Pellucidar

Edgar Rice Burroughs, who lived from 1875 to 1950, was an American author of adventure and science fiction, best known as the creator of Tarzan. He also wrote a series of stories set on Mars and another set inside the Earth, and the latter is the series to which this book belongs. At the Earth’s Core, the first book, appeared in 1914, Pellucidar followed in 1915, and Burroughs went on to write several more books about the inner world.

Pellucidar, published in 1915, is a fictional Hollow Earth setting invented by Burroughs for a run of action stories. The tales begin with the adventures of the mining heir David Innes and his inventor friend Abner Perry, who use a tunnelling machine called an iron mole to dig into the planet and find themselves in an inner world. The book carries the setting’s name as its title, and its chapters, such as Lost on Pellucidar and Traveling with Terror, give a sense of the mixture of danger and wonder.

The book is a product of the pulp magazine era, written to entertain, with fast action, rich invention and a straightforward moral frame. Like other works of the period, it contains attitudes and portrayals that a modern reader may find dated or objectionable, and these are part of its historical character.

The recording has a prologue and fifteen chapters, read by a single LibriVox volunteer, and lasts nearly six hours. Today it is worth hearing as a classic of early science fiction and as a reminder of how imaginative the genre was in its youth.