Some time ago, I did a post about the sword-and-planet stories centered on the planet Mars, such as Burroughs’ classic John Carter of Mars series. Earth’s other neighbor has also been the inspiration for a significant amount of fantastic fiction, and I’ve at long last come back to do a post about adventure stories set on Venus!
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Venus series
I’ve talked a bit about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sword and planet adventures before; in particular, I’ve discussed his ‘Barsoom‘ (Mars) series briefly and did a post on the first two books on his ‘Pellucidar‘ (Hollow Earth) series. In preparation for another massive literature survey post, I decided to read Burroughs’ fantasies set on yet another planet: Venus! The series, describing the adventures of scientist/adventurer Carson Napier when he crash lands on Venus, consists of four books: Pirates of Venus (1934), Lost on Venus (1935), Carson of Venus (1939), and Escape on Venus (1946). (There is also a posthumously published story, Wizard of Venus, which I haven’t read.)
The novels are interesting and distinct for a number of reasons. First, the ‘Venus’ series was initiated much later than the other adventures Burroughs is known for, and represents the last series he would start (though he continued to write Tarzan, Barsoom, and Pellucidar books at the same time). Perhaps because of this, the Venus series seems a little more mature and a little less spectacular than its predecessors. Whereas David Innes, for instance, had completely dominated Pellucidar in the span of two books, Carson Napier is more or less on the run throughout the four books.
Let’s take a tour through Burroughs’ fictional version of Venus, and meet its inhabitants!
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep
One of the fun things about my blogging is that I keep turning up relatively unknown works by famous authors which, although not on par with their classics, give fascinating insights into the authors’ views. They’re usually quite entertaining, as well!
Soon after reading John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, I stumbled across yet another book about the interaction of mankind with the denizens of the deepest oceans: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep (1929).
Doyle, though certainly best known for his stories about Sherlock Holmes, was no stranger to a good adventure or horror story. The Lost World (1912), for instance, dealt with an expedition to a remote South American plateau where dinosaurs and other monsters still dwell.
The Maracot Deep, however, is set in the other great frontier of that era: the deepest parts of the ocean. It is one of Doyle’s weaker novels, and is extremely short, but is a fun read and is one of the last truly ‘speculative’ novels about the undersea world.
John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes
John Wyndham either didn’t like the world much or worried about it a lot! In a previous post, I discussed his classic horror/sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which a meteor shower leaves most of the world blind and helpless against a horde of mobile, carnivorous plants. I recently finished reading his follow-up apocalyptic novel, The Kraken Wakes (1953), and I give a summary and some observations about the book below:
Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis
I’m a complete sucker for sword-and-sorcery fantasy, and actually I’ve written a significant amount of it for my own amusement. Of course, the true master, and really the originator of the genre, is Robert E. Howard, whose Conan stories are both incredibly fun to read and surprisingly eloquent.
After Howard’s unfortunate suicide in 1936, readers still hungered for strong fantasy characters, and many incredible authors stepped up to fill the void. One of those was the masterful Henry Kuttner, who danced easily between fantasy, horror and science fiction. He wrote a quartet of stories about Elak of Atlantis, which were recently reprinted:
Below, I give a brief summary of the Elak stories, and some comparison to the Conan works of REH.
Bertram Mitford’s The Sign of the Spider
It’s hard to find out information about author Bertram Mitford (1855-1914). Even Wikipedia doesn’t have information about him, instead redirecting to another Bertram Mitford who wrote about Japan. He was, like H. Rider Haggard, a writer of adventure stories set in the wilds of Africa, though certainly not as well known (Haggard wrote King Solomon’s Mines and She, the latter of which I’ve blogged about before). Valancourt Books, which has not led me wrong yet, has been valiantly reprinting much of Mitford’s work. I decided to give The Sign of the Spider (1896) a read:
I was, quite frankly, blown away. According to the book notes, Mitford has been dismissed as an imitator of Haggard. I found The Sign of the Spider to be a much more compelling, and even deep, read than any of the Haggard work I’ve read so far. A summary and some observations follow.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii
One of the fun things about blogging about both science and horror fiction is the unusual connections that one can find between them. On of my favorite science topics outside of physics is vulcanology, which is why I read blogs like Magma Cum Laude.
Recently, I happened across a very nice book by J.Z. de Boer and D.T. Sanders, Volcanoes in Human History. In short, it looks at the major volcanic eruptions with a focus on their impact on human events. Perhaps the most famed of these events is the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E., which resulted in the destruction of Pompeii. What especially caught my eye, though, was the following comment,
Among the earliest books about the catastrophe of 79 C.E. is The Last Days of Pompeii, a novel published to popular acclaim in 1834 by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Though overly sentimental and melodramatic for modern tastes, it presents a fascinating glimpse of Pompeiian life in the first century and a vivid picutre of what it must have been like when the earth shook, walls tumbled, and ash and lapilli rained down upon the city, turning day into night.
Emphasis mine. To a horror fiction fan, Bulwer-Lytton is known as the author of one of the greatest haunted house stories ever written, The Haunted and the Haunters: Or the House and the Brain. Of Bulwer-Lytton, H.P. Lovecraft had the following to say in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:
At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a “Psychic” or pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the prolific and popular Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied.
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV’s mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written.
In light of this, I thought I would take a look at the ‘other side’ of Bulwer-Lytton, and read his most famous romance, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834).
Richard Marsh’s A Metamorphosis
I continue with some reviews of the works of Richard Marsh, in celebration of the release of Valancourt’s edition of The Beetle. This time I discuss a book that is, as yet, only available through Google books, Richard Marsh’s A Metamorphosis (1903).
This story is a marked departure from other Marsh works I’ve read, in that it combines the elements of a thriller with what can only be called a rollicking adventure story. I discuss it and give some observations below the fold…
Richard Marsh’s “Philip Bennion’s Death”
As promised, here’s the first discussion of some classic Richard Marsh, in celebration of the release of Valancourt’s edition of The Beetle. I start with a brief discussion of another Valancourt edition, Richard Marsh’s Philip Bennion’s Death (1897).
Dennis Wheatley’s They Found Atlantis
I’ve discussed a few of Dennis Wheatley‘s books in past posts. Wheatley was a prolific author from the 1930s through the 1980s (though his most famous works were written from the ’30s to the ’50s), and he could rightly be considered the Stephen King of his time. Unfortunately, most of his works are out of print, with the exception of some inexpensive editions produced by Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural. I’ve started foraging for his used books online, and managed to find an inexpensive first edition of his adventure thriller with the provocative title They Found Atlantis (1936). Though not his best work, it was an entertaining read and gives me an excuse to delve into some of the history of the Atlantis story and some of the Atlantis craze of the twentieth century. I’ll include some minor spoilers of the story, so don’t read any further if you want to discover Wheatley’s Atlantis for yourself! Otherwise, follow me below the fold…