Space Cowboy
I am a big fan of science fiction novels. I started reading science fiction as a teenager and have strayed from time to time into historical fiction or horror but I always come back to the history of the future. I think my first glimpses into sci-fi were from Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Pellucidar novels. I loved the idea of a world inside of our world filled with dinosaurs and cavemen and reptiles as the overlords for human slaves. The technology at the time (we are talking mid 70’s) was not too far removed from Burroughs ideas. Today they look childish but the stories are still good.
It was always a hero thrust into a situation by bad men. He was almost always motivated by a beautiful woman who he was attracted to but unsure that the attraction was mutual. Due to his heroic endeavors, he always wins the heart of the girl and they live happily ever after or until the next time she is kidnapped. There was never a real romantic element to the stories and the bad men were always saving the women for something. None of them were ever molested or hurt, just imprisoned, it would seem, just waiting to be rescued. This was my early vision of how relationships were supposed to be. Wow, was I off.
About the same time, you had Tarzan on the television with Ron Ely and Doug McClure (Google him) starring in “The Land That Time Forgot”. Burroughs wrote a three book series about a lost continent in the South Pacific called Kaspak. The series was The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, and Out of Time’s Abyss. It was about a WWI German submarine that took on American survivors of a torpedoing and ended up becoming marooned on the Kaspak. Same plot as Pellucidar with the dinosaurs and cavemen but with the complication of Germans thrown in. Boy meets girl, girl gets kidnapped, boy finds girl and rescues her. There is a long chase and finally they are free and declare their undying love. Burroughs takes a bizarre twist on evolution with this series in that Homo sapiens are the end result of evolution with all life on the continent evolving toward becoming man. Horribly illogical, but for the 1920’s, it made for interesting reading. I guess sci-fi is about exploring science and showing what could be.
The book that stuck most in my mind was Beyond the Farthest Star. It was about a WWII pilot that gets shot down and is miraculously transported, naked to a far away world. This world is at war just like Earth but they had sky scrapers that would sink into the ground when an air attack occurred to avoid damage. The sides closely resembled the US and Germany and of course, there was the naïve and beautiful heroine that gets abducted and needs rescued.
This has been Space Cowboy reporting.
Icool
Cobb
It was always a hero thrust into a situation by bad men. He was almost always motivated by a beautiful woman who he was attracted to but unsure that the attraction was mutual. Due to his heroic endeavors, he always wins the heart of the girl and they live happily ever after or until the next time she is kidnapped. There was never a real romantic element to the stories and the bad men were always saving the women for something. None of them were ever molested or hurt, just imprisoned, it would seem, just waiting to be rescued. This was my early vision of how relationships were supposed to be. Wow, was I off.
About the same time, you had Tarzan on the television with Ron Ely and Doug McClure (Google him) starring in “The Land That Time Forgot”. Burroughs wrote a three book series about a lost continent in the South Pacific called Kaspak. The series was The Land That Time Forgot, The People That Time Forgot, and Out of Time’s Abyss. It was about a WWI German submarine that took on American survivors of a torpedoing and ended up becoming marooned on the Kaspak. Same plot as Pellucidar with the dinosaurs and cavemen but with the complication of Germans thrown in. Boy meets girl, girl gets kidnapped, boy finds girl and rescues her. There is a long chase and finally they are free and declare their undying love. Burroughs takes a bizarre twist on evolution with this series in that Homo sapiens are the end result of evolution with all life on the continent evolving toward becoming man. Horribly illogical, but for the 1920’s, it made for interesting reading. I guess sci-fi is about exploring science and showing what could be.
The book that stuck most in my mind was Beyond the Farthest Star. It was about a WWII pilot that gets shot down and is miraculously transported, naked to a far away world. This world is at war just like Earth but they had sky scrapers that would sink into the ground when an air attack occurred to avoid damage. The sides closely resembled the US and Germany and of course, there was the naïve and beautiful heroine that gets abducted and needs rescued.
This has been Space Cowboy reporting.
Icool
Cobb
posted by Cobb at
7:37 AM
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