At the Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Entertaining prehistoric adventure in a hollow Earth

At the Earth’s Core, a science fiction adventure novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was first serialized in 1914 issues of All-Story Weekly before being published as a book in 1922. The story is narrated by David Innes, a wealthy American mining mogul, who is discovered in the Sahara desert after having gone missing for 10 years. He relates how he and his friend Abner Perry, an elderly inventor, took a subterranean journey in a giant drilling machine of Perry’s invention. In simple terms, the gas pedal gets stuck, and David and Perry end up tunneling hundreds of miles through the Earth’s crust. When they burst through the inner edge of the crust, they discover another world on the interior concave surface of the globe. Referred to by its inhabitants as Pellucidar, this lost world is a throwback to prehistoric times filled with people and creatures that call to mind the surface world’s earlier stages of evolution.

As far back as the early 18th century, Hollow Earther pseudoscientists led by John Cleves Symmes Jr. proposed that another world exists on the inner surface of the Earth’s crust, similar to Pellucidar. This led to a slew of Hollow Earth sci-fi novels—some more serious, some more fanciful—including Symzonia (1820) by Captain Adam Seaborn (a pseudonym), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1867) by Jules Verne, Mizora (1881) by Mary E. Bradley Lane, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) by James De Mille, and The Smoky God (1908) by Willis George Emerson. Among this genre, At the Earth’s Core may just be the best of the bunch.

Burroughs’s science fiction is like that of Jules Verne but less dignified. Burroughs will start with a scientific premise similar to what one finds in a Verne novel, but Burroughs can’t help himself from indulging in the exploitative elements of pulp fiction: macho violence, beautiful damsels, and gratuitous gore. Burroughs’s novels lean more towards fantasy than sci-fi. If you want realism, look elsewhere, but Burroughs’s brand of adventure does have its amusing charms.

At the center of the Earth is a fiery nebula that serves as Pellucidar’s sun. On the inner surface of the globe, there is no night, only perpetual daylight. Because of this, Pellucidarians have no way of measuring time. They eat when they’re hungry; sleep when they’re tired. This makes some sense, but Burroughs takes the point to absurdity by repeatedly asserting that “time does not exist” in Pellucidar. Upon arriving in this lost world, David and Perry lose all conception of time, to the point where they can’t tell the difference between a second, an hour, or a month. Every time Burroughs brings up this idiotic idea, it is a glaring annoyance that spoils the reader’s experience of the fantasy world he has created.

Burroughs ends the book on a cliffhanger, leaving things open for a Pellucidar series of several novels, including the crossover book Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. Burroughs also created his own knockoff with the Caspak trilogy, beginning with The Land That Time Forgot, which takes place in another lost world (this time in the arctic) with prehistoric creatures, warring tribes of cavemen, a princess to be rescued, and bat-winged villains. I don’t consider myself a big Burroughs fan, but I did enjoy At the Earth’s Core. I would consider At the Earth’s Core one of Burroughs’s better books, as I would consider Journey to the Center of the Earth to be one of Verne’s worst books. Burroughs delivers on the monsters and action that one wishes there had been more of in Verne’s novel. Also worth a look is Lin Carter’s series of Zanthodon novels, a fun homage to Burroughs and Pellucidar, published from 1979 to 1982.
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