At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Empowered by the success of A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, he turned out new work at a blistering pace.

In 1913 he was in the middle of a furious creative period. Bradley Lane (1881), and Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd (1895).Įnter Mr. Bradshaw (1891), The Secret of the Earth by Charles Willing Beale (1899), the feminist utopian novel Mizora by Mary E. There are numerous other Victorian hollow earth tales, most of which are only read by speculative fiction historians today: The Goddess of Atvatabar by William R. Verne still put prehistoric beasts in his subterranean land, for which we’re all grateful. The most famous example is Verne’s A J ourney to the Center of the Earth (1864), which ignores Symmes’s inner shell for a vision that contemporary science might support.

Symmes’s theory garnered a few adherents, and even suggestions of organizing expeditions to the poles to locate the openings that accessed the inner world.īut by the second half of the nineteenth century, Symmes’s ideas were abandoned as having zero scientific proof, so it fell to the field of the evolving scientific romance to make the best use of the hollow earth. Symmes picked up from Edmund Halley’s seventeenth-century hypothesis of a series of nested shells inside the earth, but proposed only a single sphere with a “sun” at the center that made the interior surface habitable. But it was the nineteenth-century speculative theories of Captain John Cleves Symmes about the hollow earth that ignited a wave of fictional explorations of What Lies Within: “I declare the earth is hollow, and habitable within containing a number of solid concentrick spheres.” Subterranean realms of the fantastic have a history reaching back to antiquity. Today’s Installment: At the Earth’s Core (1914) The Backstory The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 19. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer - including a certain Lord Greystoke. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic… Pellucidar. There are far too many Tarzan novels for the sanity of even the most hardcore ERB fan to take in concentrated doses.) (Sorry, a Tarzan series just won’t happen. It was inevitable that I would one day bring the same survey methods to the Pellucidar novels at the center of the earth. Then, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of A Princess of Mars, I took on the same task for the Mars (Barsoom) novels. Once upon a time, I shouldered the enjoyable burden of analyzing all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Venus (Amtor) novels.

At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs