roy Carnon

During confinement and adjusting to a new job (while writing a new novel!), I’ve been feeling like my bandwidth is restricted. To calm my brain at times, I’ve been rereading books I enjoyed. My reread of the X-Men is well underway (here’s post X in the blog series), and I’ve also relistened to R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing (covered here by Theo), Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children and the first two books of The Lord of the Rings. They were all good.

I’ve had rocky experiences on rereads before though. Dune aged poorly for me in some important ways (I detailed it here) and Anthony’s Spell for Chameleon had little redeem itself in my mind (the ways that reread fell flat are here).

I was optimistic about rereading my first novel experiences, Edgar Rice Burroughs though. I’d previously talked about Burroughs and the amazing biography written about him here. Princess of Mars, Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars were all too well remembered so I downloaded Thuvia Maid of Mars at Librivox.org, which does audio recordings of public domain books. This novel was also discussed by Black Gate blogger Ryan Harvey a few years ago, so if you want an alternate view, it’s here.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs Dictated His Work — So I Tried It

Edgar Rice Burroughs Dictated His Work — So I Tried It

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edgar-rice-burroughs-dictaphoneOver his nearly forty-year career, Edgar Rice Burroughs put into use every writing method available to him. In a letter to the Thomas A. Edison Company regarding their Ediphone machine, which ERB purchased in 1922, he wrote: “I have written longhand and had my work copied by a typist; I have typed my manuscripts personally; I have dictated them to a secretary; and I have used the Ediphone.” (He didn’t mention in the letter that he also used the Dictaphone, Edison’s competitor.) Although Burroughs would shift his writing methods over the decade and sometimes returned to the trusty typewriter — even letting a ghostly force take over the typing duties in the prologue to Beyond the Farthest Star — wax cylinder dictation machines became his preferred tool. In his daily log of writing progress, he’d describe his workload in terms of how many wax cylinders he’d gone through that day. “May 24 Dictated 5 cyl. today — something over 4000 words.”

In the letter to the Edison Company, Burroughs listed the reasons he preferred to work using dictation machines: “Voice writing makes fewer demands upon the energy … it eliminates the eyestrain … the greatest advantage lies in the speed. I can easily double my output.” He kept his Ediphone (or Dictaphone) near his bedside “to record those fleeting inspirations that would otherwise be lost forever.”

At the time, dictation machines were primarily used for businesses. In order to make the most out of one, a writer had to have a stenographer to transcribe the wax cylinder recordings, so dictation machines weren’t much use to pulp fiction writers. But Edgar Rice Burroughs was both a writer and a business. He was wealthy enough to have an office staff, including a secretary whose job was to type up the manuscript from ERB’s cylinder output. The secretary would also do the job of shaving each wax cylinder — this required its own machine — so it could be reused.

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Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1928–29)

Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and the Lost Empire (1928–29)

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Readers have asked me, but the answer is still no: I can’t tackle the entire Tarzan series the way I did Edgar Rice Burroughs’s other book series, Mars, Venus, and Pellucidar. There are twenty-four Tarzan books, not counting the juveniles, and I’d burn out long before the end if I tried to read them in sequence over a compressed time period.

But since I’m always glad to pick up a Tarzan volume here and there among my other Burroughs readings, I’ll negotiate. I’ll do an occasional Tarzan book “swing-by” to give spotlight time to ERB’s biggest contribution to popular culture. No particular order, just whatever Tarzan adventure grabs me at the moment.

So I’ll start with … let’s see … Book #12, Tarzan and the Lost Empire. Wherein the Lord of the Jungle finds yet another civilization lost in time in the heart of Africa: a remnant of the Roman Empire still living the ancient ways. Tarzan also gets a little monkey sidekick.

Tarzan and the Lost Empire falls into a period of the Tarzan novels that I think of as the “Filmation Era” because of how much the 1970s Filmation animated series Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle reflects it. After the tenth book, Tarzan and the Ant Men, Tarzan was distanced from the Greystoke legacy and his former supporting cast, and now has the companionship of both Nkima the monkey and Jad-bal-ja the golden lion. Jane vanished except for a single reappearance in Tarzan’s Quest (1936). The plots became standalone and repeated certain formulas, such as Tarzan discovering lost civilizations or facing a Tarzan imposter.

The writing quality of these books was still high in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, and Burroughs hadn’t lost his skill at executing pulse-racing action set-pieces. But the plotting was often perfunctory as ERB became a bit fatigued with having to go back to the Tarzan well again and again. The story ideas and the prose popped, but the plots often meandered with overstuffed casts and too much incident that doesn’t go anywhere. Tarzan and the Lost Empire falls prey to these faults. But it also contains one of the most interesting hidden civilizations of the series and a setting that energized Burroughs.

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My 300th Black Gate Post: Why I Write About What I Write About

My 300th Black Gate Post: Why I Write About What I Write About

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This is my three hundredth post at Black Gate. This year also marks the tenth anniversary of my first post as a regular blogger. I remember when John O’Neill first invited me to be a part of this project, back when none of us had any idea where it would go — I certainly didn’t think it would last for a decade and that I’d still be around. Or that John would win a World Fantasy Award for it. Yet here the site is, ten years later and a World Fantasy Award richer, and I still can’t believe people show up to read what I have to say about Hercules movies, Godzilla, and Tarzan. It’s humbling to be part of a site with such a wealth of amazing material, great contributors, and so many dedicated and intelligent readers.

I’ve changed enormously as a nonfiction writer over these ten years, and most of the changes happened because of Black Gate. When I started my regular posts, I had only a blurry vision of the sort of blogger I wanted to be. The reality has turned out different because I made interesting discoveries about my own tastes along the way: specifically, what it is that I most enjoy writing about. I once imagined I’d write primarily about fantasy literature, Conan pastiches, and writing techniques. Now I write about monster movies, John Carpenter, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

To mark my personal anniversary, I’m going to offer an apologia of sorts — an explanation of why I write about the topics I write about most frequently on Black Gate. None of these were in the plan on Day 1, and I’m probably the person who’s most curious about how these subjects turned into my main nonfiction focus.

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Warlords of Atlantis: The Edgar Rice Burroughs Adaptation That Isn’t

Warlords of Atlantis: The Edgar Rice Burroughs Adaptation That Isn’t

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In December, my patience with North American video distributors at last ran out. If they refused to deliver Region A Blu-rays, and in some cases even DVDs, of movies from my beloved Hammer Film Productions, I needed to take drastic steps. Yes, I asked Santa Claus for a region-free Blu-ray player. Santa delivered as promised and I immediately ordered a Blu-ray of The Plague of the Zombies from Amazon.uk.

Next on the list … Warlords of Atlantis. It’s not a Hammer Film, but going region-free brings benefits like at last owning a copy of the fourth Edgar Rice Burroughs film from the team of director Kevin Connor and producer John Dark. It isn’t actually an Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, but in intent and most of the execution it might as well be.

Explain? Glad to. Connor and Dark made three low-budget movies in Britain based on ERB’s most popular science-fiction stories: The Land That Time Forgot (1975), At the Earth’s Core (1976), and The People That Time Forgot (1977). This Burroughs trio struck gold at the box-office, especially with adventure- and monster-loving kids. Connor and Dark planned a movie based on A Princess of Mars, this time working with EMI Films in co-production with Columbia.

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War Eternal: Beyond the Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs

War Eternal: Beyond the Farthest Star by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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beyond-farthest-star-ace-frazetta-coverIn 1940, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his final new adventure setting, the extrasolar planet Poloda. For the first time in a career that had ignited pulp science fiction back in 1912, Burroughs pushed beyond the solar system to the region of pure speculation. But what he discovered four hundred and fifty thousand light-years from Earth wasn’t an E. E. Smith space opera, or even an old-fashioned romp on a weird planet of monsters and savage humanoid tribes. Against the grain of its romanticized title, the incomplete short novel Beyond the Farthest Star isn’t an escapist tale, but a bleak meditation on a world mired in unending warfare. The title makes you anticipate Star Wars. Instead you find just Wars.

This is a stark work. It offers no illusions. There’s a dash of humor and some winking satire, but the overwhelming sensation of Beyond the Farthest Star is resignation to carnage. There are no valiant heroes on Poloda who become beacons for others to follow. There are only stalwart soldiers who fall in line to fight the fight, whatever it may be, and die in numbers tabulated by the hundreds of thousands.

We’re used to Edgar Rice Burroughs as a master of sweeping adventure in worlds where fighting means hope. It’s a shock to see him sitting glumly among the ruins of hope, waiting for the next wave of barbarians. Looking at Poloda from the perspective of the twenty-first century is to see a prophetic futurist emerging in Old Man Burroughs. The story the Old Man tells is not much fun. But it’s enthralling — and there’s nothing else like it in the ERB canon, even among the strange evolutions his work took during his last decade.

As with Savage Pellucidar and its sister books set on Mars and Venus, the Poloda novellas were planned to form a connected sequence for later hardcover publication. Part I, “Beyond the Farthest Star,” was written in October 1940 over twelve days, and Part II, “Tangor Returns,” was finished in December in five days. “Beyond the Farthest Star” appeared in the January 1942 issue of Blue Book, but Burroughs never submitted Part II for publication, probably because he scrapped the series after starting work as a war correspondent. “Tangor Returns” wasn’t discovered until thirteen years after Burroughs’s death. It was published along with “Beyond the Farthest Star” in the 1964 Canaveral Press omnibus Tales from Three Planets. Ace Books later released a paperback of the unfinished Poloda saga as Beyond the Farthest Star, with the first novella retitled “Adventure on Poloda.”

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My All-Story Story, or, A Tale of Tarzan (Not Triumphant)

My All-Story Story, or, A Tale of Tarzan (Not Triumphant)

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all story 1912 10 uk edition modified-small

Those who know me well are aware that I’m not a morning person (to put it mildly). Accordingly, they’d be shocked to learn that not only did I get up on Saturday, November 25th morning at 5:00 a.m., I did so voluntarily and eagerly! As collectors will attest, however, no price – even missing hours of delightful sleep! – is too great to pay in the pursuit of one of your collecting grails. Of course, it’s much more gratifying when the pursuit pays off. Unfortunately for me, it did not. Even so, I’m glad I got up to give it a shot.

About a week ago, I learned that an auction house in England would be auctioning off a copy of the October 1912 issue of The All-Story, which features Edgar Rice Burroughs’ complete novel, Tarzan of the Apes. All other things being equal in terms of condition, that issue is the most valuable of all the pulp magazines (the nicest copy I’m aware of having sold at auction, in fine condition, sold over a decade ago for nearly $60,000). This auction house clearly had no idea of its value, as their pre-sale estimate was between 20 and 40 pounds! A decent copy of this pulp has been my number one pulp grail for decades, and I hoped that this one would slip through the collecting cracks on its way to me. The auction house only had one photo of it online, and I couldn’t obtain any other photos of it, so condition was a bit of a guess, which complicated bidding. The front cover had some overall wear, but generally looked decent, but I had no clue on the condition of the spine, back cover or paper. See the photo above.

What made this particularly interesting was that it was the British edition of The All-Story, rather than the American edition. For a period of time in the teens (and I think going back a little earlier than that), The All-Story was also published in Britain, with the same cover date as the American edition. The covers noted that the price was Six Pence, rather than Ten Cents, and I believe the ads were different, but the fiction content was the same. I assume that the British edition was published at least a few days later than the American edition (the October 1912 American edition actually went on sale on September 10, 1912), but I don’t know how much of a delay there was. My guess is that it was later than the American edition, so technically this was not the first printing of the story, unlike the American.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Series Wrap-Up

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Series Wrap-Up

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Last week I concluded my book-by-book look at Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels, the prehistoric world inside the Earth’s crust where the stationary sun eradicates the passage of time. The complete series consists of seven books:

Compared to Burroughs’s other two long-running science-fiction series, Mars/Barsoom and Venus/Amtor, Pellucidar is more difficult to summarize. The Venus novels were written over a short period of time during the end of Burroughs’s career and all feature the same hero, Carson Napier. There are no Venus classics, with the best (Lost on Venus) only middling and the rest ranging from bland to unreadable. The Mars series presents a vast canvas that arcs across Burroughs’s career, but it’s the most consistently high quality of any of his series, including the Tarzan novels, so it’s not too difficult to give it a broad analysis that primarily looks at changes in protagonists.

The Pellucidar books, however, present conundrums when consumed in a short period. Like Mars, Pellucidar spans the major phases of ERB’s career: success in the ‘teens, a stabilizing period in the twenties, a steepening decline throughout the thirties, a World War II revival, and a “lost” story and final volume published posthumously in the sixties. Unlike Mars, Burroughs visited Pellucidar sporadically, with a fourteen-year lapse after the first two paired novels, and later a seven-year gap.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Savage Pellucidar

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Savage Pellucidar

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savage-pellucidar-canaveral-press-edition-coverHave we already arrived at the end of Pellucidar? It feels like I started examining this Edgar Rice Burroughs series only a few months ago — but it’s been almost a year since I drilled down to visit At the Earth’s Core. A year may have passed for me, but thirty has passed for Burroughs, and counting the time until the last unpublished novella was collected in Savage Pellucidar, the gap widens to fifty years. If you read At the Earth’s Core in the pulps as an enthusiastic thirteen-year-old, you’d be close to retirement age by the time you could buy the last book and have a complete Pellucidar set.

Wait, what am I talking about? This is Pellucidar. Time is meaningless here! I started writing this article series yesterday — or maybe a century ago, and the books were all published either over a span of one year or five hundred years. It’s all the same under the perpetual noonday sun.

Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic … Pellucidar. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer — including a certain Lord Greystoke. The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 1914 and 1963.

Today’s Installment: Savage Pellucidar (1963)

Previous Installments: At the Earth’s Core (1914), Pellucidar (1915), Tanar of Pellucidar (1929), Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929–30), Back to the Stone Age (1937), Land of Terror (1944)

The Backstory

I’ve told this tale before with Escape on Venus and Llana of Gathol, the sister works of Savage Pellucidar, but once more won’t hurt. At the start of the 1940s, Edgar Rice Burroughs experimented writing novels in three of his settings — Mars, Venus, and Pellucidar — as sets of four linked novellas. Each novella was capable of standing on its own but could later fit together with the other three for book publication. The idea may have been the suggestion of Cyril Ralph Rothmund, business manager for ERB Inc., who first wrote a letter to the editor of Ziff-Davis Magazines with the format proposal. It was an experiment of necessity, since the pulps were turning away from serializations as more of the weekly magazines dropped to monthly publication. Burroughs approached the three books as a round-robin, changing from one setting to the next to finish all the novellas.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Land of Terror

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Land of Terror

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land-of-terror-john-coleman-burroughs-first-edition-coverHere we are. The sixth book in the Pellucidar series, about which its author had this to say: “Perhaps the trouble is that it is one of a series which should have been concluded with the last story instead of trying to carry on without any logical reason.”

Oh boy. What I do next I take no pleasure in. I want to like Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. Sometimes it’s fun to shred up a terrible movie or book, and sometimes it’s simply the easier analytical path. But kicking writers you love when they’re down … that feels ugly. If you’ve never read an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel before, maybe go try this, or this, or how about this, and skip what I’ve written below. Seriously, I would never, ever, want to discourage someone from reading the works of one of the twentieth century’s great imaginative spinners of tales.

For those of you sticking around, hey, thanks plenty for wanting to read my analyses of ERB. Whenever we want to feel good about Edgar Rice Burroughs, we have a dozen or so classics we can pick up and — bam! — transported to wondrous realms of infinite adventure. So after reading this article, I recommend you pick one of your personal favorite Burroughs novels. I’m feeling the urge to return to The Land That Time Forgot. I adore that book, and I haven’t read it in a few years.

Yes, I’m stalling.

Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic … Pellucidar. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer — including a certain Lord Greystoke. The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 1914 and 1963.

Today’s Installment: Land of Terror (1944)

Previous Installments: At the Earth’s Core (1914), Pellucidar (1915), Tanar of Pellucidar (1929), Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929–30), Back to the Stone Age (1937)

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