The year is 1916. The Great War is raging half a world away from the desolate, rocky shore of Greenland where a perfectly good thermos bottle washes up on the wave-swept shore. A man stoops to pick up the strange bottle. Inside is a manuscript-the fantastic story of adventurer Bowen Tyler, who has been taken captive aboard an enemy submarine, and at this moment is battling flesh-ripping dinosaurs and brutal cave men on the lost continent of Caspak. In the uncharted seas at the bottom of the world, the submarine has stumbled upon the towering, rock-bound coastline that kept Caspak hidden for eons.

Book one, The Land That Time Forgot, is the story of Bowen Tyler's adventures on the mysterious forgotten continent where the savage inhabitants of millions of years past roam beast-infested jungles. Book two, The People That Time Forgot, begins when Tom Billings goes in search of his lost friend. More giant prehistoric creatures of the land, sea and air of Caspak battle the bewildered but determined Billings. Book three, Out of Time's Abyss, neatly wraps up the Caspak trilogy by unraveling the mystery of the land where time has stopped. The characters of the two previous books reunite in a satisfying and spectacular conclusion.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of the Tarzan books as well as the founder of the town of Tarzana, California, lived from 1875 to 1950. His seventy science fiction and adventure books, including Tarzan of the Apes, A Princess of Mars, and Carson of Venus, have remained popular since their publications. Several of his books have been made into motion pictures; Tarzan has been made and remade several times, the latest of which is Disney's summer of '99 animation. The first two books of the Caspak trilogy and At the Earth's Core were made in the early 60s in black and white; all three starred Doug McClure.

This is one of the best books i have ever read. I read it and it was so spectacular that i could have cryed. This book is a must read for any person into Fantasy or Science fiction.

"Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar" is the fifth book in the Tarzan series and is generally considered one of the better of Edgar Rice Burrough's tales of the Lord of the Jungle. Tarzan once again returns to Opar, the source of the gold for lost colony of fabled Atlantis. Ever since Atlantis sank beneath the waves, the workers of Opar have continued to mine the gold. Tarzan follows a greedy Belgian and Arab into the jungle, where the evil pair manage to stumble upon the lost city, at which point our hero loses his memory after a fight. This is good news for La, the beautiful high priestess who serves the Flaming God, because she has had that big crush on the apeman since their first encounter. However, while his amnesia opens the door for her amorous advances, her high priests are vowing that Tarzan will not escape their sacrificial knives a second time. Meanwhile, Jane is in trouble back at their African homestead. As you read "Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar," you will pick up on the fact that Burroughs liked the character of La a lot more than he did that of Jane Clayton Greystoke (who he would attempt to kill off in a few books). Of course, this second visit to the land of Opar is not as exciting as the first and the amnesia bit is pretty old hat, even for Burroughs. This is definitely one of the author's pot-boilers and for the pulp fiction era it is pretty solid stuff. Things get a bit predictable, but the tension between Tarzan and La gives the book a bit of bite. You just need to make sure you go through the first four Tarzan books before you read this one, or you are going to be a bit lost.

It's very good and keeps you in the plot but try not to judge it by today's standards. The language shows what we would call today bigotry, prejudice and racism

Writers I admire (C.S. Lewis and Robert Sheckley, and I know that there are others as well) have kind words to say about Edgar Rice Burroughs, and claim to derive inspiration from him. I mention this because I have to. It means that perhaps there is something in the man's writing that I'm missing. I must be honest and allow this possibility. The more LIKELY possibility, though, is that writers make poor critics, and will allow their superior imaginations to do the work that Burroughs didn't.

For one thing that has been said about Burroughs is that, while he could scarcely write, and was woefully ignorant, and inconsistent, he at least had a vivid imagination. Like hell he did. His imagination was the most pallid thing about him. This is clearer in the Mars books than anywhere else. Everywhere there are beasts exactly like terrestrial ones but bigger, fiercer, with more limbs and sharper teeth and brighter colours ... every forgettable sort of detail-enhancement that might substitute for true invention.

Burroughs takes the standard view of an ancient, decadent, dying Mars and adds nothing, except damsels and stilted dialogue. These are the books of someone who spends valuable time working out new units of measurement to replace feet and inches, whiles away afternoons dreaming up pointless bigger-is-better variations on terrestrial chess, but makes up the details about character and social organisation as he goes along. Admittedly he has plenty of time, since the story is invariably a fight-after-fight-after-fight affair, the author doing little to disguise the fact that he's being paid by the word. (Never let anyone convince you otherwise: his prose is ghastly.)

If you sense that Burroughs must have been reaching towards something worthwhile, you're right. If you want to know what it was, exactly, read someone by Jack Vance. Any reason there might be to read Burroughs is a reason to read Vance. But not vice versa.

These books are great fun for kids and teenagers, even some adults. I suspect, however, that if you don't read Burroughs between 12 and 14, you'll miss out on 90% of the fun. None of his Mars books are to be taken seriously. In "The Mastermind of Mars," for example, before there is even any dialogue, the hero is blown up in WWI, astral-travels to Mars, immediately has a swordfight, then witnesses a brain transplant by an almost-blind, 1000-year-old Martian! Then he falls in love with an old hag with the brain of a beautiful, kind young woman. Later he recruits the help of a gigantic ape with a half-human, half-ape brain. The author isn't the greatest stylist that ever lived, but he knew how to tell a story.

one of burroughs' best

Edgar Rice started a brilliant series with energy, but in this fourth installment, he fails to capture the full mystery and awe presented in his first three installments of the Pellucidar Series. By "Tarzan at the Earth's Core", you can tell the Pellucidar Series is starting to lose steam.

An Urgent message from Pellucidar, that world of primitive men and primeval jungles that lies inside the crust of the Earth, called on Tarzan of the Apes for assistance. Tarzan, used to the dangers of darkest Africa, heeded the call to Pellucidar, where all his skill in the jungle, all his talents with beasts and primitive men, would but to the extreme test.

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a number of series. Some series consisted of as few as two or three novellas. The Tarzan series stretched to 24 volumes. Almost all of the series were interrelated in some way or another. Clark A. Brady maps out the complex interrelationships in Appendix C to his "Burroughs Cyclopaedia" (available from Amazon.com). "Tarzan at the Earth's Core" makes the clearest connection between two Burroughs series. It is the 13th Tarzan novel and the 4th Pellucidar novel.

The Tarzan stories represent some of Burroughs' best work. The Pellucidar stories do not. Burroughs stretches credulity in all his stories, but he takes it to the limit in the Pellucidar stories. In the Pellucidar seriest Burroughs employs a preposterous concept (a hollow Earth with an inner world where time stands still) and adds insult to injury with highly improbable plot twists. This makes the quality of "Tarzan at the Earth's Core" all the more surprising. It stands as the absolute best Pellucidar story and one of the best Tarzan stories. Ironically it stands near the middle of both series.

David Innes, the hero of the Pellucidar stories, is in trouble. Jason Gridley, inventor of the Gridley Wave, hears the radio distress signal from the center of the Earth, and organizes a rescue party. Many stalwart adventurers, including Tarzan of the Apes, enlist in the expedition. Where Innes got to the Earth's core in a mechanical mole, Gridley's party travels there in an airship. Read the book to find out how they fly an airship to the center of the Earth and confront the many perils of the savage world they find.