I don’t know if other writers have experienced this or not—that moment you became a hopeless slave. For me it was when I was twelve years old. I was visiting the local library in Dawson Creek. At that time the library had the most wondrous of things – free books. For a kid with zero money the stray Edgar Rice Burroughs novels that showed up there were instantly added to the collection. Forget any possibility of their being returned after being read. I was a collector, by fair means or foul. But that wasn’t the moment, only the opportunity.
One day I realized that – hey, Edgar Rice Burroughs is the greatest writer who ever lived, so why shouldn’t his books be on the shelves as well. I enlisted a librarian and went in search. What I found was a copy of The Mastermind of Mars, the paperback with the odd Gino D’Achilles cover. It showed a Red Martian man being attacked by one of the six-limbed apes of that planet. Up to now I had been reading the black Ballantine Tarzans and a couple of Pellucidar novels. I was just at that point where I was discovering Burroughs had written so much more than just Tarzan. And that was when it hit me. Looking at that cover of The Mastermind of Mars that I became a hopeless slave to story.
It sounds like a wonderful moment but it was terrifying. I looked at the book – which I didn’t even borrow – and thought to myself, how could I ever reach so high? How could I ever read anything even a smidge as good as this masterpiece of weirdness? I could have wept but instead I ran. I put the book away from me and I ran. I ran back to the jungle. I ran to Pellucidar, even to Caspak. I ran through books and I ran through comics. But the specter of The Mastermind of Mars waited. That wonderful cover hovered before me, saying it was all so glorious and monstrous and huge and I’d never climb that mountain.
But that’s twelve. For the next five or six years I was almost exclusively an Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard reader. Someone had bought a Solomon Kane collection and hadn’t liked it and gave it to me (Jeff Jones cover). When I was in High School my mother gave me a copy of Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth to read while sick with the flu (Paul Alexander cover, you may notice I was pretty into cover art). I had my doubts. It wasn’t Sword and Planet or Sword & Sorcery or Sword and anything. But it was a wedge. I loved that book and started to reach beyond my insular world of Tarzan and Conan. (I had thought I had forgotten Mastermind but was in fact moving– well, you’ll see.) By the time I was twenty I read all kinds of Science Fiction and Fantasy. The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Ursula K. Leguin, Fritz Leiber, even a Barsoom novel or two. (Though not many since the Ballantine paperbacks were an exercise in eye strain.) I was open to most anything if it was exciting and unusual.
And old Edgar Rice Burroughs? I laughed at his naivety, his old Pulpy silliness. Was I not reading The Foundation Series, and Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny? It was the first time I walked away from ERB. Only to return again ten years later. At thirty, I re-read him for the first time, with what was the first nostalgia. And again at forty. And now again at fifty. And each time I re-read him I appreciate him better, his sense of humor and satirical cleverness – yes, cleverness! His magic, which is not a logical nuts-and-bolts kind of power, but the wild, blood-pumping magic of fourteen. The same thrill I felt watching Star Wars for the first time. The same thrill I get today when I am lucky enough to see a John Carter or Tarzan film. While others say it was okay, I have secret tears in my eyes as I remember that kid, that Edgar Rice Burroughs reading kid, who saw that cover and thought he could never climb this high.
And now, I’ve read The Mastermind of Mars. Just this week. I read it in a scan of the original 1927 Amazing Stories Annual with all the goofy Frank R. Paul illustrations. It was a fun read. Vad Varos, a John Carter clone, comes to Mars, learns how to transplant brains from Barsoom’s version of Frankenstein, Ras Thavas, gathers a crew and goes on an adventure to retrieve his girl friend’s body. One of his pals (Burroughs characters always have pals, sidekicks, call them what you like, for in spirit, Ed Burroughs was a gregarious fellow, not like that old moody pants, Bob Howard.) is the four-armed ape Hovan Du, who has half a man’s brain in his head (literally!) Hovan Du steals the show and you can tell ERB has fun writing about him.
Was it the great masterpiece I thought it was back in 1975? No. Even the cover painting by Gino D’Achilles makes me grin for its tackiness now. Standing at the heights and looking down the destination looks small, indeed. Just as visiting that library thirty years later and finding it small, underfunded and neglected, like all Canadian libraries today. They didn’t even have free books anymore.
But then again, reading this book wasn’t the real destination at all. It was a mere three years after seeing that cover when I bought my first typewriter. I got it for five dollars from a neighbor. It was a small portable and the return bar had been broken and fixed after a fashion. It hung down lower than it was supposed to so it scratched away the paint on the cover over time. It was a junky little device but it was mine. And I began to put words down with the idea that one day I would sell them. And people would read them, and they would see just a tiny bit of that amazing feeling that welled up in me looking at that D’Achilles cover. That the world could be exciting and strange and wonderful. And that feeling hasn’t tarnished, not one bit today. I still have the same desire. I still can’t quench my need to describe that elusive, shining thing which I can only call ….story. I am still your humble slave….
