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, sword, planet and/or stories:
“You sold Marmaros to the Russians. Scurried away in the night and left us to die. Is it to be wondered at that you should choose this place to build your house? The masterpiece of construction, built upon the masterpiece of destruction, the masterpiece of murder. The murderer of ten thousand men returns to the place of his crime.”
—Peter Ruric, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Edgar G. Ulmer. Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi)
“The arbitrary division of one’s life into weeks and days and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day. As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every corner of the world.”
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“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
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—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“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.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.
Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)