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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 4: Escape on Venus

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 4: Escape on Venus

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escape-on-venus-1st-edition-coverI love Edgar Rice Burroughs. His novels have had an enormous influence on me as a writer and as a pulp fan. But, I must admit, sometimes he wrote … this kind of thing….

Oh, let’s just leap into this and get it over with.

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a. Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novellas, and an orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933), Carson of Venus (1938).

Today’s Installment: Escape on Venus (1942)

The Backstory

At the start of the 1940s, Edgar Rice Burroughs decided to try an experiment with three of his properties, all of which had sailed into creative doldrums: Mars/Barsoom, Pellucidar, and Venus/Amtor. The previous Barsoom novel, Synthetic Men of Mars (1939), is one of the few stains on that otherwise superlative series. The Pellucidar novels went into a decline with 1937’s Back to the Stone Age and hit bottom with Land of Terror, which Burroughs failed to sell to any magazine when he wrote it in 1938 and waited to publish it on his own in 1944. Carson of Venus has some positives, but the Venus novels are already much lower on the quality scale of Burroughs’s work. Something wasn’t going right, and the failure to sell Land of Terror must have worried ERB.

It wasn’t just that Burroughs’s writing was in a slump — although it was — that was causing problems, but also the economic realities that were starting to kill the pulp magazines. Comic books exploded at the end of the 1930s and competed for the same young male audience that read the pulps. The magazine companies started cutting back their titles and publishing schedules; this led to reducing the number of serials they ran. Serials work well for a weekly magazine; for a monthly, not so much. Readers wanted their stories complete in each issue, and the publishers couldn’t afford to argue.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 3: Carson of Venus

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 3: Carson of Venus

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carson-of-venus-1st-edition-coverFive years have passed since Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Lost on Venus, and the world has undergone a startling and disturbing metamorphosis. Something sinister and confusing is taking place in Europe, and across the Atlantic waters the people of the United States are growing concerned at the saber-rattling of Nazi Germany. The poverty-crippled period in which ERB wrote the previous Venus books has given way to a time of escalating fear of a second great war.

Does this have anything to do with the next novel of the Venus saga, 1938’s Carson of Venus? Of course not. That the villains of the book are called “the Zanis,” and that they rule through a tyrannical personality-cult dictatorship complete with ritualized salutes, concentration camps, and rampant murder of political undesirables is mere coincidence.

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a. Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. Carson finds time during his adventuring in the various warring countries of the planet to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novellas, and a final orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932), Lost on Venus (1933)

Today’s Installment: Carson of Venus (1938)

The Backstory

Edgar Rice Burroughs was in a creative slump at the close of the 1930s. The success of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films at MGM and the creation of his own publishing company meant a steady flow of revenue, but the famous author found his new fiction getting rejected from the regular magazine markets that had featured him for more than twenty years. Even Tarzan was no longer dependable. Burroughs was not a young man anymore, and the magazine rejections seemed to hint that his best writing years were behind him. At least he could always publish the books through his own company, but the publicity from magazine serialization was an important way to boost sales.

It was during this turbulent time that ERB tried a few experiments. After leaving the Venus series alone for five years, he returned to it with a spy story reflecting the political tensions of the day.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 2: Lost on Venus

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 2: Lost on Venus

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lost-on-venus-first-edition-cover1The parade on the second planet continues in Lost on Venus. This is one of the most controversial works that Edgar Rice Burroughs ever published, although it surprises me that enough readers managed to get through the lackluster first book, Pirates of Venus, to want to pick up the sequel and be able to argue about it. But here it is, so get out your anti-tharban gear and be ready to test your genetic purity!

Our Saga: The adventures of one Mr. Carson Napier, former stuntman and amateur rocketeer, who tries to get to Mars and ends up on Venus, a.k.a. Amtor, instead. There he discovers a lush jungle planet of bizarre creatures and humanoids who have uncovered the secret of longevity. The planet is caught in a battle between the country of Vepaja and the tyrannical Thorists. Carson finds time during his adventuring to fall for Duare, forbidden daughter of a Vepajan king. Carson’s story covers three novels, a volume of connected novelettes, and an orphaned novella.

Previous Installments: Pirates of Venus (1932).

Today’s Installment: Lost on Venus (1933)

The Backstory

Burroughs completed Lost on Venus in early 1932, before Pirates of Venus made its first appearance as a serial in the pulp elder-statesmen magazine, Argosy. Since the first novel hardly “ended” at all, Lost on Venus picks up the story moments later, and with only a short gap between the two serials in Argosy. …

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 1: Pirates of Venus

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus, Part 1: Pirates of Venus

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pirates-of-venus-first-edition-coverNext year brings the hundredth anniversary of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first two published novels: A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, as well as a big-budget film version of A Princess of Mars from Disney. (The film is saddled with the unfortunately bland title of John Carter. Fear of a Red Planet?) The effect these novels had on popular cultural was immense: they created a whole medium, they altered the nature of reading for pleasure. Pulp magazines existed before Edgar Rice Burroughs had the idea he could write better than the tripe found in the publications where he was working to place ads; but it was the success of first Under the Moons of Mars (the serial title for A Princess of Mars) and then Tarzan of the Apes in 1912 that made the pulps into the artillery of the Reader Revolution. The pulps turned the U.S. into a nation of readers, and ERB fired the first two shots in the revolution.

Then, twenty years into the revolution, he fired off the few rounds of his “Venus” series.

I have planned some festivities for the upcoming centenary of the Burroughs Upheaval. One is an ambitious project I have wanted to try on Black Gate for the last two years. But as a prologue to my 2012 ERB projects here in 2011, I’ve chosen to present a look at Burroughs’s least popular series, the last one he started before his death.

These posts will have a different structure from my usual free-form analysis style. Inspired by columns I’ve seen on the movie review sites I frequent (particularly “Franchise Me” on CHUD.com), I’ve laid out a template for tackling each of the five installments of the Edgar Rice Burroughs “Venus Saga.” An experiment? Or an admission that trying to go academic on this series feels like the wrong approach? I’m not sure myself, but here it goes….

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Regrets for the Vanished John Carter

Regrets for the Vanished John Carter

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Right now, as I type this and most likely as you read it, a movie titled John Carter of Mars, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel A Princess of Mars, is in production. Not in development. Not in pre-production. Not in meetings. It is in front of cameras. Andrew Stanton, director of the brilliant CGI Pixar films Finding Nemo and WALL·E, is shooting John Carter of Mars from a script by Stanton, Michael Chabon, and Mark Andrews, in London this very minute, in this dimension, and it will reach theaters in 2012, in time for the novel’s one hundreth birthday.

Really. Honest and for true. It is actually happening.

This is both the perfect and imperfect (although not the pluperfect or future perfect) time for an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian novels. It is perfect because the level of special effect visualization has finally caught up to the wild genius of Burroughs’s Barsoom, and the current mania for fantasy and and science-fantasy spectacle has climbed to a level where a wide audience will open up its arms to embrace the wonder of John Carter slashing his way across the dreamworld of Mars. And in Andrew Stanton, we may very well have the perfect director to achieve it. (He has never done a live-action film, but I’ll give the person who directed the new science-fiction classic WALL·E the benefit of the doubt any time). It’s the imperfect time because many viewers will believe that a John Carter of Mars project is some kind of Avatar clone. James Cameron’s mega-blockbuster borrows heavily from Edgar Rice Burroughs—to the point that I almost could think of nothing else but ERB while I was watching it—but general audiences probably won’t know that not only does John Carter date back to 1912, but a film project has been going through constant development hell since the 1980s. For years, I’ve had my hopes raised with each announcement in the trades that made it seem that a Barsoomian adventure was finally about to make it to theaters: the close-call with John McTiernan (I own a copy of that Rossio-Elliott script; not bad), the almost with Robert Rodriguez from a Mark Protosevich script, the near-miss with Kerry Conran, and the so-close brush with John Favreau before Iron Man called.

But the story of the development Purgatorio of John Carter goes back even farther into history. Farther even then the discussion of Ray Harryhausen adapting the property in the 1950s. To see what might have been, during the only other time that John Carter could have been properly imagined for theaters, we must look back to the Great Decade of the 1930s.

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The People That Time Forgot: The Movie

The People That Time Forgot: The Movie

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The People That Time Forgot (1977)
Directed by Kevin Connor. Starring Patrick Wayne, Doug McClure, Sarah Douglas, Dana Gillespie, Thorley Walters, Shane Rimmer, David Prowse, Milton Reid.

Amicus Productions waited two years to release a sequel to their hit The Land That Time Forgot, stopping along the way to do another Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, At the Earth’s Core. The People That Time Forgot marks the last gasp for its brand of low-budget fantasy/adventure film, since another film that came out that same summer of ‘77, set in a galaxy far, far away, caused a shift in genre-movie expectations when it turned into the highest-grossing film in history.

But The People That Time Forgot still brings handmade thrills and an old-fashioned attitude that adheres to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s style—if not to the letter of his writing. Unlike The Land That Time Forgot, which stays close to the first third of ERB’s novel in its script from Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn, the script for the sequel from Patrick Tilley charts its own direction rapidly and leaves the original plot of the middle novella of the collective novel behind. Since the third novella, “Out of Time’s Abyss,” was apparently never slated for film adaptation, Amicus had to create a sense of completion with The People That Time Forgot that required dumping much of Burroughs’s material.

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Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”

Tarzan Swing-By: Tarzan and “The Foreign Legion”

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Tarzan and Foreign Legion 1st edI would like to step forward at this moment to address the audience before the curtain rises on our feature book review presentation so that I may make a personal observation about Edgar Rice Burroughs. Specifically, I would like to explain why I’ve written so many posts about his work in the last few weeks.

Burroughs needs no excuse for discussion in a magazine dedicated to heroic fantasy and planetary romance. Adventure literature as we know it springs from the influence of Burroughs in the early twentieth century. Although pulp magazines existed before Burroughs published Under the Moons of Mars (later titled A Princess of Mars) and Tarzan of the Apes, this double-punch in 1912 changed the style of this publishing medium for the remainder of its lifetime, and the influence continued into the paperback revolution and on into our era. Burroughs looms as one of the Titans of genre literature. But the true question is: Why am I re-reading so much of his work right now, in concentrated doses that I usually reserve for no author?

One answer is that I enjoy writing about Burroughs almost as much as I enjoy reading him. For an author who supposedly crafted straightforward entertainment, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels contain a remarkable breadth of ideas for debate and consideration. But a deeper reason for such current copious reading of Burroughs is that his work always gives me a unique uplift. In times of uncertainty and concern, I find that no author can temporarily re-energize me than ERB. Even a violent and embittered book, such as the one I’m about to discuss, provides an energy boost like a literary vodka with Red Bull. Burroughs knows how to make life seem wild, colorful, and far removed from the petty concerns of the everyday. It isn’t strictly “escapism,” a word I dislike, but a form of romantic empowerment. Burroughs’s daydreams on paper enhance our yearning for that which is beyond what we have to struggle with in day-to-day life.

End of psychological exegesis. The curtain now rises on today’s Tuesday Topic: one of Burroughs’s most unusual books, one that few people have read because — let’s face facts — how many but the most dedicated fans manage to reach Book #22 in any long-running series?

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The Land That Time Forgot: The Movie

The Land That Time Forgot: The Movie

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Land That Time Forgot PosterThe Land That Time Forgot (1975)
Directed by Kevin Connor. Starring Doug McClure, John McEnery, Susan Penhaligon, Keith Baron, Anthony Ainley, Bobby Parr.

In A.D. (Anno Dinosauriae) 1975, the old era of low-budget fantasy and science-fiction filmmaking neared its close — although nobody knew it. In 1977, an under-marketed flick called Star Wars forever changed the way studios approached genre movies, elevating them to A-budget, blockbuster, mega-studio super-entertainment with emphasis on attaining photo-realistic effects.

Progress? In a way. But when I look at a movie like 1975’s The Land That Time Forgot, a British adaptation from Amicus Productions (famed for their horror anthologies) of the first third of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic “Lost World” novel, I feel a tug of regret that such handmade, analog epics, crafted on tight budgets with intense imagination and invention, have largely suffered extinction. There’s a beautiful innocence to The Land That Time Forgot that makes it an ideal approach to Burroughs’s style. If its effects aren’t “realistic,” they certainly are thrilling and wonders to behold. We shall never see such marvels again.

It’s easy for the general public and the old-guard movie critics who still lumber around major magazines and paperback video guides to dismiss this “rubber dinosaurs and cavemen” film as campy, but The Land That Time Forgot plays it straight — it isn’t camp unless you choose to approach it that way. That’s acceptable, of course; the film belongs to the viewer. But taken as a serious adventure-fantasy, The Land That Time Forgot provides remarkable entertainment, far better than a campy romp. And it’s smart.

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Caspak Victorious: The Land That Time Forgot

Caspak Victorious: The Land That Time Forgot

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First Edition Cover“You have read the opening paragraph, and if you are an imaginative idiot like myself, you will want to read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here…”

I often refer to Edgar Rice Burroughs as an “excuse” author. It seems readers or critics can’t discuss him without qualifiers to excuse reading him. A typical statement: “Edgar Rice Burroughs wasn’t a good writer but he had a vast imagination.”

I not-so-respectfully object to the assessment of Burroughs as a poor writer. In his best works, he pulls me along and engrosses me far more than most bestselling “thriller” authors published today. I can pick apart objective deficiencies in his style, criticize his dips into awkward phrasing, but this ultimately doesn’t matter in his overall style, which reads fast, involving, and exciting. His prose style matches the types and tones of the stories he wants to tell, fits them so well that I can’t imagine another style that would work with them. That, in my reader’s eyes, makes Edgar Rice Burroughs a great writer.

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