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Back to Ancient Opar

Back to Ancient Opar

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king-oparexiles-khoEdgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan has proven an unstoppable force. While misguided movies, TV series, and musicals do their best to rob the ape man of his savage nature and integrity in the name of mass marketing and political correctness, Burroughs’ original Jungle Lord perseveres. Conventional wisdom may suggest time has passed him by, but it’s the vitality of the original that keeps readers coming back for more. Happily, talents like Joe R. Lansdale, Philip Jose Farmer, and most recently Will Murray have been willing to give fans further adventures of the real Tarzan.

Turn back the clock four decades and you’ll find Philip Jose Farmer’s seminal fictional biography, Tarzan Alive (1972) had much to answer for in terms of launching the Wold Newton movement in popular fiction as well as boosting Burroughs’ cachet. While the book may be relatively obscure today, the ripples it created are still felt on the beaches of pulp fiction. For his part, Farmer launched a series of officially sanctioned books recounting the history of ancient Opar. Longtime readers of Burroughs’ work will know that Opar was the first of the author’s lost cities (an outpost of forgotten Atlantis) that survived undiscovered in Tarzan’s African jungle.

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The Hugo Ballot: Another View

The Hugo Ballot: Another View

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Neptune's Brood-smallPeople will have heard that the Hugo nominations are out. I think the reactions to each ballot always break in two ways: the process and the content.

Lots of people have views on the process of constructing the ballot and the views are so diverse that I couldn’t do justice with a bunch of links here. If you’re interested in that crowd reaction, John O’Neill covered the tip of the iceberg in his post last week.

I suppose my only two cents is to point out that nobody likes 100% of any ballot and that, because they are based on a nomination process of voters who have different tastes and criteria, this is hardly surprising. On the content, I think there’s plenty on this ballot to make a strong showing at the Hugo Awards Ceremony over Labor Day Weekend.

The novels ballot looks interesting. I’ve been told wonderful things about Leckie’s debut novel Ancillary Justice and now I want to read it even more. I love Charles Stross (an honor I share with Nobel in Economics Laureate Klugman), but I have to admit that Neptune’s Brood is neither exciting nor captivating literature so far (although I’m only a third of the way through).

I was discussing Stross with a friend yesterday. He’s got a dizzyingly varied corpus (the Laundry Files novels, “Rogue Farm,” Saturn’s Children and “Lobsters” stake out just a few examples of some of his creative way stations), but my friend and I noted that we sometimes have a harder time with his character work and plotting, much as we might with Perdido Street Station by Mieville. I’ll finish Neptune’s Brood and see what I think.

There are some intriguing entries on the novella ballot, including some Stross, but also Cat Valente and a Brad Torgerson story from Analog. Analog doesn’t seem to get a lot of Hugo attention, and at first, I thought this might be the sign of editorial changes at the magazine.

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Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Part 2: The Fritz Leiber Novelization

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Part 2: The Fritz Leiber Novelization

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Tarzan Valley of Gold Novel CoverTarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)

By Fritz Leiber, from a Screenplay by Clair Huffaker

I have never watched a movie and then immediately felt an urge to “Read the Jove Paperback” (or whatever publisher released the tie-in). Movie novelizations are marketing after-thoughts and I think most readers pick them up as after-thoughts as well. A wanderer in a bookstore might spot a paperback copy of Blockbuster Film You Kinda Enjoyed and think to herself, “Hey, this might be a fun airplane read.”

But there aren’t as many bookstores to wander in these blighted times and with the gap narrowing between the time of a film’s release and its DVD/Blu-ray popping up in the impulse item rack of the supermarket, the niche genre of the novelization has entered a slow death cycle. Fewer big tent pole movies are getting the prose treatment.

I’ve read more than my sane share of novelizations, the majority from Alan Dean Foster because Alan Dean Foster rocks (he even responded to my review of his Clash of the Titans novelization). But with Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, I found myself for the first time in the peculiar reverse position of wanting to see a movie because of the novelization.

The reason: Fritz Leiber.

The idea of one of the Grand Masters of speculative fiction, an icon of sword-and-sorcery, penning any genre film novelization is delicious. And penning a Tarzan novelization … that’s the colored sprinkles on top of the chocolate doughnut. Novelization or not, it’s a Fritz Leiber Tarzan book.

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Further Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan the Magnificent

Further Tarzan-on-Demand: Tarzan the Magnificent

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Tarzan the Magnificent Warner Archive DVD coverThe Warner Bros. Archive Collection has taken good care of Tarzan fans. This manufacture-on-demand division of Warner Home Video offers all the films from the lesser-known Tarzan actors who followed Johnny Weissmuller in swinging from the jungle ceiling: Lex Barker, Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney, Mike Henry, and the two seasons of the Ron Ely television story. The best of the lot for a more casual viewer is Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959), but Tarzan the Magnificent from 1960 comes a close second to it. It’s not as lean and stripped-down as its predecessor, and director Robert Day lacks the same skill at pacing an action picture as John Guillermin, but the movie ranks among the top live-action Tarzan films ever made. And it’s just a darn good adventure film in general, with some surprising levels of violence and mature subtexts.

(Tarzan disambiguation notice: The movie has no connection to the Burroughs book of the same title published in 1939 that combines two separate novellas.)

Tarzan the Magnificent is the second movie of the series from producer Sy Weintraub, who created the “New Look” Tarzan that took the character back to his more adult and violent Edgar Rice Burroughs roots. Best of all, Tarzan got his full vocabulary returned to him, breaking over two decades of film tradition that ruled the Lord of the Jungle had to horribly misuse pronouns and exterminate helping verbs.

Weintraub’s “New Look” favored crime stories set in the African rainforest, which gave them a harsh and naturalistic feel. They also borrowed elements from the Western, and Tarzan the Magnificent is the most explicit example. The movie opens with a band of outlaws, an archetypal blood clan of murderous brothers under an obsessed patriarch, committing a hold-up in broad daylight. The criminals rob the pay office of a mining company in a small town, passing “Wanted” posters of themselves on the way in. Except for the African locals walking the dusty street, this might be any frontier town in a Western of the day. With veteran John Ford stock-company actor John Carradine in the role of the clan head, Abel Banton, it’s hardly much of a leap to see this taking place in a lawless American frontier town. Even the name “Banton” has a Western ring to it, echoing the Clantons from the story of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

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Romance and Revisions: The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Romance and Revisions: The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Outlaw of Torn 1st ed“Not since Arthur of Silures kept his round table hath ridden forth upon English soil so true a knight as Norman of Torn.” –Joan de Tany

“I am very doubtful about the story. The plot is excellent, but I think you worked it out all together too hurriedly.” –Thomas Newell Metcalf, letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs, 19 December 1911

“I am not prone to be prejudiced in favor of my own stuff, in fact it all sounds like rot to me…” –Edgar Rice Burroughs, letter to Metcalf, 14 March 2012

In Irwin Porges’s groundbreaking and Chartres Cathedral-sized biography, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (Brigham Young University Press, 1975), only two of ERB’s books have solo chapters dedicated to them: Tarzan of the Apes, of course — and The Outlaw of Torn.

Unless you are a hardheaded Burroughs devotee, I’ll wager a ducat you have never crossed paths with the title The Outlaw of Torn. Considering that chronologically it is squashed between his two most famous books, A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, it makes sense that The Outlaw of Torn gets overlooked. That it belongs to the genre of Medieval Romance, a mite mustier than high Martian adventure or swinging times in the African rainforest, compounds the issue.

But this Middle Ages adventure deserves the primacy that Porges awarded it. Burroughs’s second novel taught him hard truths about the business of writing and what he was capable of. ERB was one of the first writer-businessmen; the long labor getting his second book to work and sell schooled him in the reality of making a living as an author of popular adventure.

The Outlaw of Torn also turned out, after all the toil put into it, a flat work manufactured too obviously as a copy of earlier romances. Burroughs thought highly of the book, and in 1927 wrote to his publisher: “I think it is the best thing I ever wrote, with the possible exception of Tarzan of the Apes, and next to it, I believe will rank The War Chief of the Apaches.” But instead of embracing further stories in this style, Burroughs turned and ran for the jungle with his next outing. A lesson learned, even if he could not admit it years later.

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The Company That Time Will Never Forget: A Visit to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Incorporated

The Company That Time Will Never Forget: A Visit to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Incorporated

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ERB Inc Thark StatueIn the waning days of March 2013, I made a trip I should’ve taken years before. I’ve lived in Los Angeles since I was four, became a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs in my teens, but never thought about taking the jaunt on the I-405 into the Valley to visit the office of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. I knew the office was there; that part of the Valley didn’t get the name “Tarzana” by accident. But it wasn’t until after working for three years writing numerous articles about Burroughs’s books and movies based on them that I realized the opportunity in plain sight — actually, over the hill. I looked up the company’s website, found a phone number, and gave the office a call, wondering what might come of it. A pleasant-sounding woman answered the phone, and after I provided her only a sentence of explanation (ERB fan, live in L.A., would like to write something about the company for an online magazine), she cheerfully told me to call the president of the company, James J. Sullos Jr., and gave me his cell phone number. Another call later — and a half-hour of quality fan talk with Mr. Sullos — and I had an appointment to come out to the offices and have lunch with him and Cathy Wilbanks, the company archivist and executive assistant.

What follows is a brief record of that delayed visit. I would love to present myself to you as ERB often did, a fictional version of Ryan Harvey who discovered this account in a bottle that washed ashore from Caspak, or communicated via Gridley Wave from Helium on Mars. But no, it was just me, a humble fan who took some notes and stared in awe at… well, I’ll get to that.

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Affair of the Bear: The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Affair of the Bear: The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Oakdale Affair frontspiece Jack BurroughsYes, this is the 3,000th post on Black Gate. Discovered after the fact, of course. Never thought I’d be writing about a murder mystery centered on a bear for the occasion, but what the hey.

In the spring of 1917, as he was completing the last of the “New Tarzan Adventures” that would eventually fill the volume Jungle Tales of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a short novel (40,000 words) titled “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid.” A reader of the previous year’s The Return of the Mucker might recognize the name “Bridge” as belonging to that novel’s itinerant poet and co-hero. Burroughs liked the character so much that he spun him off into his own story: a crime drama/mystery, something different for the author.

Editor Bob Davis at All-Story found little to appreciate about ERB’s new tact when “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid” landed on his desk. He argued that its twist ending stretched credulity past what readers would tolerate: “Lord! Edgar, how do you expect people who love and worship you to stand up for anything like that? And the bear stuff, and the clanking of chains!” Davis may also have objected to mentions of one of the villains injecting morphine to feed an addiction. Although Davis remarked that Bridge was a “splendid character” in The Return of the Mucker and “well worth a great story,” the editor didn’t think this was it. He bounced the novel back to ERB.

Burroughs had his own doubts about “Bridge and the Oskaloosa Kid,” criticizing his performance as “rotten” even before he finished. But his name was still good for a sale in a magazine in 1917, and the novel ended up at Blue Book, printed in full in the March 1918 issue under the more economical title The Oakdale Affair. Editor Ray Long paid $600 for it, considerably less than ERB’s standard pay-rate at the time.

A year later, a movie titled The Oakdale Affair starring Evelyn Greeley premiered from World Film Company. It was the fourth film made from ERB’s work, and a rare non-Tarzan one. Somebody must have liked the book, the opinions of the author and his editor be damned!

What to make of this unofficial third novel of the “Mucker Trilogy,” a crime thriller/mystery with a vanished heiress, murderous drifters, gypsies, an enthusiastic child detective, a deadly bear, a lynch mob, a couple of dead bodies, and a chain-clanking ghost in a haunted house? Did ERB stray too far in looking for somewhere else for his poetry-loving Bridge to roam?

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Poetry in Action: The Return of the Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Poetry in Action: The Return of the Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Return of the Mucker FrazettaThis upfront: The Return of the Mucker is less effective a novel than last week’s topic, The Mucker. The strange genre-mashings of the first book give way to the more familiar settings of the American southwest and northern Mexico. The Return of the Mucker plays as an outright Western for most of its length, and offers nothing as lunatic as samurai cannibals. As a story, it doesn’t hold together as well as The Mucker, getting weighed down with too much plot “business” while the first book stripped away extraneous aspects the farther the story advanced until it came down to only the hero and heroine, Billy Byrne and Barbara Harding.

Yet The Return of the Mucker is still a strong work that glosses over its shaky plot elements with a breakneck action finale, fitting developments of Billy Byrne’s personality that merge together his extremes, and one of Burroughs’s most intriguing characters: a hobo-poet hero named Bridge.

Burroughs’s working title for The Mucker’s sequel was Out There Somewhere, the name of a poem that inspired the character of Bridge. (More about that later.) Burroughs submitted the novel to All Story in March 1916, soon after completing it. Editor Thomas Newell Metcalf purchased the story immediately, and the first of five installments appeared two months later under its more marketable title. The Return of the Mucker was published in hardcover in 1921 from A. C. McClurg as Part II of a volume simply called The Mucker.

When the story begins, Billy Byrne is no longer “the mucker.” ERB makes that clear as a cloudless blue sky in the second paragraph: “Billy Byrne was no longer the mucker.” Barbara Harding cured Byrne of his criminal life and coarse ways: everything that defines the now outdated slang term “mucker.” But Billy Byrne surrendered his love for Barbara so she could marry William Mallory at the conclusion of the first book, and he’s now a man without direction — or a complete personality. If he isn’t the mucker, and he’s not with the woman who changed him, what is he? …

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Yes, The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs Really Is That Good

Yes, The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs Really Is That Good

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Mucker First EditionI spent last year on an extended trip to Mars exploring Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fantastical version of the Red Planet. But after reviewing all eleven books in the Barsoom series, the time had arrived to return to Earth and the early phase of ERB’s career. Spending too much time with the final sputterings of Burroughs’s Martian stories, when much of his talent was ebbing, has a strong depressive effect. Let’s relive the enthusiasm of youth. Or middle age, in the case of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Yeah, he was a late bloomer.

So, on the centennial of its writing, I land back on Earth with one of ERB’s grubbiest, most “realistic,” and finest works of adventure, The Mucker.

The Mucker and its closely entwined sequel written two years later, The Return of the Mucker, have long held high positions in the canon of ERB’s work — but only for enthusiasts. The general reading population, who might pick up a few Tarzan books or go through the first three Martian novels, has scant familiarity with this oddly titled work. Perhaps it’s the strangeness of the name “Mucker” — is this about the adventures of a sewer worker? — or simply that it doesn’t belong to one of the author’s famous franchises, but the book usually inspires shrugs of ignorance when brought up, mixed with measures of curiosity. Of all Burroughs’s novels, this is the one about which I get the most inquiries: “Hey, is that ‘Mucker’ thing worth reading? I’ve heard good things, but I just never got around to it.”

Let me answer the question for everyone who has asked or planned to ask: Yes, The Mucker (and its sequel) is good. Actually, superb. Burroughs gathered all the conventions from the stories and novels of the first fifteen years of pulp writing, most of which are unreadable today, and condensed them into a rollicking action yarn with fistfights, shipwrecks, cannibals, sword duels, a lost civilization, kidnappings (and not just of women), street brawls, piracy, and prizefighting. And he wrapped this all around one of his most interesting heroes, a man who goes from an alley thug without an ounce of sympathetic qualities (aside from questionable criminal “honor”) to a reformed hero in a tangled love tale.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 11: John Carter of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 11: John Carter of Mars

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john-carter-of-mars-canaveralSo it ends here, not with a climatic epic, but with a bit of house cleaning almost fifteen years after the author’s death. The final book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s career-spanning Barsoom saga is a slender volume containing two unrelated novellas.

I’ve called this review series “Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars,” but that title is a smidgeon deceiving when discussing the two stories here. One doesn’t take place on Mars, and the other was not written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My apologies going forward.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: John Carter of Mars (1964)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (1913–14), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of Mars (1927), A Fighting Man of Mars (1930), Swords of Mars (1934–35), Synthetic Men of Mars (1938), Llana of Gathol (1941)

The Backstory

Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950, two years after the publication of Llana of Gathol. Two novellas from the Mars series remained orphaned, having only appeared in magazines: “The Skeleton Men of Jupiter” and “John Carter and the Giant of Mars.” It wasn’t until 1964 that Canaveral Press published them together under the deceivingly archetypal title John Carter of Mars.

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