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Literary Criticism

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Richard A. Lupoff
MASTER OF ADVENTURE
The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs
307pp. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press
$16.95; distributed in the UK by Combined Academic Publishers. 
10.95 pounds ~ 0 8032 8030 0
Edgar Rice Burroughs used to write a novel almost every other month. He once produced a book in twenty-six days and in 1913, his busiest year, turned out 413,000 words of fiction. He was the author of three astonishingly successful ongoing series -- Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and the chronicles of Pellucidar, that subterranean world beneath our own first described in At the Earth's Core. Burroughs pinballed excitedly, if not always successfully, from gentre to genre -- jungle tales to science fiction, Westerns to romance, as well as oddities like The Outlaw of Torn, a historical drama set in thirteenth-century England, Marcia of the Doorstep, "about a stage-struck girl, her struggles and problems" and The Mucker, which sees a petty crook stumble on an island inhabited by "a lost race of Japanese Samurai who have kept much of their language, armour and famed swordsmanship over the isolated generations, but who have forgotten the outside world and have largely reverted to savagery and cannibalism."

Despite cranking out at an improbabl rate, Burroughs was capable of political satire (lampooning Hitler and Mussolini in 1938's Carson of Venus), impressively detailed world-building (The Chessmen of Mars contains a lengthy appendix detailing the rules of "jetan", Martian chess) as well as formal inventiveness, inserting a self-deprecating version of himself into his own stories years before Martin Amis thought this sounded like a wheeze. Master of Adventure, Richard A. Lupoff's cheerful critical overview of Burroughs's long career, first published in 1965, is here reissued in updated form, with an extra chapter and the occasional , baffled-sounding footnote about "the internet". Little more than a series of synopses of Burroughs' oeuvre, this is nonetheless tremendously evocative. Lupoff's lucid, occasionally wry recappings make one want to scour second-hand bookshops for Burroughs' back catalogue in a quest to find out more about characters like the beautiful La of Opar, Nah-ee-Lah the daughter of Sagroth (king of the city-state of Laythe), the honourable Kulan Tith, Hooja the Sly One, and most promisingly, Nu, the revived prehistoric hunter, who lives in the cave of the . . .
JON BARNES

The Best of NASA's Aeroquiz Week of 11/2/98:
Q: In 1922, fantasy author Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote At the Earth's Core; a story of a hollow Earth kingdom called Pellucidar. In the story, adventurers drilled their way into the Earth. As they went ever deeper, the force of gravity reversed direction, and they began climbing "up" into the land of Pellucidar. When they "surfaced," they stood upright inside the hollow shell of the Earth, held there by the gravity generated by the mass of Earth directly beneath them. Assuming the Earth really is a hollow shell, would gravitation work that way?

A: No. In fact, it can be shown that there is no net force of gravity at all inside a hollow Earth! The mass of the Earth directly under your feet would indeed generate a gravitational force on you (as Burroughs surmised), but so would the mass of Earth far over your head. Although the mass over your head is far away, there is a lot more of it than the mass under your feet. For a perfect spherical shell, you can mathematically show that the net force of gravity is zero. In "reality," there would be small forces acting on you due to mass concentrations within the Earth's crust, the centrifugal force of the Earth spinning (about 0.3% of a "gee" at the equator), and because the Earth is an imperfect sphere. But Burroughs was wrong -- You would float in Pellucidar!
Congratulations to winstel@acsu.buffalo.edu (John D. Winstel)

From AVClub.com ~ Games of Our Lives
Jungle King
Year released: 1982 ~ Company: Taito
Format: Arcade, Atari 2600, Atari 400, Atari 5600, Colecovision, Commodore 64, VIC20
Reviewed by Wil Wheaton ~ January 11th, 2006
Drop in a quarter, hit start, and prepare to tackle a typical day in the life of a Jungle King: bellow out your best Tarzan yell, swing through the trees, swim through gator-infested waters, run through an avalanche, and rescue your girlfriend from cannibals.

Gameplay: As fun as it sounds, the Jungle King's day is still fraught with peril. Your first trip through the trees is pretty simple, but on the second run, vicious monkeys will try to knock you to your death on the jungle floor. When you swim through the river, you've got to make sure you don't run out of air, get caught on bubbles, or get eaten by the gators you're trying to shank with your stylish Jungle King knife. And if you thought running through an avalanche was all fun and games, think again: You can jump over most of the rocks, but you'll have to duck beneath a few sneaky ones.

Enduring contribution to gaming history: The estate of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs sued Taito for copyright infringement, forcing Taito to replace the Jungle King with a pith-helmeted adventurer. They also removed the Tarzan yell, and retitled the game Jungle Hunt.