Most people are aware that the Earth is not flat. Even though Plato and other scholars 300 years before the Common Era proved it was round many people believed the flat-world myth well past the 16th Century.
Another Geological debate involves the inside of our spherical planet. Common consensus believes our inner world to be an increasingly hot ball of magma culminating in a solid core of iron. Not too long ago the opposition believed Terra to be hollow. Taking that common belief Edgar Rice Burroughs sat down at his desk and penned At The Earth's Core, filling the fictional world of Pellucidar with living prehistoric relics, stone age humans, humanoid simians and a reptile race who are master over all.
In a style repeated in the first Tarzan novel ERB narrates the tale as it was told to him by another. This technique absolves Burroughs of any responsibility for proof. It's told to him by David Innes, who has returned to the surface somewhere in the middle of Arabia after spending ten years underground.
For a story to span a decade one might expect the author to split it into a trilogy which would later be sold in combined form such as Tolkien or John dos Pasos' famous epics. This is unnecessary for any story concerning Pellucidar since time does not exist there. A brief description of it's geological state is required to explain.
500 miles into the Earth's crust one breaks through the surface of this inner land. There is no horizon since the distance curves upward. If you were to look straight up you'd only see a sky, but thousands of miles above you would be mountains and settlements or perhaps even an ocean "hanging upside-down"
The Earth's molten core hangs suspended in the middle of the planet shedding it's perpetual light all around. Since "the sun" never moves and it never becomes night there is no time. Inhabitants sleep when they get tired. David Innes left on an adventure early in the novel and was gone for months. He returned to find his companion Abner Perry working on his studies, being awake during Innes' entire absence and believing that only a few hours had passed.
The proportion of land to sea is approximately reversed to that of the outer surface creating a unique situation where a larger world is contained inside a smaller one. The humans which inhabit this land comprise many tribes and races. The ones we're introduced to in the first novel resemble Caucasians and American Indians. Unfortunately Edgar, whose racial sensitivity has been touched on before, has the creatures described in this excerpt as his only African-Pellucidaric representatives:
They were to all appearances strikingly similar in aspect to the Negro of Africa. Their skins were very black, and their features much like those of the more pronounced Negroid type except that the head receded more rapidly above the eyes, leaving little or no forehead. Their arms were rather longer and their legs shorter in proportion to the torso than in man, and later I noticed that their great toes protruded at right angles from their feet--because of their arboreal habits, I presume. Behind them trailed long, slender tails which they used in climbing quite as much as they did either their hands or feet.
Oh, God bless it.
In a nutshell, Innes and Perry accidentally reach Pellucidar during a mining expedition where they're captured by Gorilla-like men called Sagoths and taken to be slaves of the reptilian Mahars. Blah Blah Blah Action Action Action and David prepares to return to the surface with his new wife Dian to bring back materials to aid the humans in their fight for freedom. At the last minute Hooja the Sly One double-crosses him and we end with Innes preparing to return beneath the surface to rescue his wife. Burroughs does not know if David successfully returned or if he was killed by Arabs. (It's never explained why their lives are in danger by the Arabs...perhaps David Innes drank from someones well. Perhaps he looks Turkish. It's never explained.) A search the following year for the campground is fruitless due to the shifting sands.
Presumably Innes made it back because Edgar wrote six more Pellucidar novels. Like the Tarzan books these are pulp that have been pre-chewed for easy digestion but so what? These were the kind of stories I lived on when I was a kid and I still like them. The illogistics of science-fictional worlds and the preponderance of scientific proof rendering these stories impossible means nothing.
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