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:
“All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.”
—Lenny Bruce (1925–1966)
“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)
“Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
—Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950)
“March indefatigably on,
And for the last effect
Still keep thy Sword erect:
Besides the force it has to fright
The Spirits of the shady Night;
The same Arts that did gain
A Pow’r must it maintain.”
—Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
“...I, his wife, rested and was warmed in the sunlight of his loyal love, and glorious fame, and now, even though his beautiful life has gone out, it is as when some far off planet disappears from the heavens, the light of his great fame still falls upon and warms me.”
—Julia Dent Grant (1825–1902)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)