Immortal heroes and heroines... #Giveaway #SciFi #Pulp #EdgarRiceBurroughs @Betts_Matt

The First Universe of its Kind....

A century before the term "crossover" became a buzzword in popular culture, Edgar Rice Burroughs created the first expansive, fully cohesive literary universe. Coexisting in this vast cosmos was a pantheon of immortal heroes and heroines - Tarzan of the Apes, Jane Clayton, John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Carson Napier, and David Innes being only the best known among them. In Burroughs' 80-plus novels, their epic adventures transported them to the strange and exotic worlds of Barsoom, Amtor, Pellucidar, Caspak, and Va-nah, as well as the lost civilizations of Earth and even realms beyond the farthest star. Now the Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe expands in an all-new series of canonical novels written by today's talented authors!

Blurb

Carson of Venus is back in the first novel of groundbreaking Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe series!

When a mysterious enemy attacks his adopted nation of Korva, Earthman Carson Napier discovers his own arrival on Venus years ago may have unknowingly triggered the strike. The invaders' trail of death and destruction leads Carson and his beloved princess Duare headlong into battle against a seemingly invincible, primordial race. But that is not Carson's only challenge, for an uncanny phenomenon has entangled him with two strange individuals from beyond spacetime. Will Carson be able to solve the mysteries of his past and the enigmatic visitors before the entire planet descends into chaos?

Also includes the bonus novelette "Pellucidar: Dark of the Sun" by Christopher Paul Carey, introducing Victory Harben, the ERB Universe's newest heroine:

The very principle of physics behind the Gridley Wave has mysteriously failed, cutting off all communication between the hollow world of Pellucidar and the outer crust, and now inventor Jason Gridley must seek help from his brilliant young protégé, Victory Harben. Together they recover timeworn records from deep in the ruins of a dead Mahar city, hoping to use knowledge of Pellucidar's former reptilian overlords to jumpstart the Gridley Wave. But when their experiment goes terribly wrong, Jason and Victory suddenly find themselves drawn into the inscrutable machinations of an ancient evil.

Excerpt

Fire and ash blackened his armored bands, but he advanced without the appearance of concern. The black smoke rippled off him as he stepped from the fiery mess. Each step of his large feet seemed to hasten the floor cracks that still moved in our direction.

“Stop!” I shouted. “This is a grand fight we have going on here, but if you advance any farther, you’ll shatter this floor and hurl us both to our deaths.” He continued forward as if he hadn’t heard me, one heavy step after another. I looked to the broad strip of white rock that encircled the room, hoping it would be sturdier than the glasslike material that composed the floor.

At that moment, the whole building seemed to shake. There came a tremendous cracking sound, and the section of the flooring upon which I stood lurched down several feet with a sickening screech. I flung myself to one side and grabbed a thick section of the clear floor, holding on with one hand as I watched the great chunk of glass upon which I had just been standing twist and turn on the way to the ground far below.

Fingers bleeding, I clutched the sharp edges in order to keep myself from following the broken section down. The sounds of combat around me fell away until I heard nothing but my own breathing, ragged and desperate, fearing the slightest breeze would cause my fragile handhold to break free.

About the Author

Matt Betts worked for years in radio as an on-air personality, anchor and reporter. His fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His work includes the steampunk novel, Odd Men Out, urban fantasy crime novel Indelible Ink, and his recent cryptid/horror novel White Anvil: Sasquatch Onslaught. His current release Carson of Venus: The Edge of all Worlds continues a series begun by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Buy Links

ERB Inc: https://bit.ly/3cmkrAU

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2RFrcGa 

Social Links

 

Twitter:@Betts_Matt

https://www.facebook.com/mattbettswrites

https://www.instagram.com/mattbetts_author/

Website www.mattbetts.com

Enter to win a physical copy of the paperback of Carson of Venus: The Edge of All Worlds. Available for the continental US.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review Tuesday: Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs -- #ReviewTuesday #stereotypes #tragichero

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A few months ago I had the opportunity to see the 1934 blockbuster Tarzan and His Mate at a local film club. This classic movie, which stars Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, is particularly famous for its implied sexuality and its nudity, so I figured that as an erotic author it was my duty to check it out. ;^)

In fact, I felt the film left a lot to be desired. Maureen O’Sullivan is lovely as Jane, but Weissmuller makes a rather skinny and anemic-looking ape man, in my opinion. The characters are stereotyped and the treatment of black-skinned people is appalling.

However, the experience made me curious about the original story, so I downloaded the book from the Gutenberg Project. This is a non-profit organization devoted to digitizing and distributing books that are out of copyright. Their website offers thousands of ebooks in a variety of formats, including (I discovered) Epub. 

 

I found that Burroughs’ Tarzan has little in common with the popular movie versions. He is a natural gentleman, with a powerful sense of morality, despite having grown to maturity in the jungle. His parents, members of the English nobility, are abandoned on an uninhabited African beach by mutineers and eventually killed by the wild apes, one of whom takes their infant to her breast after her own child is slaughtered by her jealous mate. She raises the boy to manhood. Although he cannot compete physically with the male apes, Tarzan triumphs to become the leader of the tribe due to his superior intelligence. However, he eventually finds himself dissatisfied with the society of the apes. When he enters the world of men, he’s dismayed to realize he does not belong there either.

In Burroughs’ novel, Tarzan laboriously teaches himself to read and write English by studying books, including children’s primers, he finds in the hut his parents built. When Jane Porter and her entourage arrive (similarly abandoned by greedy and murderous seamen), he communicates with them by writing notes, but cannot understand their spoken language at all. When he does learn to speak, there’s none of the “Me Tarzan, you Jane” nonsense we’ve been fed over the years by the popular adaptations.In fact, his first spoken language is French!

I was very much caught up by Burroughs’ adventure, despite its occasionally racist tone and its confused notions about Africa. (As far as I know, lions do not inhabit the jungle, only the plains.) I read the whole book in a couple of hours, and truly enjoyed it. The author does a remarkable job capturing Tarzan’s concurrent civility and savagery. I couldn’t help fall in love with him, right along with Jane.

Burroughs portrays Tarzan as something of a tragic hero, a man of great promise who will always be an outsider. Much to my surprise, this first book ended not with him claiming Jane as his mate, but on the contrary, sacrificing his own desires because he believed she would be happier with someone else.

This was definitely not what I expected. I immediately downloaded the next volume in the series, The Return of Tarzan – hoping for a happier and more romantic ending!