Beyond Thirty is one of ERB's earliest and least successful novels. It was published once in his lifetime in 1916. It's the story of a typical ERB hero who against the precepts of his society sojourns across the thirtieth parallel of longitude and lands on the European continent, a territory unseen by Western eyes for two hundred years. The outbreak of war caused the Pan American countries to restrict travel there and in the interim a great multi-continental nation was developed. This seems clearly to be written in response to the questions about whether the United States should enter the First World War.
The story was combined with another Burroughs tale and released in a fannish small-market edition in 1957. It stands out to me because it sports a handsome Gil Kane cover. When the surge hit in the 60's release as much ERB material as possible, the story was edited and retitled The Lost Continent and unleashed again onto the market, this time with an outstanding Frank Frazetta cover. The Lost Continent is a more dramatic title, though no less informative than the weirdly obscure Beyond Thirty.
The story has most all the elements ERB fans are looking for -- a rugged militaristic hero, a beautiful yet savage damsel, and a cadre of trustworthy and less than trustworthy side characters. Jefferson Turck is the hero and he finds and falls in love with Victory, the heir to the British throne no less. (Or what is left of it.) Wild beasts have taken over much of the British Isles (at least the part we visit) while the population has reverted to savagery. Modern sophisticated armies have developed in what was the Abyssinian Empire and later we discover in China.
Richard Lupoff in an essay included in the Bison edition I read called the novel "malformed" in that Burroughs spends a lot of time setting up the characters and settings, and then suddenly we discover new empires in the latter pages, but there seems no time to explore them hardly at all. There are some interesting spins in that Jefferson is made a slave of a black general and he finds his slavery demoralizing and dehumanizing. If ERB was making a marginally progressive statement about race relations or not, it certainly reads that way.
This is a quick sturdy little read. ERB fans will like it because all the elements seem to be there. For others the mileage might vary.
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This is one I've never read, but I definitely understand the criticism you quote. Burroughs' stuff often felt like first-draft writing, as if he were explaining it to himself as he went along. This is why good editors are valuable. "Beyond Thirty" sounds like a manual for handling mid-life crisis.
ReplyDeleteIt seems somewhat it tune with the genre of dystopian world war fantasies that flourished briefly during a time when the eastern hemisphere might as well have been the planet Mongo, for all we knew. You had Shiel's The Yellow Danger, Operator 5 in the pulps, Total War in the comics, and even Jack Kirby's uncirculated novel The Horde. We know too much about our world now, so the fantasy ended up moving into outer space, or vastly distant futures.
The ugliness of attitude about the outsider is something all too familiar in popular fiction. We simmer in a real-life modern world which struggles with this notion, the fear of the unknown, which is as a wise man once noted is fear itself.
DeleteERB's stories were the perfect setup for Frazetta's lusty style. I read this years ago and don't remember much about it. Maybe it's time to give it another shot...
ReplyDeleteFrazetta did seem to find the perfect scene to make his own. His artwork has forever defined the way I see Mars no matter what else happens ever.
DeleteThis is not precisely germane to the subject of Burroughs, but when I read the commentary of racial politics in ERB here, I wondered what if anything you might have said about Jules Verne, who has some similar questionable content. I was mildly surprised that you don't have any posts about Verne works according to the tags. Is it that you haven 't read Verne in the original, or that you read some of his stuff but don't have much to say about him?
ReplyDeleteI certainly have not read Verne in the original. I did make a point of reading the most famous Verne works decades ago, but aside from the Nemo books have little interest in returning to them. The works of ERB and Verne are of an earlier time when attitudes, even those which might've been considered progressive are problematic to modern readers without the proper context. Society changes all the time, hopefully improving in general, but that's not guaranteed by any means. Have a Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah of a day my friend.
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