Edgar Rice Burroughs and "sword and Planet" Stories
The first author to achieve a large market for this type of story was Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Barsoom series' first installments appeared in the pulp All-Story in 1912. Even if Burroughs' writing was not wholly original, it at least popularized the concept of pulp-style adventures on other planets. Burroughs' "Barsoom" (Mars) manifested a chaotic melange of cultural and technological styles, combining futuristic devices such as "radium pistols" and flying machines suspended by a mysterious levitating ray, with anachronistic Martian cavalry charges, a feudal system with emperors and princesses, much sword-fighting, and a credibility-stretching martial code that justifies it. Frank Herbert's Dune and George Lucas' Star Wars are direct inheritors of this tradition of welding the futuristic to the medieval. The content of the Barsoom stories is pure swashbuckler, being a series of imprisonments, forced gladiatorial combat, daring escapes, monster-killings, and duels with villains. Fantasy elements are minimal; other than telepathy, most instances of "magic" are dismissed or exposed as humbuggery.
Burroughs' stories spawned a large number of imitators. Some, like Otis Adelbert Kline, were exploiting the new market that Burroughs had created; even Burroughs imitated himself in his Venus series, starting in 1934. After the genre had been out of fashion for a few decades, the 1960s saw a renewed interest in Burroughs and the production of nostalgic Burroughsian pastiche by authors like Lin Carter and Michael Moorcock. This consciously imitative genre, influenced also by such sword and sorcery authors as Robert E. Howard, goes by the name of "Sword and Planet" fiction; it is an essentially static, "retro" genre, aiming at reproducing more of the same type of story, with slender variations on a set formula. Perhaps for this reason, many "Sword and Planet" authors have written staggeringly long series sequences, the extreme example being Kenneth Bulmer's Dray Prescot saga, composed of fifty-three novels.
Read more about this topic: Planetary Romance
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“Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
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“To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop; Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver.”
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“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.”
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“The Knight’s bones are dust,
And his good sword rust:—
His soul is with the saints, I trust.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.”
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