THE READING RHEUM: LAND OF TERROR (1939/1944)

 When I blogged my review for SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR, I mistakenly thought that it was the next to last of the series, since the first three parts of SAVAGE were printed in magazines in 1942, while LAND OF TERROR didn't get any serializations whatever and went straight to book publication in 1944. However, I didn't note the year in which ERB is supposed to have completed TERROR, which is recorded as 1939. What may have happened is that ERB submitted TERROR to all of the usual magazines, got turned down over a period of years, and started SAVAGE in 1942 despite TERROR's failure to generate serialization income. Then, possibly due to constraints on ERB's time, he didn't finish writing the last part of SAVAGE until 1944-- and then either it didn't get submitted to magazines (about two years after the third SAVAGE-section was printed) or it just went into a safe, until getting printed very belatedly, both in AMAZING STORIES (where I first read it) and in an Ace Books publication. According to Wiki, 1944 was also the last year in which ERB produced a substantial amount of writing, his productivity naturally declining in his final six years of life. A final irony is that in my estimation, TERROR is the best of the adventures to focus only upon David Innes, and I see no good reason for the SF-magazines of the forties to have turned it down, unless the ERB brand was just getting a little "old-timey" even in that time-period.                   

   I complained in my review of the first two David Innes books that Innes seemed too much "an incarnation of Manifest Destiny" than a person. This wasn't an explicit critique of the colonial mindset that informs a lot of Burroughs works, though. My stance is that it is possible for an author to produce good literature even if the author subscribed to problematic beliefs, and though ERB has often been pilloried for his politics, often his critics make snap judgments based on incomplete knowledge. For instance, I mentioned in reviewing AT THE EARTH'S CORE that the first human species Innes encounters is that of "Black monkey-men with tails," which to many would seem a slam-dunk proof of racism. Yet late in TERROR, even though ERB again mentions the monkey-men in a stray recollection by the hero, Innes also spends a protracted period as the somewhat-unwilling guest of a tribe of "handsome" Black humans, who only spare him the fate of slavery-- which fate they usually extend to white Pellucidaran captives-- because he can teach them useful techniques. Yet if ERB were a thoroughgoing racist, could he write a somewhat satirical passage like this one:                                               

The men are monogamous and very proud of their bloodline. Under no circumstances will they mate with a white, as they consider the white race far inferior to theirs. I could never quite accustom myself to this reversal of the status of the two races from what I had always been accustomed to; but it really was not as difficult as it might appear, for I must admit that the blacks treated us with far greater toleration here than our dark-skinned races are accorded on the outer crust. Perhaps I was getting a lesson in true democracy.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        ERB doesn't entirely repudiate his screed about trying to advance the Stone Age world, but in the later novels he includes many more acidulous remarks comparing the violence of primitives versus that of "sophisticated" humans, like this one.                                                   

 

Silently I fitted an arrow to my bow and waited until the entire file was well within the ambush. I bent the bow and took careful aim. This was savage warfare, warfare of the Stone Age. Of course, we lacked poison gas, and we couldn't drop bombs on women and children and hospitals; but in our own primitive way we could do fairly well; and so I released my arrow, and as it sunk deep into the body of the last man in the file, I gave the signal for the Ruvan warriors to attack.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       And though TERROR is not the first novel to include such observations, it's the only one I considered to possess high-mythicity, due to establishing a strong symbolic opposition between Innes' "Yankee ingenuity" and the bizarre rules of the Earth's Core. For instance, for most of the series, ERB established that every native Pellucidaran has an innate ability to "home in" on his place of birth, no matter how far he may be from said locale. Most of the time, this concept just made it easy for the heroes to get to a given destination with the help of a native guide from said domain. But during Innes' sojourn with the Black people known as Ruvans, this becomes problematic because the Ruvans inhabit one of several "floating islands," meaning that Innes' navigation problems become extremely complicated-- all in an entertaining manner, of course.       

               

All that said, TERROR is, like all the other books in the series, very episodic, and two of the shorter episodes may owe something to ERB's 1924 TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN. In that story, the ape-man meets a tribe of hairy women who dominate their weak menfolk, and a race of humans who use technology to become as small as ants. Innes is briefly enslaved by another tribe, the hairy, man-dominating Women of Oog, but unlike Tarzan, Innes doesn't stay in the Oogians' domain long enough to reform their aberrant culture. And instead of men as small as ants, Innes also encounters ants as large as men, who hold Innes and a Ruvan tribesman prisoner. How do the embattled humans escape? Well, there's this giant ant bear, and...                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Innes and his wife Dian also remain captives of the Jukans, who are  all more or less crazy and may be a spoof of the madness of civilization. Dian doesn't get as much action here as she would in the final novel, but toward the end, when ERB was in a hurry to wrap things up neatly, she's said to have slain the man who kidnapped her before being reunited with Innes-- surely one of the few times a Burroughs heroine brought about her own rescue.    

THE READING RHEUM: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (1929)

 TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR, ERB's fourteen-years-later sequel to the 1915 PELLUCIDAR, is one of the author's better spinoff stories, but it's best known for launching his "crossover project." In addition to spinning off the title character with only a token reference to former star David Innes, the authorial prologue-- in which ERB chats with radio-expert Jason Gridley about the supposed reality of ERB's fantastic stories-- sets up the action of the sequel TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. During the chat, ERB and Gridley supposedly get a very long radio-broadcast from Innes' buddy Abner Perry, telling them the entire story of prehistoric hero Tanar and ending on the revelation that Innes is still in the hands of enemies. At this point Gridley declares that he'll marshal forces to rescue Innes, said forces including the Lord of the Jungle, while Gridley gets a secondary hero-role as well as the standard romantic arc.                                                                 

  I'll touch on two quick points before getting to the main TANAR plot. The first is that, during the prologue, Gridley expresses the same opinion I did in my review of PELLUCIDAR: that Hooja the Sly was one of ERB's better villains, but that as far as ERB is concerned, the Sly One was sincerely killed off. The second concerns those now politically incorrect Black Monkey-Men from the first Pellucidar novel. The tribe does not come on stage in the course of TANAR, but the hero has a flashback in which he remembers being held captive by the tailed people, during which time they taught him the skill of bounding about the tops of trees. This past history comes in handy when ERB wants his caveman hero to swing through the forest with his lady love in his arms. If there wasn't such a time discrepancy between the first two books and the third one, I'd think that was the only reason ERB introduced the monkey-guys.                          

Anyway, fourteen years after the conclusion of PELLUCIDAR, David Innes' prehistoric empire is threatened by seafaring invaders called Korsars. Innes' forces repel the attackers, who unlike the primitives possess huge sailing ships and firearms. However, Tanar-- the son of one of ERB's many tedious noble savages-- is taken aboard one of the ships. Tanar encounters the ruler of the Korsars, an older man known as "The Cid," and the ruler's teenaged daughter Stellara. The Cid-- whose people will later be revealed as descendants of Barbary pirates who blundered into the earth's core--wants Tanar to reveal the process by which Innes' scientists compound gunpowder, since the Korsars' formula is faulty. Tanar is a warrior and knows nothing about chemistry, but he allows the Cid to think that he Tanar can be of assistance. As for Stellara, she and Tanar go the same way as every other ERB couple: falling in love at first sight and not being able to express themselves.                                     

  In fact, though Tanar's episodic adventures wandering about the earth's core are just par for the course, the romance between the hero and his lady is better than the average Burroughs romance. ERB captures much of the hormonal confusion of youth as Tanar and Stellara quarrel while displaying unconditional loyalty toward one another. In two of the roaming adventures, ERB creates a couple of primitive societies he may have meant to be mirror-images of one another. The first is Amiocarp, a tribe in which the members express love very openly, in marked contrast to Tanar and Stellara, who can't manage to know their own hearts. The second is Hime, a tribe in which all the members constantly show hatred and contempt for one another, which represents the fractiousness between hero and heroine-- though of course true love wins the day in the end.                         

This time the heroine has two unwanted suitors. The first one, Bohar, is encountered on the Korsar ship during Tanar's captivity, and halfway through the book Tanar kills this rival. Then, very late in the story, Tanar and Stellara get hauled to the Korsar base, and ERB belatedly reveals that the Cid intends to marry off his daughter to a brute named Bulf, whom Tanar also slays in due course. Strangely, the Cid doesn't ever have a reckoning for his crimes, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't appear in the later books. This might be understandable if the Cid was genuinely the father of Tanar's beloved. However, thanks to one of ERB's more intricate birth-mystery plots, Stellara reveals that she knows that she is not the child of the Cid, even though he thinks that she is. (Their few scenes together also display only contumely toward each other, so one assumes the Cid was not much of a daddy.)                                                                           

                                                                                                                                       Further, since childhood Stellara has known that she was the child of a primitive chieftain, and that her mother was stolen in a Korsar raid before being "married" to the Cid. There's some amusement-value in the author's decorousness about sex, since it goes without saying that for the Cid to believe Stellara his progeny, he has to have had sex with the deceased mother at some point. A contemporary author might have pictured Stellara as lusting for vengeance upon the false parent who raped her mother. But that wasn't in ERB's wheelhouse for whatever reasons. The author does devote some space to having Stellara find her way to her original tribe, where she meets her real father. But ERB seemed to be avoiding any discussion of the relationship between the heroine and the Cid-- who never even learns, so far as the reader knows, that he was tricked into raising another man's child. And even though the Cid doesn't suffer for his act of rape-- I don't even think he has any major scenes in TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE-- one might imagine that the slaying of Bulf, who explicitly would have taken Stellara by force given the chance, provides a substitute for the non-punishment of the novel's main villain. (ERB also never imagines what would have happened had The Cid forced himself on Stellara's mother more than once, but the erudite reader may argue that he did, but never learned that he was "firing blanks," as even people of ERB's time would have comprehended.) ADDENDUM: After TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, Gridley gets another one of those loquacious radio broadcasts, this one relating the entire story of the 1931 FIGHTING MAN OF MARS.         

THE READING RHEUM: PELLUCIDAR (1915)

 I didn't mention in my review of AT THE EARTH'S CORE that the book ended with a cliffhanger in which hero David Innes ends up back on the surface, separated from the primitive interior world of Pellucidar. But compared to the suspenseful ending of A PRINCESS OF MARS, both the concept and the resolution of CORE's cliffhanger in the sequel seems lazy by comparison. It's my unsupported opinion that ERB wasn't nearly as invested in Pellucidar as he was in Barsoom and even Caspak. Certainly, throughout the remainder of PELLUCIDAR the author doesn't expand much on this pocket prehistoric cosmos.                                             

Though the sequel is just as episodic as CORE was, ERB no longer has to devote time to explaining his world, so overall there are more action set-pieces. David Innes still seems like a cypher, an incarnation of Manifest Destiny, eager to convert all the primitives to 20th-century progress. Admittedly he does this to liberate the humans from the ravening Mahars, though these ruthless reptiles only appear a couple of times in PELLUCIDAR. Dian the Beautiful isn't improved by more narrative-time either. She almost gets a Xena-moment as seen in the Roy Krenkel cover above, but exigent circumstances sideline her potential as a heroine. Her best character-moment may be indirectly explaining how she never got raped during her captivity by the villainous Hooja, revealing to Innes that she still has on her person a poison that would have prevented "the fate worse than death." The novel holds a smattering of okay character moments for the various humans Innes encounters. Still, the most involving scenes in the book involve Innes taming a savage hyenanodon as if it were a surface-dog. When a book is more interested in the hero's dog than in his lady love, there's a problem.                                                   

   I must admit that I forgot what a threat Hooja was since I last read this novel. He and Innes share no scenes here, and Hooja was mostly offstage throughout the first book after Innes beat him up for getting grabby with Dian. But compared to a lot of weakling villains in ERB, Hooja does his enemy a lot of damage. He's not any better characterized than Innes and Dian, and his being offstage lessens his impact. But he's smart enough (unlike most humans of the pocket world) to recognize the nature of the science-marvels that Innes and his elderly buddy Abner Perry bring to Pellucidar, and to copy those marvels to garner power for himself. Hooja is apparently slain at the end of this book, but I guess I won't know if ERB really knocked off one of his better villains until I finish the PELLUCIDAR series.                             

  Due to his prolonged absence since the end of the first novel, Innes spends most of this book trying to unite all the human tribes against the Mahars, though ERB's idea of diplomatic relations always a consists of saving this or that tribal member from peril. After lots of episodic dangers, Innes gets the chance to consolidate his empire in the last twenty pages, though the author is smart enough to let some of the evil reptiles escape capture/death. From peeking at the next book in the series, I know that Innes' empire gets torn down almost as quickly, though he's restored to his throne at the end of the fourth in the series, TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. I suspect the other three books may be more one-offs than part of a greater continuity.               

   In my review of CORE I speculated that ERB probably wouldn't re-use the tailed Black monkey-men, and PELLUCIDAR shows I was half-right. The monkey-men never come on stage again, but when Innes runs into a tribe of hairy white men whose eyes are supposedly like those of sheep (?), ERB has Innes compare the two tribes in his mind. The hero notes that the Black people didn't seem to have a real language, but they did have civilized habits not seen in any of the White tribes, like building huts and holding livestock. The sheep-eyed people have a language, but they seem pretty dumb otherwise. They occupy the top of an escarpment, and when their tribe is attacked by invaders coming up the mountainside, Innes has to point out that the sheep-guys ought to toss rocks down onto their enemies' heads. Clearly ERB had no agenda in describing all of his imaginary evolutionary quirks. His approach would be best likened to the fantasists of Marco Polo's day, who would spin stories of tribes in Asia with all sorts of bizarre nonhuman aspects. In these books, it seems that ERB only wanted to divert his audience-- though I'll only be sure when I make my way through the last three in the series.                                  

THE READING RHEUM: AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1914)

 

I never read the entire Pellucidar series back in the day, and frankly didn't remember much about the books I did read. But given that Pellucidar might be deemed ERB's third best-known series-concept and given that I enjoyed 1929's TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, I got hold of the entire series. Whether I get them all read and reviewed here is anyone's guess.  (Quick illustration note: pleasant though Roy Krenkel's cover-painting is, no one in CORE rides dinosaurs, though it's possible that something similar happens in later books.)                                                                                                     

The Pellucidar series resembles that of ERB's second-best-known series-concept: the Mars books, which had one really famous hero but also devoted one-shot stories to other protagonists on Mars. Yet CORE's main hero David Innes is not nearly as evocative as John Carter or Tarzan. Innes is something of a cypher even compared to some of ERB's more obscure characters. The young hero makes it financially possible for scientist Abner Perry to design the drilling-machine, "The Iron Mole," that burrows down beneath Earth's crust and finds a totally independent pocket-world with dinosaurs, cavepeople, and its own independent light-source. I don't think even in 1914 most readers believed in the possibility of a "hollow earth," but there's something enormously evocative about the idea of digging down into the earth-globe and finding a whole world therein. Additionally, the natives of Pellucidar supposedly doesn't experience linear time as do residents of the surface world. ERB doesn't really develop this notion, and all I can say is that the author had some attraction to the idea of characters being able to escape "time's winged chariot, hurrying near."                                                                                                         

The Pellucidar books also resemble the Mars books in that the hero falls in love with a native woman of this savage world and thus becomes fired with the desire to remake the domain into a place of higher civilization. However, ERB takes an odd approach to his standard formula. While in captivity of slavers, Innes encounters, and promptly offends, the hyperbolically named maiden "Dian the Beautiful." Then Dian disappears from most of the first two-thirds of the book. She finally reappears in the last third, gives Innes a hard time for a couple of chapters, and then true love asserts itself. Like Innes, Dian's not much more than a sketch of a formula-character. Her main function in the plot is that from the first she's being pursued by a hulking warrior, the Biblically-named "Jubal the Ugly," whom Innes must defeat in single combat at the conclusion. The fight's the best action in the novel, and ERB even gives it a patina of the old "civilization defeats savagery" trope.                                               

   If there's any concept into which ERB did invest a lot of thought, though, it's that of Pellucidar's master race, the Mahars. These intelligent pterandons command a race of gorilla-men, the Sagoths, who capture human slaves and turn them over to the Mahars for scientific experimentation and, more often than not, for eating. ERB worked more than a few commentaries on omophagia into his stories, and in all likelihood the Mahars represent his best example of man-eating monsters. He even makes the point that to the Mahars, humans are no more than the beasts that humans themselves consume-- though that rationale doesn't make the creatures any less horrific.                                                                                                     

   All of ERB's books are episodic, but CORE seems particularly so, as very few of Innes' adventures add up to much in terms of emotional impact. ERB also doesn't come up with any compelling society except that of the Mahars, though many modern readers will be offended by the first society Innes encounters: tree-dwelling humanoids with tails, who bear a strong resemblance to the Negroes of the surface world. I have seen ERB use Black characters as the butts of jokes, not least in the first TARZAN novel, but I didn't glean any particular agenda this time. Innes gets carried around by the Black tree-dwellers for a while, but they don't do anything malicious or stupid. Then Innes is captured by Sagoth slavers, and the tailed tree-dwellers aren't seen again in CORE. ERB is justly famous for his studied ignorance of his era's evolutionary theories, though he often used his version of evolution to explain a lot of his fantastic creations. I'm not sure the writer was even aware of the distinction between the major primate groups of monkeys and apes: that the former usually have tails and the latter never do. I theorize that for ERB it was a jape to put tails on humanoids who were not related to monkeys in the least, but who acted like humans in having dwellings and domesticated animals. Seven years later, in the book TARZAN THE TERRIBLE the jungle-lord visits a different prehistoric land, Pal-Ul-Don, and there he meets two groups of tailed (but not tree-dwelling) humanoids, one white and one black. My guess that the tree-dwellers of CORE were just a one-off may be confirmed if, as I suspect, that particular society makes no further appearances in the Pellucidar book-series.  

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1929)

 

SPOILERS (for a novel printed back in 1929, HAH)

Within two years in the early nineteen-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs had authored what most of his fans regard as his three seminal serial concepts: TARZAN and JOHN CARTER OF MARS in 1912, and the PELLUCIDAR series, beginning with AT THE EARTH'S CORE, in 1914. Roughly fifteen years later, ERB then made an ambitious attempt to correlate all three concepts within a series of novels written from 1929 to 1930. Slightly later, he also provided a link to his "Venus" books, which are usually regarded as a concept distinctly inferior to the other three. This didn't happen until 1932, so it was probably just an afterthought for ERB.

AT THE EARTH'S CORE, like other books in the ERB canon, opens with the conceit that its narrative-- the story of how David Innes and his colleague Abner Perry found a huge primitive environment at the center of the earth-- is actually a true story related by Innes to Burroughs himself. However, for the crossover project ERB decided to create a fictional character, Jason Gridley, to serve as a linking element between his disparate fictional worlds. In two crossover novels, radio-technician Gridley is just an onlooker. First, in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (the third in that series, and the first to center on a hero other than David Innes), Gridley uses his advanced radio to receive a transmission from Abner Perry, which tells the story of the titular Tanar and his adventure. Later, Gridley also receives a similar transmission from Mars, which allows him to relate the story of 1930's A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the seventh of the "Mars" series, but there too Gridley merely relays information. 

The TANAR narrative ends with the revelation that Innes has been imprisoned by evildoers, so Gridley makes the promise to come to Innes' rescue. The story of the rescue-mission makes up the narrative of TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. Gridley seeks out Tarzan in his African jungle and convinces the ape-man to help save Innes, even though neither Gridley nor Tarzan has ever encountered the Pellucidaran adventurer. Tarzan uses his personal wealth and contacts with some characters from an earlier TARZAN novel to bring about the construction of a unique dirigible, with which the heroes plan to journey to the earth's core via a polar entranceway. Most of the technicians manning the dirigible are Germans, which may be ERB channeling memories of the German use of zeppelins in World War One. Tarzan also brings along a small group of his Waziri warriors and an American Negro cook (more on whom later).

Anyone hoping for a major encounter between two of ERB's creations, Tarzan and David Innes, is doomed to disappointment. Innes is not rescued until CORE's final pages, and the character rates only a couple of paragraphs-- which is more than we see for other Pellucidaran support-characters (including the aforementioned "Tanar"), who get the equivalent of footnotes. The only substantive crossover is the one between the hero Tarzan and the setting of Pellucidar. Since the latter is not the star of the Pellucidaran novels, CORE is in essence what I've called in this essay a "high-charisma crossover," since only one of the crossover-presences possesses centric stature. 

Gridley, though he debuts in a Pellucidar novel, is only weakly correlated with the Pellucidar mythos, and even less so with the Mars series. He's allowed to shine as a secondary, support-cast hero in CORE for reasons of romance. ERB always worked a romantic subplot into his adventure-stories, and since Tarzan like David Innes had already become "an old married man," Gridley was elected to play the role of the Earnest Young Man who completes a romance-arc with a comely savage girl of Pellucidar, the amply-named Jana, Red Flower of Zoram.

The structure of CORE amounts to a series of search-and-rescue missions. Both Tarzan and Gridley get separated from the crew of the dirigible, so that both are able to pursue distinct story-arcs. Tarzan gets stuck with the non-erotic duty of befriending some of Pellucidar's noble warriors-- a gorilla-man and the brother of Jana-- while Gridley saves the lissome Jana from both human and animal marauders. Love is swiftly kindled between Gridley and the primitive naif, but like one of ERB's earlier heroes, Billings of the 1918 PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, the civilized Gridley becomes a trifle snobbish in the presence of the uneducated girl. Jana, possessing the full array of feminine intuitions, senses his diffidence and "catches him by running away." This strategy leads to more arduous treks and more battles with the denizens, animal and human, of Pellucidar. Thus both Gridley and Tarzan burn up most of the book's continuity until all the good-guy protagonists are united so as to bring about the anti-climactic rescue of David Innes and the plighting of troths between Gridley and Jana.

Gridley is little more than a stereotypical earnest adventurer, the image of the reader's identificatory figure. Jana is slightly more complex. Her fulsome nickname establishes both that she's beautiful and she knows it, but unlike many of ERB's savage heroines Jana can at least attempt to defend herself, using a spear to slay a primitive hyenadon, much like the character of Meriem in THE SON OF TARZAN. She's extremely proud and doesn't allow Gridley the luxury of pretending that they're "just friends," and her determination to make him confess his feelings in spite of his upbringing drives the romantic subplot. As for other characters, Tarzan is just Tarzan, though as in earlier novels he tends to shift into an animal-like affinity with the natural world whenever that suits ERB's purposes. The rest of the support-characters, good and bad, are all stock figures, though the Negro cook Robert Jones requires a little extra comment. It may be that the commercial reprint of CORE I read expunged some "pickaninny" humor, for Jones doesn't really do much in the story, though he does speak in the mushmouthed Southern dialect usually reserved for Negro characters. His backstory is curious. Though he was captured in Germany while serving as a cook for the American forces during World War One, Jones got along well enough with his captors that he never went back to America and simply continued working for German employers until being hired for the dirigible-adventure. The temptation is to believe that Jones is one of ERB's "cheerful Negroes," though at least he's never as pusillanimous as the maid Esmerelda from TARZAN OF THE APES. 

Yet just as Esmerelda was unfavorably contrasted with the noble Black Africans of the first Tarzan novel, it may be that Jones is meant to be an unfavorable contrast with the fighting Waziris on the expedition, who are clearly shown to be capable of learning the operation of the dirigible from the German crew. This interpretation would cohere with ERB's overall program of critiquing civilized life in contrast to the lives of noble savages, a prevailing theme in the majority of the author's works. CORE is full of such trenchant observations, most often lobbed against pampered Europeans, and even against the American Gridley and his circle of friends. Because Pellucidar is a place where the perception of time is somewhat erratic, ERB also scores some points against the workaday world experienced by his readers, the world of punching time-clocks and societal demands. 

Of course, it must be said that ERB's critique of modernity is a shallow one, rooted in the escapism of noble savages who are just wholly good or wholly bad. ERB actually seems less interested in the Pellucidaran people than in the multifarious prehistoric animals. ERB gives a lot of attention to describing all the exotic biological features of the fauna: cave-bears, pterodactyls, even a quasi-stegosaur capable of limited glider-flight. There are also a few animal-human hybrids, such as the aforementioned gorilla-men, the Sagoths, and reptile-men, the Horibs, the latter proving to be among ERB's best villains. ERB fills these descriptions with considerable verve and thus gives Tarzan one of his best settings for adventure.

On a minor note, the novel ends with one member of the dirigible-crew still missing, but this contrivance takes place simply to set up that character's own debut as a starring hero in the 1937 Pellucidar book BACK TO THE STONE AGE, also a very minor crossover since David Innes makes a token appearance therein. Gridley did not appear in this story, but he has another introductory role in the 1932 PIRATES OF VENUS, the first in the "Carson Napier of Venus" series. 

ERB didn't seem to pursue crossovers much after this period from 1929 to 1932. But TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE is certainly the best of his crossover works, as well as one of the best of the Tarzan novels.