The Ultimate Pulp Adventure of A White Aristrocrat Raised by Apes in Darkest Africa This is not your Disney sanitized version, or the various other spiThe Ultimate Pulp Adventure of A White Aristrocrat Raised by Apes in Darkest Africa This is not your Disney sanitized version, or the various other spin-off TV series and comics. This is the rip-roaring pulpy original book, full of British colonialist racist attitudes as interpreted by an American with British roots that date back to the first colonies and a father who was a Confederate Civil War Veteran. He was a big believer in eugenics and the superiority of the white European races and cultures over the darker, inferior races, so darkest Africa was a perfect setting to orphan his British aristocrat baby and let him be raised by a tribe of super-intelligent apes (not gorillas, close to neanderthals in their use of primitive language, tools, family units etc).
The tale begins as Lord Greystoke and his wife are stranded on the West Coast of Africa after a mutiny by the brutish sailors on their journey. They are forced to create their own life to survive while waiting for the hope of rescue in the future, but things go wrong and the baby is adopted by a tribe of apes instead. It's a great idea, so let's give Burroughs credit for that. And since he wrote 24 sequels to this and got very rich milking it to the very utmost, he also knew he had happened on a winning pulp formula.
It's a fairly engaging story in the early going, especially as Tarzan grows up among the apes with no human compass points, bonding with his ape mother savior and learning to survive among the apes as a puny and ugly hairless white ape (aka Tarzan). There was a lot of interesting things going on here. But once Tarzan miraculously starts to display all the superior traits of chivalry, bravery, honor, fighting prowess, and intelligence as his superior white aristocratic lineage (DNA) starts to exert itself despite his barbaric upbringing, we cannot avoid seeing Burrough's racist attitudes, though that is of course from our modern perspective and his views were very prevalent back then, so if you condemn Burroughs then you have to condemn that whole society. But it is quite unpalatable to read some of the nonsense ideas that he espouses, though an interesting window onto the views of the times, over a century ago in a society now long gone.
The story really devolves in the latter parts, leaving Africa for Baltimore and Wisconsin (if I remember right) for a ridiculous and unneeded side story involving Jane almost getting married off to some money-hungry boor. Hollywood wisely dumped this whole part of the story and stuck to the jungle and vine-swinging, deadly knife-wielding fights with ferocious beasts and cannibal natives etc. ...more
Hugely Influential Planetary Romance from 1912 - A Pulpy Swashbuckling Tale This book may not be great literature, and the author was not ashamed to adHugely Influential Planetary Romance from 1912 - A Pulpy Swashbuckling Tale This book may not be great literature, and the author was not ashamed to admit he wasn't aiming for that, but he know he could write a pulp romance better than much of the pulp being published at the time, and made good use of his varied job experiences in mining, as a cowboy, training for the military, and having a Civil War Confederate veteran father.
The story is full of bravado, fighting again impossible odds, preposterous plot, simplistic good vs bad characters, a beautiful princess who is constantly being captured and fought over, and an absurdly handsome, strapping, manly fighting here who has superhuman strength on Mars thanks to being used to the stronger gravity of Earth. It's pretty ridiculous stuff, but if you were a young impressionable reader back in those days, it must have been incredibly exciting to read. Famous scientist Carl Sagan took inspiration, and giants of the SF Golden Age as well, particularly Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein.
One of the best aspects of the book is really the dying world and barbaric civilizations of Mars, which he does evoke with panache. It is a massive influence on Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), the Bradbury's writing skills put Burroughs to shame. The influence on Jack Vance's Dying Earth books is equally obvious, so we must give credit for that.
There is also a lot about racial ideas of character, bravery, empathy, cruelty, intelligence, etc, as Burroughs was a major believer in eugenics and the racial superiority of White Europeans. Because of the science fantasy tropes the non-white races are often aliens (except for the Red Martians), which masks some of the racism, but that unpleasant streak is far more evident in his even more iconic Tarzan of the Apes series....more
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