At the Earth’s Core

What It's About

David Innes, a young mining heir, joins the inventor Abner Perry on the first test run of the "iron mole", a giant mechanical prospector designed to bore through rock. When the steering fails, the machine tunnels hundreds of miles down and breaks through into Pellucidar, a vast world on the inside of the Earth's crust. There the sun hangs fixed at noon, so time cannot be measured, and prehistoric beasts roam the land. The two men are captured by the Sagoths, gorilla-like soldiers who serve the Mahars, intelligent winged reptiles who rule the region and keep humans as slaves. Innes must find allies among the tribes of Pellucidar and fight to change the order of this world. The story is framed as an account Innes relays to the narrator, "Burroughs".

Key Concepts

The novel draws on the Hollow Earth idea, a long-running speculative theory that the planet's interior might be habitable. It is pure fantasy rather than science, even by the standards of its day. The book also reverses the usual order of things: humans are the subject species, ruled by a cold, telepathic reptilian intelligence. Pellucidar's lack of day and night, and so of any shared sense of time, is one of the story's most distinctive touches. Readers today may find its treatment of "primitive" peoples dated, since it follows the common adventure-fiction pattern of a technologically advanced outsider leading native tribes.

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) was an American writer born in Chicago. After drifting through a series of jobs, he turned to fiction in his mid-thirties and became one of the most commercially successful pulp authors of the early twentieth century, known for fast-moving adventure and science fantasy.