PULP MAGAZINE PREFACE
TO THE GIRL OF PELLUCIDAR SERIES
Some of you oldsters who can still remember the history
you learned many years ago will recall that Pellucidar was discovered in
January 1913, by David Innes and Abner Perry, a discovery which was quite
as accidental as was Columbus' discovery of America some four hundred twenty
years previously, but none the less epochal.
Columbus started out for India and discovered a new
world. David Innes and Abner Perry started out to prospect for coal
in an invention of Perry's which they called an Iron Mole, and they discovered
a new world -- at the center of the Earth.
Columbus never really got to America; but Innes and
Perry got to Pellucidar, and they are still there. They found it
inhabited by men still in the Stone Age of evolution and by strange forms
of life which had developed along very different lines from similar species
in the outside world.
They have made it their life work to bring civilization
to the poor, benighted humans of Pellucidar; at leas Perry has. Perry
was an old man when he came to Pellucidar, an old scientist -- a sweet
and lovable character. He has done the best he could to bring the
blessings of civilization to the Pellucidarians. He found them killing
one another with stone hatchets, stone tipped spears, and a few bows and
arrows. He gave them gunpowder. He built a navy and armed it
with cannon.
For you who may have forgotten, may I remind
you that there is no such thing as Time in Pellucidar. A stationary
sun hangs perpetually at zenith. It is always noon, and one of the
psychological effects of this is most weird. As I write this, David
Innes and Abner Perry have been in Pellucidar for twenty-seven years; yet
they are no older than when they left the outer crust! At least, they look
and feel no older. Where there is no way of measuring time, there
can be no passage of time. When Pellucidarians are tired, they crawl
into a dark cave and sleep; when they are hungry, they eat. An hour, a
day, a month, or a year may have passed on the outer crust where all men
are the slaves of Time; but in Pellucidar it is still noon just as it was
when they started doing whatever they may have been doing; therefore, they
are no older, not even by a second. This, I think you will agree,
is quite sound reasoning. Suppose you started to build a house at
noon on a certain day and finished it at noon on t he same day -- you wouldn't
be any older, would you? And it is always the same day in Pellucidar.
It always has been.
Another unique characteristic of Pellucidar is that
it is horizonless. Wherever you may be standing on the surface of
Pellucidar there is no horizon. You are standing on the inside surface
of a sphere. The ground rises gently all around you, the view fading
away gradually in the distance, limited only by the power of your vision.
Always the sun is directly above you and your shadow directly beneath you.
When Dave Innes left Sari to go in search of von Horst,
Perry was toying with the idea of an aeroplane. Now, Abner Perry
is a scientist. He knows a great deal about a great many things;
he knows a little about a great many other things, and he knows nothing
about a considerable number of things. On the outer crust he was, by choice,
a metallurgical engineer. He was never an aeronautical engineer;
but, being Perry, he would build an aeroplane. As you may recall,
one of his first inventions after he reached Pellucidar was gun powder.
What he achieved looked like gun powder, smelled like gun powder, and tasted
like gun powder. All that was wrong with it was that it wouldn't
burn. Dave Innes suggested that they might use it as a fire extinguisher.
That hurt Perry. Of course, he succeeded in manufacturing gun powder later
by the well known system of trial and error.
~ ERB
PULP MAGAZINE PREFACE
TO THE TIGER GIRL EPISODE
In this ever-changing world it is sometimes difficult
to keep abreast of historical events, but who is there who does not know
that strange stone age world at the center of the earth, which was discovered
by David Innes and Abner Perry many years ago? Into this stone age
world they brought some of the blessings of civilization, such as gunpowder,
rifles, and cannon. They built a navy and established a federation
of states, which they called the Empire of Pellucidar. Perry even
built an aeroplane, which would not fly, and a balloon, which did; and
which broke loose and carried Dian the Beautiful, David Innes' mate, into
a strange land beyond the nameless strait which connects the Sojar Az with
the Korsar Az; and forms the southwestern boundary of the land mass where
lies the land called Sari, which is the home of David Innes and Dian the
Beautiful and Abner Perry.
Down upon this strange land, near the farther shore
of the nameless strait, drifted the balloon in which was Dian the Beautiful.
It was a strange, a terrifying, land to her, this terra incognita of her
people; but she was well received, for the yellow race which inhabited
that portion of the country felt that she must be a goddess coming down
out of the heavens; and they treated her as such until Hor, the high priest,
fearing her increasing power, turned the people against her, and Gamba,
the king; so that they barely escaped from the city with their lives.
With bronze swords and bronze daggers and fire, they
constructed a canoe and set forth upon the waters of the nameless strait
in an attempt to cross it and reach the continent where lies Sari, while
David Innes drifted southward from Sari in another balloon which he had
had Perry build, in the hope that thus he might find Dian.
At the same time, Hodon the Fleet One, with a small
ship and a few warriors, was searching the vast Lural Az for O-aa, whom
he knew to be drifted upon the ship Sari.
The wind and a powerful ocean current had carried the
Sari and little O-aa into the nameless strait and thrust her ashore near
the city of Tanga-Tanga, who had fought with the men of Lolo-lolo for possession
of Dian the Beautiful when her balloon had grounded between the two cities.
They had lost Dian the Beautiful; now they had another Noada, or goddess,
in the person of O-aa, who was making herself unpopular with the high priest
and the king b y tossing the money offerings which the people brought to
her temple back to them; because, being a girl of the stone age, she knew
nothing about money; and it delighted her to see the people scramble for
it.
This is all history, with which, of course, you should
be familiar.
THE
PULP MAGAZINE
LAST PARAGRAPH OF TIGER GIRL
(Originally meant to be the
closing story of the sequence)
As the Lo-har beat back toward the nameless strait on
its return voyage to Amoz it sighted such a ship as no one there had ever
seen; and Dian feared that it was a Korsar. The little Lo-har tried
to escape, but the ship overhauled her as though she were anchored; and
when it fired a shot across her bow, she came about; and then Hodon and
O-aa and David Innes and Dian the Beautiful were reunited, for this strange
ship was the clipper John Tyler.
The
Blurb Originally Intended
for the Hard Cover Dust Jacket
Flap
While this could scarcely be called "A collection of flowers
of literature," it might still be called a sort of anthology -- an anthology
of adventure. It is a tale not alone of the adventures of the girl, O-aa;
but of those which befell Hodon the Fleet One and Dian the Beautiful and
Abner Perry and David Innes and the little old man from Cape Cod, whose
name was not Dolly Dorcas, and many others.
It will take you to strange lands across the nameless
strait in the Stone Age world at the Earth's Core, and to adventures upon
the terrible seas of Pellucidar. It will take you form the terrors
with which you have been for years accustomed -- the terrors of a world
gone mad with hate -- to the cleaner, finer terrors of prehistoric hunting
beasts and savage, primeval man.
The primary cause of many of the adventures which befell
the nice and un-nice characters whose stories unfolded between these covers
was Abner Perry's insatiable urge to invent. Had he not invented
a balloon, very little of this you are about to read would have happened.
On the other hand, the ships he built, the cannon and
muskets and gunpowder he produced made it possible for many of these characters
to live to tell of their adventures.
But may you do not like adventure? Then do not
read this story. For it is replete with adventure and mystery and
despair and courage and loyalty and -- love.
We think you will love little O-aa and her astounding
mendacity. Perhaps you will be shocked by the little old man whose
name is not Dolly Dorcas and who had an inordinate appetite for human flesh,
especially Swedes, a lovely old gentleman from Cape Cod where the cranberries
come from.
