THE SCIENCE FICTION OF EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
While H. G. Wells was offering erudite, intelligent parables on the future fate
of Humanity, Edgar Rice Burroughs was writing gloriously shameless fantastic,
exotic pulp fantasies that no one could have taken too seriously. His most
famous creation was of course, TarzanThe Ape Man , in which the last lord of
Greystoke, raised in the ways of the African jungle by the great apes, and
renounces the bourgeois life for the freedom of the jungle. Tarzan’s original literary
adventures, (unlike the film ones) usually depicted him battling monsters and
demons rather than lions and crocodiles. Burroughs even sent Tarzan to the
Earth’s core, in one adventure, and seriously considered sending him to Venus
in another. Burroughs capitalised on Arthur Conan Doyle’s pre-Jurassic Park
novel The Lost world with a lost Dinosaur civilisation of his own, in a series
of novels that began with The Land That Time Forgot . Forget the naff film
version with Doug McClure. The book is a great adventure story. Survivors of a
ship sunk by a German U –Boat, capture the sub responsible, and as the crew try
to take it back, they stumble upon an arctic entrance to a dinosaur island,
Caprona. As crew and captors play a cat and mouse game against each other as
well as the island creatures, the story proves genuinely imaginative and
exciting. It spawned a number of sequels. More readable are Burroughs’s Martian
stories, featuring John Carter, finest swordsman of two worlds. Carter’s
adventures usually involve very little story line. Some evil megalomaniac
kidnaps his Martian girlfriend, Deja Thoris,, and Carter fights his way across
an increasingly exotic, lurid landscape, fighting various monsters and madmen
on his way. Burroughs has his Martians depicted naked. (Though there is no
mention of sex acts in any of the stories). The people on Barsoom (the native
name for the planet) are tall, like humans, but their skin is either blue, or
green, or red, depending which clan Carter is fighting for or against at any
given time. Burroughs doesn’t even give Carter a spaceship for his journey to
Mars. He travels there by some kind of astral projection, while his earthly
body rests in a deserted cave until he comes back to narrate his various
unlikely, but always delightful adventures. Burroughs also wrote a small number
of Venus based stories, featuring Carson Napier, a hero who tries to meet up
with John Carter but gets lost in space and ends up on the other planet
instead. Then there are his Earth’s Core sagas, set in the land of Pellucidar,
a take on ‘Hollow Earth’ nonsense theories and Verne’s Journey To The Centre Of
The Earth. The core proves to be another monster’s paradise, described so well
that you wish it could be remotely possible. It was to this world that even
Tarzan paid an unlikely visit. Brian Aldiss, in his history of Science Fiction,
Trillion Year Spree, accuses Burroughs of ‘dishing out daydreams’. That seems
unfair. Burroughs knew that his Mars was an impossible world, as unattainable
in reality as Lucien’s bird-driven flights to the Moon, or Lewis Carroll’s
Wonderland. His stories are a celebration of the imagination, and no worse for
being seen merely at that level. His stories sold well. They were easier to
digest than Wellsian novels, and sadly, also easier to write. Burroughs and his
contemporary author, Arthur Conan Doyle fuelled the imagination of countless
hack writers, each failing to write half as well as Doyle or Burroughs. The
1920’s saw a plethora of bad Scientification stories, and unlikely journey
stories, that were soon to be labelled as bad science fiction. Sadly, too many
people believe that the bad stuff is all that exists. They need to read
Burroughs to see what they have missed.
© Copyright. Arthur Chappell
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