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Tanar of Pellucidar
By Edgar Rice Burroughs
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006
University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8032-6257-4
Introduction
PAUL COOK
By the time Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) published
Tanar of Pellucidar in 1929, he was already well established as
one of America's most beloved writers of popular fiction. His
career as an author began in 1911 after a series of failed business
ventures compelled him to turn to his first love, writing.
Burroughs first found success when he sold Under the Moons
of Mars (later entitled A Princess of Mars for book publication
in 1917) to All-Story in 1912, in which he introduced the first
of his major heroes, John Carter. Tarzan, perhaps Burroughs's
greatest character, also made his initial appearance in 1912, in
Tarzan of the Apes.
For about two decades Burroughs managed to write four
to five books a year, most serialized in pulp fiction magazines
such as All Around, All-Story Magazine, All-Story Cavalier,
The Blue Book Magazine, and New Story to name just a few. To
the chagrin of his editors-but not his legion of readers worldwide-Burroughs
was interested in a variety of fantastic landscapes
and gallant heroes, and he jumped about in his storytelling,
first writing about Mars, then about Tarzan and Africa, then
going back to Mars, then Africa again, and so on. Hepublished
all of his novels in serial format first, and such was their success
that they almost immediately came out in book form. A. C.
McClurg Publishing would publish most of Burroughs's books
from 1912 (Tarzan of the Apes) to 1929 (The Monster Men).
Burroughs's work also found quick success in foreign markets
and in translation. His popularity was further boosted by the invention
of cinema. Among the earliest full-length movies ever
made was the silent Tarzan of the Apes in 1918, starring Elmo
Lincoln. (There would be forty-eight Tarzan movies in all and
a 1970s television series starring Ron Ely, who would go on to
play Doc Savage, another pulp-era hero.)
Burroughs wrote stories in his Tarzan and Mars series exclusively
from 1912 to 1921, when, after writing the stand-alone
novel The Mucker (a contemporary picaresque tale about a
scoundrel who leaves America on a murder rap only to fight an
isolated community of Japanese samurai on a Pacific island),
he began his third great series, the Pellucidar stories. The first
tale was At the Earth's Core, followed by Pellucidar in 1923.
Tanar of Pellucidar was published in 1929 and was Burroughs's
thirty-third book overall. It was, as was the case with just about
every other Burroughs book, an instant hit with his readers. The
Pellucidar series continued with a Tarzan novel, Tarzan at the
Earth's Core, in 1930, and then with Back to the Stone Age in
1935 and Land of Terror in 1939. The series concluded with
Savage Pellucidar in 1944 when Burroughs was sixty-nine and
a war correspondent living in Hawaii.
One outstanding feature of all of Burroughs's series is that
each of the novels in them can really stand alone. Few have
cliff-hanging endings that absolutely require the reader to buy
the next book to see what happens. This is particularly true of
the Pellucidar novels. Each book is essentially complete, with
the main plot elements wrapped up nicely (although every now
and then there appear a few minor loose ends that eventually
need to be dealt with).
The Pellucidar series begins with At the Earth's Core wherein
David Innes and Abner Perry take a giant borer down through
the earth's crust to see what they can see. When they discover
that their incredible machine cannot turn around and return
them to the surface, they continue, breaking through at a depth
of five hundred miles into Pellucidar, a world within our world,
on the inside of a hollow shell with a perpetually glowing central
sun. Pellucidar is, for the most part, a late Pleistocene world
replete with saber-toothed tiger-like tarags, wooly mammoths
called tandors, bears called ryths, massive crocodile-like creatures
known as labyrinthodons, a few nasty hyaenodons, and
atavistic ape-men. The regular humans of Pellucidar are ruled
by a repugnant race of reptilian creatures called Mahars until
these creatures are later subdued by Innes and Perry.
Early in At the Earth's Core Innes falls in love with the
primitive but entrancing Dian the Beautiful, who is promptly
abducted. Innes goes after her, and the chase is on. This is indeed
the template for quite a number of Burroughs's novels
(particularly after 1930 when his writing seems to lose some
of its joie de vivre), which are filled with all manner of kidnappings,
pursuits, daring rescues, and breathless escapes. Through
it all, whether on the Moon or Mars, in the future or distant
past, or inside the earth or on its surface, we get to see the
strange imaginary lands and near-mythic heroes and heroines
Burroughs has created.
Stories of a hollow Earth were not new to literature. Tales
of heroes venturing into the underworld in search of truth or
the meaning of life (or even of a beloved, as in Orpheus and
Eurydice or Dante Alighieri) are as old as humankind. Such
a tale is called a katabasis and the Pellucidar series is one.
The Pellucidar stories, however, owe less to Gilgamesh and
Odysseus than to the works of Edgar Allan Poe (Hans Pfaal
and the short story "Ms. Found in a Bottle") and Jules Verne
(particularly Journey to the Center of the Earth). While these
books detail journeys in underground labyrinths, the first hollow
Earth story was written by Ludvig Baron von Holberg in
1742. It was a social satire called Journey to the World Under-Ground.
Later on, the hollow Earth story gets embellished by
a hole either at the North or the South Pole (or both) that leads
directly to the inner Earth. (A side note: Tarzan travels by zeppelin
to Pellucidar in Tarzan at the Earth's Core by entering
into a hole in the ocean at the North Pole.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tanar of Pellucidar
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpted by permission.
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