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
Famous quotes containing the words edgar rice burroughs, rice, burroughs, sword, planet and/or stories:
“Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
—Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950)
“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.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can’t be ironic all the time.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“...all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 26:52.
Jesus.
“Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)