Tarzan at the Earth's Core

What It's About

When a distress call reaches the surface world from Pellucidar, the primeval realm hidden at the Earth's core, inventor Jason Gridley assembles a rescue expedition to save its captive emperor from the pirate Korsars. He enlists the jungle hero for the journey, and the party sets off aboard an experimental airship bound for the polar opening that leads into the inner world. Once inside, they find a land of eternal noon where compasses and jungle instincts alike prove useless, and the group is soon scattered and forced to survive among saber-toothed tigers, ape-like tribes, and other primordial dangers as they fight their way toward the captive they came to save.

Key Concepts

This is a crossover novel, joining two of Burroughs's long-running series by bringing his most famous character into the hollow-earth setting established in his earlier Pellucidar books. It leans on classic "lost world" tropes: a sunless-yet-sunlit inner earth where time has no meaning, monstrous prehistoric wildlife, and a hero stripped of the skills that made him formidable on the surface. The pairing of the two franchises was a commercial move as much as a creative one, designed to draw readers of one series into the other.

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) was an American writer best known for his adventure and science fiction novels, whose prolific output helped define the pulp fiction era of the early twentieth century.