The Land That Time Forgot (Commemorative Edition)

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was a prodigiously productive writer of pulp fictions--literary entertainments, that is, published in inexpensive, easily obtained periodicals. His style was simple and instantly accessible, his stories riveting if often implausible tales of adventure, and of good overcoming evil. Burroughs wasn't much of an artist. But, as Mike Resnick writes in his introduction to this commemorative edition of Burroughs's immensely popular trilogy The Land That Time Forgot, first published in 1924, almost every book Burroughs wrote remains in print, and countless readers turn to his Mars and Tarzan novels every day.

In Land, Burroughs concocts a fabulous microworld, located somewhere in the South Pacific, called Caspak. On this mountainous island live winged, humanlike creatures, dinosaurs, ferocious beasts of prey, Neanderthals, "wild ape-men," and monstrous reptiles; they terrorize each other, to say nothing of the mixed crew of World War I-era adventurers who inadvertently land on a Caspakian beach and fight their way across the island, dining on Plesiosaurus steaks and having a grand old time in the company of a jungle princess. The story streaks onward like a bullet toward its surprise ending, and it's pure fun all the way. --Gregory McNamee