The Land that Time Forgot, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Nelson Doubleday, 1946
(no ISBN; hardcover book-club edition, movie tie-in trilogy compilation.)
Individual
titles of the series: The Land that Time Forgot, The People that Time
Forgot, Out of Time's Abyss. Originally published in 1918.
I love the Barsoom books, and Tarzan is just fun,
but somehow I never got around to these, so when I saw this absolutely
awesome yellow and red hc published to promote the film (which I also
want to see now, because I like hurting myself) I just had to have it. (again, props to the Greenville Really Big Book Sale!)
Somewhere near Antarctica, there's a giant
cliff-walled island. Inside that undiscovered country is the freakiest
weird-ass version of evolution I've ever seen in science fiction. I
won't spoil it, but it's seriously weird, and really impressive as a
world-building conceit. I have to give the guy props for going there in
1918 - I have neighbors in South Carolina in 2013 who can't deal with
the concept, so it's a little dizzy-making to think about how ahead of
the curve Burroughs was.
Usual quibbles apply - the men are heroes, the women
are victims (but at least once in each book they save themselves
temporarily, or serve more of a function than looking pretty or
delicate) and the villains are villainous. The one scene with the
cowboy "taming" a wild horse made me flashback to Jean Auel and my eyes
near about rolled out of my head, but otherwise it was fun, fast, and
seriously weird.
The writing and plotting is about on the same level
as the Barsoom series, but a little more manageable due to the length
differences. This is like a nice evening meal, that is more like an
enormous southern Thanksgiving. Either way, you're going to be eating
good for a while.
