Utterly Fantastic

For a lot of people my age and younger, fantasy literature began with Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. For the significant number of us who got into fantasy through role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, LotR was the most influential book we read. Sure, there were recommended reading lists in the back of the rulebooks (the legendary Appendix N, or the list in the back of the Moldvay Basic book), but Lord of the Rings and its many imitators, such as the Shannara series, were the biggest influences on our gaming and, for some, our writing. Yes, there were those who enjoyed Lovecraft and Howard as well, but unless you were actually using Cthulhu in your games, those influences were comparatively minor.

It's a tragedy, to be honest. There was so much other fantastic stuff out there that we just weren't paying attention to. I've spoken of Edgar Rice Burroughs before, of course; he's the dominant force in pop culture, even if the vast majority of us don't know it. The John Carter movie that Disney put out a few years ago was a pale imitation of the original, but I find it amazing that a lot of people actually thought it was a pale imitation of more recent science-fiction and fantasy movies. Are you kidding me?

John Carter, Burroughs' first great creation (predating Tarzan by a few months in publication) stands at the beginning of pop culture as we know it. Yes, there were heroes like Hercules and Sigurd and King Arthur before him; those are of a different breed. Their influence, while important, pales today compared to John Carter and Burroughs. Without Edgar Rice Burroughs, we would be bereft of Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, and Superman, among others.

That's a bold statement, isn't it? But it's true, nonetheless. George Lucas has stated that when developing Star Wars, he couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon, so he turned back to that character's inspiration: John Carter of Mars. Jerry Seigel, the creator of Superman, stated that he "had Tarzan and John Carter in mind" when he created the Man of Steel. And the original boxed set of D&D booklets had far more references to Barsoom than Middle-Earth; they had to be removed because of issues with the Burroughs estate, and this was well before the publicized problems with the Tolkien estate.

But Burroughs isn't the only one. Inspired by Jeffro Johnson's epic read-through of the books of Appendix N, I've been slowly working my way through the same authors, starting with Dunsany, Burroughs, and Abraham Merritt (the Lord of Fantasy before he was memory-holed in the 1980s). Life has slowed down my reading (and I'm working my way through the Arabian Nights right now), but the stuff I've read so far has been incredible. I'm working on Conquest of the Moon Pool, the original serialized version, and it's so different from everything I grew up reading. But it's recognizably fantasy, too. The kind that we used to read regularly, before we threw out our pop-cultural heritage and replaced it with Game of Thrones. That was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an improvement.

Burroughs didn't just influence D&D, though; Traveller also has some ties to John Carter's stories. In the back of the first Traveller supplement, 1,001 characters, the publisher added nine nameless characters drawn from classic science fiction. The first one? Unquestionably John Carter. And you would not want to get your character on his bad side; he will end you.

Reading these old books may turn some people off, but as I mentioned in my 'About Me,' what's new isn't necessarily an improvement. And when it comes to reading these giants of science-fantasy, they have yet to be improved on.

And while I don't pretend that my own efforts at this sort of writing come up to the lofty standards set by these masters, I'm doing my best to follow in their footsteps, one book at a time. I've even written a book set in the time of these early champions of the genre; it's The Awakening, the first book of the Gilded Age series.