At the Earth's Core

Of all of the worlds created by Edgar Rice Burroughs my favorite by far is Barsoom, his version of mars, a close contender however is Pellucidar, the world at the earth's core. I enjoy Burrough's Barsoom stories because I find them visually interesting, they're filled with multi limbed animals, rainbow hued martians and naked people. It's this visual interest that also draws me to Pellucidar.

Pellucidar is inverted, the land masses and oceans are reversed from the surface, our land masses are their oceans and their land masses are our oceans. The World of Pellucidar is perpetually lit by a small glowing orb that floats, without moving, at the center of the world. Burroughs' Pellucidar is a caveman wonderland, he created a world where humans on several different planes of evolution interact with each other and coexist with prehistoric mega-fauna and dinosaurs. A rough summary of the first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth's Core, consists of David Innes, a mining heir, and his inventor friend Abner Perry accidentally traveling to the earth's core in a giant drilling machine and becoming trapped there.

The first two or three books in the series take place in an area of Pellucidar that is controlled by the Mahar, a group of evolved pterosaurs with psychic powers.

It's interesting how precise Burroughs was when describing the Mahar, specifying that they appeared to have evolved from the ramphorhynchus.

The Mahar use a group of gorilla-like men called the Sagoth as slave drivers to control and capture the humans. I find the Sagoth to be a bit confusing and difficult to portray. While Burroughs describes them as gorilla like in appearance, he also suggests that they evolved from the same race of ape, the Mangani, that raised Tarzan. Burroughs gave the apes that raised Tarzan a language, not an ape language of grunts and hoots, but a spoken language. Tarzan's ape mother was named Kala in their language, and she gave Tarzan his name. On a side note, in his fictional biography, Tarzan Alive, Phillip Jose Farmer suggests that the Mangani might be a surviving group of Australopithecus. Due to their apparent evolution from the Mangani I have a tendency, much like Frazetta, to draw them more like Homo habilis.

Homo habilis however, doesn't say gorilla man to me, it says ape-like human. Oh well, sometimes you need to take some artistic license.

One of the first human inhabitants that David Innes meets is Dian the beautiful of Amoz. Dian differs from most of Burroughs' women, although she is kidnapped several times in the series, she is far more capable than most of the females he wrote. In this way she is reminiscent of Jane Porter from his Tarzan novels, they are both willing to get their hands dirty and, if need be, fight.

This is obviously unfinished, I like the way it was coming along but it was causing me some problems that I couldn't work out at the time. Looking at it now, I think I would be able to salvage it if I set my mind to it.

I wish that I had found the Pellucidar novels when I was younger, I would have loved them when I was 8 or 9. Dinosaurs, cave bears, psychic pterodactyls, ape men, pirates, hey, I love them now. Who wouldn't?