Edgar Rice Burroughs

Lost! Space adventurer Carson Napier made a grievous miscalculation and became stranded on dangerous, mist-shrouded Venus. But Napier refused to quit. He won the love of the beautiful Duare, princess of Vepaja, became a pirate, fought villains, then lost his beloved to the evil Thorist kidnappers. Napier's adventures on Venus continue in this pulse-pounding sequel to Pirates of Venus. Here the intrepid and wry explorer takes on a savage world in order to rescue the princess from her sworn enemies. Napier's epic quest for Duare takes him through the streets of the City of the Dead, into the terrifying Room of the Seven Doors, and face to face with fantastic and perilous creatures. Featuring what may be Burroughs's most realistic hero, Lost on Venus brims with the action, suspense, and wit unique to the Master of Adventure. This edition features an introduction by celebrated writer Kevin J. Anderson and the original illustrations by J. Allen St. John.

The prologues to both parts, "The Moon Maid" and "The Moon Men"(part 3 of the series) constitute a future history, effectively Burroughs' vision of what the 20th Century held in store for humanity, which could be considered a kind of retroactive alternate history--a genre rare in Burroughs' writings and a bit reminiscent of such works as H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come. Burroughs was writing in the early 1920s, several years after the end of the First World War in 1918; clearly, however, he did not regard the war as having truly ended but only changed in intensity--especially as it had been directly followed by the October Revolution in Russia and the intervention of the Western powers in an effort to crush that revolution, which the staunchly anti-Communist Burroughs supported.

Nu, the son of Nu, his mighty muscles rolling beneath his smooth bronzed skin, moved silently through the jungle primeval. His handsome head with its shock of black hair, roughly cropped between sharpened stones, was high held, the delicate nostrils questioning each vagrant breeze for word of Oo, hunter of men. Now his trained senses catch the familiar odor of Ta, the great woolly rhinoceros, directly in his path, but Nu, the son of Nu, does not hunt Ta this day. Does not the hide of Ta's brother already hang before the entrance of Nu's cave? No, today Nu hunts the gigantic cat, the fierce saber-toothed tiger, Oo, for Nat-ul, wondrous daughter of old Tha, will mate with none but the mightiest of hunters. Only so recently as the last darkness, as, beneath the great, equatorial moon, the two had walked hand in hand beside the restless sea she had made it quite plain to Nu, the son of Nu, that not even he, son of the chief of chiefs, could claim her unless there hung at the thong of his loin cloth the fangs of Oo. "Nat-ul," she had said to him, "wishes her man to be greater than other men. She loves Nu now better than her very life, but if Love is to walk at her side during a long life Pride and Respect must walk with it." Her slender hand reached up to stroke the young giant's black hair. "I am very proud of my Nu even now," she continued, "for among all the young men of the tribe there is no greater hunter, or no mightier fighter than Nu, the son of Nu. Should you, single-handed, slay Oo before a grown man's beard has darkened your cheek there will be none greater in all the world than Nat-ul's mate, Nu, the son of Nu."

Time travel, a millennium-spanning romance, and rousing action in modern African jungles and the untamed prehistoric wilderness ignite this classic adventure tale from the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Nu, a warrior from the Stone Age, is buried alive in an earthquake while stalking a saber-toothed tiger. Awakening thousands of years later on Tarzan's estate in Africa, he gives his heart to Victoria Custer of Nebraska, a visitor to the estate, who is the reincarnation of Nu's Stone Age love, Nat-ul. But other men treacherously compete for the love of Victoria in modern Africa and for the heart of Nat-ul in the distant past. Set in both a terrifyingly dangerous primeval setting and the beloved world of Tarzan, The Eternal Savage movingly reveals whether eternal love is strong enough to triumph over undying adversity.

The year is 2137. Two hundred years ago -- in our time, more or less -- Eurasia fought a war to end all wars, a war that meant, for all intents and purposes, the end of the Old World. The Americans managed to retain their civilization -- but only by engaging by the most extreme form or isolationism imaginable for two centuries, now, no American has ventured east of the thirtieth parallel. "East for the East . . ." the slogan went, "The West for the West!" Until a terrible storm at sea forced American lieutenant Jefferson Turck to disobey the law, seeking safe harbor in England -- where he found that two centuries of isolation have desolated the land. The damaged ship found a Europe that is no longer an enemy -- a ruined land that is utterly unable to be an enemy -- or a friend.

THUVIA, MAID OF MARS is the first Carter novel that does not feature John Carter as the central character -- he only makes a brief cameo appearance early on. Instead, the action mantle is taken up by Carthoris, Carter's son. Fortunately, though, Carthoris is every bit the swashbuckler that his father is. Princess Thuvia of Ptarth has been kidnapped by the vile Prince Astok of Dusar -- an abduction which nearly causes a world war on Barsoom. Young Carthoris, in his quest to free his beloved princess, runs across deserted cities, a forgotten kingdom, banths (10-legged Barsoomian lions), ethereal warriors, much swordplay, giant white apes, and on and on. . . . highly recommended.

#5 in Burroughs's Martian Barsoom series. Tara, Princess of Helium, John Carter's impetuous and headstrong daughter, flies into one of Barsoom's rare but fierce storm defying the elements. But the Martian storm is only the beginning: hurled half a planet off course, she's threatened by grotesque flesh eating monsters and barbarous warriors. Is the mysterious Panthan warrior friend or foe? As hero battles for maiden in a deadly game of living chess, the pieces are fighting men and the stakes are life and death!

At the start of this volume, Tarzan knows his inheritance as an English lord, but is determined to hide that since he truly believes that his cousin, William Cecil Clayton, would make a better lord and husband for his beloved Jane. He gets involved with a married Russian countess (there's a plan -- oh, sure) who has issues with her criminal brother (Nicholas Rokoff -- a real villain, naturally, who becomes a regular in the series) and her older husband. As a consequence of his interaction with brother, Tarzan is lured into a room where he is attacked by a dozen Paris muggers. The scene that details this mugging is one of the great chapters in the literature of muggings. Tarzan fondly recalls his childhood and his foster ape mother with a friend, D'Arnot: "To you my friend, she would have appeared a hideous and ugly creature, but to me she was beautiful -- so gloriously does love transfigure its object."

At the end of A PRINCESS OF MARS, the first volume in Burroughs's Mars series, John Carter managed to get the factory that produces oxygen for Barsoom working again -- and collapsed. When he came to, he found himself back on earth, and separated from his beloved Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium. It's a decade later when Carter returns to Barsoom, and he finds himself in that part of the planet that the natives consider to be "heaven" -- which is no heaven at all. Carter has to reunite with his friend the fierce green warrior Tars Tarkas, fight with plant men and the great white apes of Barsoom, violate some significant religious taboos, survive the affections of an evil goddess, foment a slave revolt, fight in an arena, and still save Dejah Thoris in the middle of a giant air battle between the red, green, black and white people of Barsoom. . . . High adventure, Martian style.

In the previous volume, the Lord of the Jungle discovered the burnt corpse of his wife, Jane, after a visit to his African home by German soldiers. (One suspects that Burroughs never did like Jane; this sort of thing happened to her a lot.) In this volume, Tarzan learns that Jane was not murdered by the Germans but kidnaped -- and sets off in pursuit. As the novel begins, Tarzan has spent two months tracking his mate to Pal-ul-don ("Land of Men"), a hidden valley in Zaire, where he finds a land dinosaurs and men even stranger -- humanoids with tails. Ta-den is a hairless, white-skinned, Ho-don warrior; O-mat is a hairy, black skinned, Waz-don, chief of the tribe of Kor-ul-ja. In this new world Tarzan becomes a captive -- but he impresses his captors so well that they name him Tarzan-Jad-Guru ("Tarzan the Terrible"). Meanwhile, a second visitor has come to Pal-ul-don -- wearing only a loin cloth and carrying an Enfield rifle along and a long knife. Pal-ul-don is where Jane is being held captive, of course. . . .

. . . . between Tarzan's avenging of his ape foster mother's death and his becoming leader of his ape tribe. In JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN, Burroughs gives us an Ape-Man who might have fit in a television sitcom or a domestic drama. We see a Tarzan whose character is barely hinted at in the events of Tarzan on the Apes -- this is a collection of stories that take place in the same years as that first novel, but show us a very different aspect of Tarzan. We see "Tarzan's First Love," a tale of a teenage Tarzan with a distracting crush on a big-but-beautiful female gorilla called Teeka. The Ape-Man (well, boy, actually) declares his love for her and battles a childhood friend for her favor. But in the end he comes to understand that some things are Just Not Meant To Be, and forsakes his childhood heart-throb . . . In "The God of Tarzan," the Ape-Man asks himself the meaning of life -- and attempts to track down God in the same way that he would follow the spoor of a wounded deer. In "Tarzan Rescues the Moon," Tarzan sees a lunar eclipse and in his efforts to rescue the moon, shoots arrows into the moon until the moon re-emerges from the eclipse. In the end, it's Tarzan's struggle to find real meanings in the world around him that distinguish him from the apes who are his adoptive kin -- and make him as fascinating today as he was a hundred years ago.