Tag Archives: Pellucidar

Tuesday Night Party Club #20

Posted on by

Gallery: Morgo the Mighty

Morgo the Mighty was a pulp serial by Sean O’Larkin. You can find my essay about the novel (and download it to read) at that link. The story is fun but not a classic. It reads like the author had read enough fantasy pulp adventures to know the formula but wasn’t in love with the genre enough to go crazy. I look at the story as a not bad first draft that needs a more imaginative rewrite. Doing that rewrite is one of my many “someday” projects.

In the meantime I’ve done a few illustrations inspired by the book. Most of these are visuals for The Surrilana Depths, my imagined  “second draft”. Someday. Someday.

Story Seed #43
The New Hollow Earth

Morgo the Mighty was set in a gigantic cave system under the Himalayas. It’s part of the Hollow Earth genre of pulp fantasy. The most famous examples are probably Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne and At the Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most examples of subterranean adventure stories follow closer to Verne’s example than Burroughs’ – they take place in caverns and tunnels. That makes sense. The earth is riddled with caverns and humans (and other critters) are good at making tunnels. Caverns and tunnels are more plausible than an actual Hollow Earth. Hell, even when Burroughs wrote At the Earth’s Core the idea of a vast, inhabitable inner Earth was considered a fantasy. That didn’t stop Burroughs from writing seven novels set in Pellucidar.

The idea of Hollow Earth filled with prehistoric survivors, lost civilizations and other weird menaces is free for anyone to use. The first two Pellucidar novels are in public domain so one could set a story there. So far as I know, existing Hollow Earth fiction and games set their stories no later than WW2. It’s easier to believe in an impossible place when the stories are period pieces. Technology was less advanced. The world seemed to have so much undiscovered space.

Imagine someone discovering the Hollow Earth in 2020. I’m less interested in how such a place could exist (Alternate dimensions? Atlantean construct? Elder Thing project? Extraterrestrial pocket universe? Intelligent dinosaur asteroid survival strategy?) than in how modern humanity would react to finding an entire world beneath their feet. Suddenly there’s a world of untapped resources available that doesn’t require space travel to reach.

Is the Hollow Earth inhabited by intelligent creatures? If not, we’re likely to have Surface nations competing for territory and resources. If there are intelligent but low tech Hollow societies they’re going to be faced with the same challenges that indigenous Surface people have dealt with for hundreds of years.

What if the Hollow Earth already has a materialist civilization using up its resources? In that case the Hollows might be looking at our surface world as a source of new materials. And workers. Slaves. Consumers.

Or perhaps the Hollows have figured out a workable civilization and contact with the Surfaces threatens to destabilize it. Or … what if discovering that our planet was inhabited by a workable, sustainable civilization caused us to (further) destabilize ours?

Does the Hollow Earth have dinosaurs? Has time stopped there? Has life followed a different evolutionary path? The Hollow Earth is empty. How would you fill it?

Recommendation

Field Notes is a newsletter by Christopher Brown. He writes about encounters with animals and nature in urban spaces. I’m fascinated by the way the rest of the inhabitants of the environment adapt to the sprawl of the human species. I consider human civilization as natural as termite mounds or ant colonies. Human civilization is toxic to much of the rest of environment because we’re better at creating it than we are at creating limitations for it. Brown describes his explorations and observations of the “wild” surviving in “civilization”.

Local News

I’ve been off work since Friday. I’m on one of my annual vacations. I’m primarily focusing on getting art done. I hadn’t made plans to travel anywhere so the shutdown hasn’t created any disappointment. I had thought about taking a road trip to see friends but I hadn’t done more than thought about it.

I had been enthusiastic about rearranging my studio so my wife could have a closer workspace but that was weeks ago. I managed some spring cleaning then, did some organizing and got rid of some things but the longer the shutdown lasts the less energy I’ve got for big changes. That feels weird because we’re less affected by the shutdown than most.

I enjoy my own company. The creative work I do is mostly a solo thing. I need a quiet space when I write. My artwork is all my own work, no inkers or colorists. But I learned a long time ago that I need to physically interact with people in order to maintain sanity and a good mood. I need to see friends. I need to be in the same physical space and to touch them. Handshakes. Hugs. High fives. Basic monkey interactions. Phone calls, emails and Facebook are, for me, just gap fillers between the real moments. The longer real moments stay unavailable the less I’m interested in phone calls, emails and Facebook, the more an isolation loop forms.

I understand part of why folks are protesting the shutdown. It’s not really haircuts or going to bars. It’s isolation. Being alone for too long can be terrifying. Have you listened to your thoughts. Culture has clogged your thinking with so much horrible crap. The best way to get it out is to interact with another person, in person. I’m lucky. I’m friends with the monsters in my head. I don’t think my thoughts are orders or that unmet desires are signs of personal failure. But, damn, I get sick of listening to my thoughts.

Hmmm. I hadn’t planned to sign off on a downer note. I do know that this is just how I’m feeling as I’m writing this. The only constant in the world is change. I’m likely to feel different in a couple of hours. So, however, you’re managing yourself in these times, I do wish you well. We live in interesting times. The best way to navigate them is by being interested and interesting.

Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole – Black and White

Posted on by

FrankensteinEarthCoreBW

One of my favorite Frankenstein sequels is the short story “Black as the Pit, From Pole to Pole” by Howard Waldrop and Steve Utley. It picks up where the novel left off with Frankenstein’s Monster wandering across the polar ice cap. He has discovered that Frankenstein made him too well – the ice and cold won’t kill him. He doesn’t want to try drowning himself – it might not work. So he keeps walking – right into the northern opening to the hollow earth.

He makes his way through the Earth encountering all manner of monsters, beasts and weirder things, conquers kingdoms, finds love, and sows fear and destruction in his path. Eventually he comes out at the South Pole. I liked the story so much that I bought the book Custer’s Last Jump just so that I wouldn’t have to check it out of the library the next time I wanted to read it. One of these days I’ll have to get around to reading the other stories that keep it company.

Reconciling Lost Worlds

Posted on by

When I was a kid, dinosaurs were believed to be, basically, giant, mostly slow moving lizards who lived in hot swampy jungles. The dinosaurs that appeared in fiction and films reflected that understanding. Some versions moved faster than others. Sometimes humans encountered these creatures by going back in time but, in the versions I’m currently considering, people discovered them in lost worlds – places on Earth where the beasts had been isolated and somehow avoided the changes that time and evolution forced on the rest of the planet.

The Valley of Gwangi. Maple White Land. The Center of the Earth. The Savage Land. Pellucidar. Pal-ul-don. Caprona. The Land Unknown. Skull Island. Loch Ness. When I was kid, there was a lot of debate about why the dinosaurs had gone extinct. Maybe mammals ate too many of their eggs. Maybe they were too dumb. Maybe the world got too cold. For whatever reason, they ceased to exist. Except. Somehow there were places in the world where dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles still fought and survived.

Decades later, in 2015, the understanding of dinosaurs has evolved and improved. We know that they were warm blooded and lived in many types of environments. Many of them had feathers. Most of the creatures that we think of as dinosaurs (or pterosaurs or marine reptiles) were no more “reptiles” than mammals are reptiles. Snakes, lizards, turtles, crocodiles and alligators – those are reptiles. Dinosaurs (and pterosaurs and, probably, marine reptiles) were something else.

About 60 million years ago an asteroid collided with the Earth in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. That’s the current scientific consensus.The aftermath of that collision wiped out most of the “higher” species of life including dinosaurs, pterosaurs and marine “reptiles”. The creatures that went extinct, had they somehow survived in little Lost Worlds, would have been strange and foreign beasts to Verne and O’Brien, Burroughs and Harryhausen, Doyle and all the other authors and film makers who conjured up still extant versions of prehistoric lands.

I still love the lost worlds that I read about in books and saw in movies. I’m delighted by all the new information that has been discovered about dinosaurs since I was a kid. It’s a little weird to think of a tyrannosaur as (sort of) a giant flightless bird (or a pigeon as small type of dinosaur) but I can roll with that. I understand that the likelihood of entire ecosystems surviving unchanged for tens of millions of years is … ridiculous. Yes, there are some species that have adapted to the changing world with changing much themselves. But those are individual species. There are no lone islands, inaccessible plateaus or valleys that sport ecosystems where time has stood still. Isolation tends to make ecosystems weirder and more unique rather than keep them in their pre-isolated state.

But I’m a nerd and I want my Lost Worlds. And fiction is malleable in ways the real world is not. How can one explain the existence of these Lost Worlds when actual dinosaurs were not slow moving reptiles and, even if they were, they couldn’t have survived unchanged for 60 million years?

That’s easy. Dinosaurs, my beloved new feathery beasts, are long gone. That asteroid did them in. The creatures in the Lost Worlds really are (sometimes, except when in pursuit of a novel human morsel) slow moving reptiles … who evolved in isolation along parallel paths as the original dinosaurs so that, while they resemble the originals, they are their own things.

The Valley of Gwangi. Maple White Land. The Center of the Earth. The Savage Land. Pellucidar. Pal-ul-don. Caprona. The Land Unknown. Skull Island. Loch Ness. There’s no need to repopulate them with feathered foreigners. They were never lands that time forgot. Time ran at a different speed there and created places that we mistook for something ancient.