Disposable Lit Reviews

Ace, 1916/1973
144 pp.
ISBN 0-441-49292

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Despite Edgar Rice Burroughs’ century of popularity (and the income thus generated for his great-grandchildren), The Lost Continent isn’t one of his better-known books, probably because it isn’t a part of a series and was never made into a movie starring Doug McClure. It’s a fairly early book, originally published under the title “Beyond Thirty” in All-Around Magazine in 1916, and you can see in it just about every theme and trope that ran through Burroughs’ entire career.

Written at the height of the Great War in Europe, The Lost Continent begins from that moment in history and extrapolates a war that continues for decades until America finally shuts itself off from the European conflict in the ultimate expression of isolationism. For two hundred years, the government of Pan-America has strictly enforced its walls of silence at 30 degrees west and 175 degrees west. Life in the united American continents is one of technological innovation and comfort; both Europe and Asia are mysteries long forgotten — remembered academically, but out of sight and centuries out of mind.

Our protagonist, naturally, is the person who breaks the taboo. Jefferson Turck is a hero in the standard Burroughsian mold, the heir of a lineage of military officers, though nowadays the Navy is a mere rote patrol of the edges of the Pan-American edict. (He’s also given to florid declamations, another sign of the Burroughsian hero.) In fact, he longs for the kind of glorious adventure that was open to his ancestors:

What boy has not sighed for the good old days of wars, revolutions, and riots; how I used to pore over the chronicles of those old days, those dear old days, when workmen went armed to their labors; when they fell upon one another with gun and bomb and dagger, and the streets ran red with blood! Ah, but those were the times when life was worth the living; when a man who went out by night knew not at which dark corner a “footpad” might leap upon and slay him; when wild beasts roamed the forests and the jungles, and there were savage men, and countries yet unexplored. (p.10)

Turck is such an aficionado of the heroic past that he knows the contours of Europe better than most of his countrymen and fellow servicemen, a fact which serves him well when some maintenance mishaps combine to strand the aero-submarine under his command in the mid-Atlantic, perilously close to the forbidden longitude. A moment of mutiny later, and Turck is stranded in a small launch with two other crewmen, far too far to attempt a return trip to Pan-America. The only way to go is east, toward what was once Great Britain.

If you guess, based on your previous contact with Burroughs, that Turck is going to discover a Great Britain that has degenerated into savagery, give yourself a point. If you further guess that there will still be apparent an inherent nobility in the white race, give yourself another point. If you then surmise that Turck will fall in love with a barbaric but regal princess of a neo-Stone Age tribe — the “Queen of Grabritin,” in fact, and the kind of woman who’s well-served by a Frazetta cover illustration — shucks, you just won the daily double.

There’s the framework here for an epic pulp novel, though many of the best opportunities go unexploited (likely because of length restrictions in All-Around Magazine). Turck and his cohorts keep searching for a semi-civilized European country. Instead, they find a Europe which is now becoming the colonial battleground between great empires formed in Africa and the Far East battling over the almost empty lands left behind after the mutual destruction of the protracted Great War. The captured barbaric whites are slaves to the conquerors, and in a move that more than likely inspired Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold,, Turck ends up the slave to a black master. (Given the ideas of inherent racial nobility which inform most of Burroughs’ work, the treatment of that relationship here is surprisingly progressive and rancor-free.)

If one wanted, one could find plenty of things to nitpick. The cities of Europe crumble and disappear almost entirely in a timespan that stretches suspension of disbelief, though the English language in the remaining post-literate is intelligible to our American heroes (a proposition that some would argue with even today). And in a move that is more a symbolic witticism, depopulated Great Britain is overrun with lions (!), which presumably descended from escaped zoo animals (!!). But criticizing the plausibility of an Edgar Rice Burroughs is like scolding your kindergartner for his performance on a calculus exam; at least there are no talking apes or instantly-evolving cavemen.) If you don’t like Burroughs’ other work, you won’t like The Lost Continent. If you like what Burroughs normally puts into a book, you’ll like this one too, without the commitment to a long series or franchise.