Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site Since 1996 ~ Over 10,000 Web Pages in Archive Presents Volume 3961

ERB’S EMBRYONIC JOURNEY:
THE TRIMESTERS OF CASPAK
by
Woodrow Edgar Nichols, Jr.

ERB wrote for people like the White Queen, those people who are able to imagine the impossible, for most ERB fantasies require the reader to suspend his or her disbelief to the reach of the impossible. Everyone knows that ERB’s Africa is not a real place, but if you can believe in the impossible, there is no other place quite like it. The same goes for the savage world of Pellucidar, the inner world 500 miles below the surface of the Earth. Or Barsoom, or....well, yes, of course – Caspak!

Sure, ERB gives Caspak some historical credibility with a fake Italian explorer’s credentials, but this proves to be fake history. The island itself is reached by another impossibility, a German U-boat manufactured in Santa Monica, California. In fact, the Caspakian Trilogy is topped by one impossibility after another. After all, ERB considered himself a teller of tall tales in the American tradition, and the Caspakian Trilogy – with all of its terrors and horrors, weird creatures and one of the most bizarre evolutionary schemes you have ever laid eyes on – is one of the tallest tales ever told.

The story opens with one of the greatest cliches in Western literature: the message in a bottle. This time the message is rather long, in a fact a journal that makes up the first book in the Trilogy, The Land that Time Forgot. That book ends with our first person narrator in near despair, but his message in a bottle is found by an Unknown Narrator, likely another incarnation of ERB’s fake autobiographies. The second book of the Trilogy, The People that Time Forgot, relates the first person narration of the leader of the rescue party sent out to save the author of the journal. The last book, a horror story, is told in the third person from the point of view of the first mate of the tug boat crew from the first book.

ERB wrote each of these stories as if they were the story line behind a Hollywood screenplay. It is easy to imagine each book as a motion picture in your head and I always marvel at why Hollywood always feels the need to change ERB’s stories in order to adapt them for film.

Hell, ERB imagined them as movies in his imagination to begin with. Within two years of writing this Trilogy, ERB had moved to his Tarzana ranch, a stone’s throw from Hollywood. Each book is a ripping good adventure, full of sexual innuendo and action. If a reader can slow his or her eye to read an ERB adventure like a classic novel, and if the reader dares to imagine the impossible, the reader will come to realize why the Caspakian Trilogy is George McWhorter’s favorite ERB adventure. After all, this is one of greatest examples of why ERB is the undisputed King of Pulp Fiction.

So, fasten your seat belts and begin your Caspakian adventure now, and whatever you do, don’t let the fact that almost everything you are reading is impossible stop you from the pure enjoyment of the reading experience.

TABLE OF CONTENTS  FOR ERB'S EMBRYONIC JOURNEY: THE TRIMESTERS OF CASPAK by Woodrow Edgar Nichols, Jr. (Dedicated to George McWhorter) www.erbzine.com/mag39/3961.html CONTENTS | I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV| XV | XVI | XVII | XVIII | XIX | XX XXI | XXII | XXIII | XXIV | XXV | XXVI FIRST TRIMESTER: THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT                                                                                                                         ERBzine No.             Part One (Chapter 1).......................................................................... 3962             Part Two (Chapters 1-2)..................................................................... 3963             Part Three (Chapters 2-3).................................................................. 3964             Part Four (Chapter 4)......................................................................... 3965             Part Five (Chapters 5-6)..................................................................... 3966             Part Six (Chapters 7-8)....................................................................... 3967             Part Seven (Chapters 9-10)................................................................ 3968 THE SECOND TRIMESTER: THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT             Part Eight (Chapter 1)....................................................................... 3969             Part Nine (Chapter 2)......................................................................... 3970             Part Ten (Chapter 2 cont.)................................................................. 3971             Part Eleven (Chapter 3)..................................................................... 3972             Part Twelve (Chapter 3 concluded).................................................. 3973             Part Thirteen (Chapter 4).................................................................. 3974             Part Fourteen (Chapter 5)................................................................. 3975             Part Fifteen (Chapter 5 cont.)............................................................ 3976             Part Sixteen (Chapter 6)..................................................................... 3977             Part Seventeen (Chapter 7)................................................................. 3978 THE THIRD TRIMESTER: OUT OF TIME’S ABYSS             Part Eighteen (Chapter 1)................................................................... 3979             Part Nineteen (Chapter 1 concluded).................................................. 3980             Part Twenty (Chapter 2)...................................................................... 3981             Part Twenty-One (Chapter 2 concluded)............................................ 3982             Part Twenty-Two (Chapter 3)............................................................. 3983             Part Twenty-Three (Chapter 3 concluded).......................................... 3984             Part Twenty-Four (Chapter 4)............................................................. 3985             Part Twenty-Five (Chapter 4 concluded)............................................ 3986             Part Twenty-Six (Chapter 5)............................................................... 3987

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