On Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tarzan, yes.

John Carter, yes.

I am now journeying to the Earth’s core with Edgar Rice Burroughs . . . a writer of whom many greater can be read. Having read most of the many Tarzan books and just having finished the complete John Carter, I can report: Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote one book.

In this book, a winsome Anglo hero finds himself in an exotic locale. There he meets a Hot Princess who is taken by the local version of Donkey Kong requiring the noble White Guy to journey across ever more exotic locales to save the day. During this period of time, he will have improbably bad luck that continues the adventure and improbably good luck that prolongs his life.

A sad mark of our times is that Burroughs uses, by Percy Jackson standards, an extensive vocabulary. He is not afraid to a coin a word and he is the poor man’s Tolkien when it comes to inventing languages. He is moral sexually, but howlingly immoral when it comes to stereotypes. Just as I hope kids reading Potter  don’t become want-to-be-sorcerers, so I assume nobody will adopt Burroughs colonial era ideals.

He was a man a bit less than his times.

And yet . . . and yet one enjoys reading Burroughs, because he does the one thing he does well. His stories race along with a comforting sameness disguised by faux excitement, like the first drop on Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. That drop is actually scary, but it is a reasonable facsimile of a thrill. Walt Disney was right that many of us just want to have our terror un-terrifying and terrifying too.

Edgar Rice Burroughs never disappoints a loyal reader. His prose sometimes soars (Tarzan) to excellent, but rarely is weary or slow. He wrote so much that deciding to read Burroughs in like eating at the Home Style Buffet, nothing tastes great, but you can have all you want.

What should you do in ERB, as the cool kids have never called Edgar Rice Burroughs? Nothing. You are liberated from any should when you read him, but here are five of his best.

First, if you read one ERB, then do read Tarzan. Everyone knows who he is, but few have read the book that started metro Tarzana, the Disney film, and provided careers from good looking men from many generations. This is actually a decent book. The Return of Tarzan and Tarzan and the City of Gold are two of the better follow up books

Second, my personal favorite ERB, is The God’s of Mars in the John Carter series. it is the second of the series and since the first book is the second best you will might as well read A Princess of Mars.  Burroughs hated tyranny, at least for Anglos, and even his monarchies are libertarian paradise  . . . except for the slaves. If that seems bizarrely contradictory, then don’t think about his science at all. Only Burroughs could get away with putting life on a tiny moon and then imagining (somehow) Earthlings get smaller as they get closer to the moon and so retain proportion.

Third, At the Earth’s Core,  the first of the “hollow earth” series, is the best. Like The Land That Time Forget, the first of the Caspak series, the hollow earth books exploit every kid’s fascination with big lizards, sort-of-dinosaurs, and battles with monsters. The battles are remarkably unbelievable . . . with numbers often swollen to Biblical proportions and fairly sterile in fact.

The best you can say about Edgar Rice Burroughs was he knew what the public wanted, gave it to them in huge portions, and like Frank Baum stumbled into one enduring myth, Tarzan. Baum and his Oz books are, however, actually read while it is rare to meet a kid who has actually read Tarzan and not just consumed the products. Tarzan has suffered an extreme version of Mickey Mouse Disease, when a character is lost to his origins.

ERB: the best bad writer of his time.

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