Edgar Rice Burroughs’s work is largely unknown now except through the Tarzan movies and a few other—mostly terrible—movie dramatizations which don’t really represent his stories very well. None of the movie Tarzans are really much like Burroughs’s Lord of the Jungle. But he, along with his fellow Chicagoan L. Frank Baum, was one of America’s foremost fantasists.
Burroughs has some problems. He wasn’t above plagiarizing plots (The Mad King) or settings and characters (A Princess of Mars). There are racist themes in his work, all nationalities are portrayed in stereotypes, he’s jingoistic, and his ideas of history, science, and language are, shall we say, sketchy.
But he was a great story-teller. And, remarkably, it wasn’t unusual for him to base his stories around interesting philosophical ideas. The core idea of Tarzan is a discussion of the nature vs. nurture question. One of my favorite of Burroughs’s works, The Monster Men, is an exploration of the creation of artificial human life. Do artificially created humans have souls?
And his novel The Land That Time Forgot is a riff on a famous saying of the German biologist Ernest Haeckel: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. Or, said another way, the development of the individual organism repeats the development of the species.
The Land That Time Forgot takes place on the hidden island of Caspak where Haeckel’s statement is literally true. Individuals make their way up Caspak’s magic river, beginning as single-celled organisms, mutating progressively into multi-celled organisms, fish, amphibians, reptiles, rodents, and on up the evolutionary ladder to become primitive ape-men and, eventually, human beings. Like all Burroughs novels The Land That Time Forgot and its two sequels have beautiful damsels in distress, dashing (usually American) heroes, threatening brutes, and high adventure.
Here in the blogosphere we have our very own Caspak. It’s called The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem (Haeckel invented the term “ecology”, too, BTW). Blogs start off as Insignificant Microbes and claw their way up through Multicellular Microorganism, Wiggly Worms, and so on to the very pinnacle of the Ecosystem. At the top of the Ecosystem are the lordly Higher Beings. This consists of blogs that receive hundreds of thousands of visits per day with thousands of other blogs linking to them.
The Glittering Eye started off as an Insignificant Microbe a little over six months ago. It’s been a Marauding Marsupial for a grand eight days now. That was the height of my ambition when I started back in March and I’m very happy to have reached it if only temporarily. But it’s been a glorious eight days and I’m sure I’ll be back up here over time.
BTW, The Land That Time Forgot is available online. You can read it right here.
