The Land That Time Forgot, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: 3
Pages: 153

The Land That Time Forgot is the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Caspak trilogy. It begins with terror on the high seas: a German submarine torpedoes an American liner in the English Channel. Our hero, young Bowen J. Tyler, Jr., clings to life in a single surviving lifeboat. He rescues his dog, Nobs, and a beautiful young woman named Lys La Rue--whom he instantly falls in love with.

The three are picked up by an English tug, which has the misfortune to run into the same German submarine which sunk the American liner. This time, the Allies get the upper hand. They trick the Germans and storm the submarine, taking control of U-33.

Tyler and the rest try to sail the submarine into an English port, but sabotage by the German prisoners (or somebody) gets them lost. They stumble upon the lost island of Caprona in the Antarctic Sea. Caprona--or Caspak, as the natives call it--is a huge island rearing hundreds of feet out of the sea. The sides are sheer impassable cliffs. Over the cliffs, on Caspak, lies an ancient primitive land from Earth's forgotten past. Volcanic heat creates a tropical atmosphere that supports lush forests. Dinosaurs and savage, pre-historic beasts roam the land. Ape men eke out a meagre existence. Out of oil for the submarine's engines and out of food and water for the men, Tyler and his crew must survive on Caspak.

Most don't survive, of course. And the German prisoners are up to no good. This book was written during the first World War, and it shows.

It's a good book, marred by a few throwaway lines of subtle racism.

The Land That Time Forgot is out of copyright. It is freely and legally available online at Project Gutenberg: The Land That Time Forgot.

At the Earth's Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: 2
Pages: 210
Spoilers?: Minor
Better than Moby Dick?: Yes

Edgar Rice Burroughs has a pretty good formula. A hero gets stranded in a strange alien world, sees a princess, and falls in love. The princess is kidnapped, and the hero rescues her. Along the way everybody does lots of fighting with swords, knives, arrows, and other honorable weapons. At the Earth's Core does not deviate from the formula.

The alien world is Pellicudar, a world inside the hollow crust of the Earth. A tiny sun at the center of the Earth provides eternal daylight in Pellucidar. Without day and night, time in Pellucidar is variable. What seems a month to one man--as he fights his way through the savage jungle--is a mere hour for his companion studying quietly in a library. It's a ludicrous concept, but no more so than the idea of a hollow Earth.

The hero is David Innes. No Tarzan or John Carter, Innes is nonetheless a true Burroughs hero: athletic, educated, but a man of bold action rather than study. The love interest is Dian the Beautiful. Unfortunately for Innes, in his ignorance of Pellucidarian culture, he offends her grievously. He must go after her, but he is captured and enslaved by the Mahars.

The Mahars are intelligent winged dinosaurs, and are the dominant species in Pellucidar. They are served by the Sagoths, a race of primitive ape-men. Together, they enslave the true men of Pellucidar. Innes and his companions escape from the Mahars, Innes gets the girl, and then--in a surprise twist that surprises no one--Innes unites the men of Pellucidar and frees them from the tyranny of the Mahars. Hooray for happy endings.

Out of Time's Abyss, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: 2
Pages: 139
Better than Moby Dick?: Yes

Out of Time's Abyss is the conclusion of the Caspak trilogy. It's not so much a trilogy as a three-part story, so it doesn't make sense unless you've read the previous installments.

Burroughs is not at the top of his form here. The action feels largely perfunctory. The plot is merely a device to allow Burroughs to explain the curious mode of evolution in the land of Caspak.

In Caspak, evolution is central to the lives of all men. The pinnacle of Caspakian evolution, the Galu people, do not have children. Instead, members of the lower races spontaneously rise and become Galu. Likewise, members of the highest order of apes spontaneously rise and become men. Thus in Caspak, even individual creature experiences the full evolutionary development from primordial tadpole to fully developed man.

Women in Caspak spend an hour each morning in the river water, releasing eggs that wash out to sea. There they begin the evolutionary process that will eventually come full circle. Because the women do not bear children, one might expect this to have an impact on Caspakian culture. Burroughs passes up this opportunity for building an interesting society, sadly.

Instead, Burroughs creates a whole new race of man: the Wieroos. The Wieroo are winged men who claim to be the pinnacle of human evolution. The Wieroo and the Galu compete for dominance on Caspak. Both groups are anxious to develop the ability to give live birth--which they call cos-ata-lu, as they hope this will allow them to increase their numbers and conquer the whole of Caspak.

A few Galu women are able to give live birth, but they are rare. The Wieroo can all reproduce cos-ata-lu, but they only have male offspring. To keep the race alive, the Wieroo steal any Galu women who shows signs of being able to bear children.

In Out of Time's Abyss, our hero Bradley is kidnapped by Wieroo. In captivity, he meets a Galu woman. They escape together and have many adventures. It's a boring story, though, except for the glimpses into the Wieroo culture.

The People That Time Forgot, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: 3
Pages: 153

The People That Time Forgot is the second of three books that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about Caspak. The three books are best read together (so I hear), but I had no trouble reading this one out of order.

Caspak is a land populated by beasts and men from Earth's prehistory: dinosaurs, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and cave men. Caspak is a huge island in the Antarctic Sea; the coasts are vertical cliff walls, completely cutting the island off from the rest of the world. Volcanic activity heats Caspak and maintains a year-round tropical temperature.

Tom Billings leads an expedition to Caspak to rescue his friend Bowen Tyler, who was stranded in that savage land. Billings scouts the terrain in an airplane, and meets with disaster: he is attacked by a pteradactyl and crashes into the jungle. Then he rescues a native girl from a band of savage apes, and together they make their way to the land of the Galus, where Billings hopes to find Bowen Tyler.

On their way north to Galu, the girl (named Ajor) teaches Billings all about Caspak. It is home to beasts from all of Earth's lost ages. The complete evolutionary history of Earth is represented, with the oldest and most savage creatures living in the south of Caspak. The farther north one goes, the more advanced and developed are the denizens of the forest--and more advanced are the people.

For Caspak is peopled by multiple groups of ancient men. First, the Ho-Lu, who are mere apes. Next, the Apu, the speechless men. Next the Bo-Lu, or clubmen, followed by the Band-Lu (spear men), Kro-Lu (hatchet men), and finally, at the pinnacle of evolution, the Galu (rope men). The girl Billings rescued, Ajor, is a Galu.

The most curious thing about Caspak is that the men themselves evolve. The Galu do not have children; instead, the most advanced Kro-Lu evolve and become Galu. Similarly, the Band-Lu become Kro-Lu. And so forth, with each tribe being made up of risen members of the tribe below it.

"[The Band-Lu] are no longer my people," To-Mar replied proudly. "Last night, in the very middle of the night, the call came to me. Like that it came into my head"--and he struck his hands together once--"that I had risen. I have been waiting for it and expecting it for a long time; today I am a Kro-Lu. Today I go into the coslupak" (unpeopled country, or literally, no man's land) "between the Band-Lu and the Kro-Lu, and there I fashion my bows and my arrows and my shield; there I hunt the red deer for the leathern jerkin which is the badge of my new estate. When these things are done, I can go to the chief of the Kro-Lu, and he dare not refuse me."

The basic question is: where do the Ho-Lu come from? Do they have babies? This question Burroughs does not answer--but he leaves clues. The precise nature of the curious accelerated evolution of Caspak is revealed in the next book, Out of Time's Abyss.

Tanar of Pellucidar, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: 2
Pages: 250

Tanar of Pellucidar is another perfunctory Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, which is to say it's exciting but forgettable. In the hollow inner-Earth world of Pellucidar, David Innes rules over a savage empire. His empire is attacked by mysterious pirates called Korsars. Tanar is taken captive. He wins a reprieve from death by promising to teach his captors the secret to gunpowder.

Tanar has no intention of teaching them to make gunpowder. Instead, he escapes with the lady Stellara, an Amiocapan woman who grew up among the Korsars. They have numerous adventures, are recaptured, escape again, are recapture, escape again, etc. As so often happens to ERB's characters, Tanar and Stellara fall in love but don't realize it until it's nearly too late.

The most interesting villains are the Coripies, known in Amiocap as the Buried People. These subhuman fiends live underground and feast on human flesh. No one captured by the Coripies has ever escaped--until now, of course.

Tanar of Pellucidar doesn't hold a candle to any of the Barsoom stories.

Under Crimson Moons, by N. P. B. Barker

Rating: 3

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote about Mars in its old age, when the Barsoomian seas had dried up and the planet was kept inhabitable only by great atmosphere generators. N.P.B. Barker gives us Under Crimson Moons, a fan fiction novel about Mars in its youth.

The story mirrors A Princess of Mars; an Earthman, Englishman Hector Blake, is transported to Mars, where he falls in love with a princess, demonstrates his prowess as a fighting man, saves a nation, earns great respect, and wins the girl's heart. The plot is so perfectly Burroughsesque that I wondered at times whether Barker had just copied out sections wholesale from the Mars novels; but it isn't so. Barker has a gift for reproducing the pulp style of Burroughs's writing.

Barker's Mars--which he names Kanthor--is younger than Burroughs's Barsoom, and it is correspondingly more vibrant. Brilliant colors abound, even more so than in Burroughs's writing: blue men, red men, green men, twin crimson moons, black-and-vivid-orange beasts. There isn't a single color word in the English language that Barker fails to use. It's a bit overdone, but in a good way.

Because this is Mars in its youth, the creatures, races, and nations of Barsoom are still in the inconceivably distant future. Barker has populated Kanthor with a panoply of colorful creatures and races. Hector Blake spends time among the blue reptilian race of Thoons; he meets the green princess Kara Dea; he fights the blood-red Slithian men who ride on winged snaroths. He fights the tiger-lizard rarnkors, escapes the bear-sized spidery sipperath, and befriends a wild thastak who repays him with canine loyalty.

The people of Kanthor are much like Barsoomians in their views about honor, fighting, and swordsmanship. It would hardly be a story worthy of Burroughs were it to be otherwise. Hector Blake is much like John Carter, except English. In all, Under Crimson Moons is a worthy continuation of the Mars tales. I enjoyed it as much or more than any of Burroughs's books.

Under Crimson Moons is available as a Kindle ebook at Amazon.

Victory was mine! Standing ecstatic over the lifeless body of my vanquished enemy, its visage still contorted into an impossible rictus, I was seized by the urge to throw back my head and howl in exultation while beating my breast like a jungle ape.

It was a close-run thing, but I restrained myself, aware that such an ejaculation would ill-become an Englishman.