I grew up back in those halcyon years of the 1950s and 60s reading not just Robert E. Howard but Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Andre Norton - all of those wonderful weird pulp writers. And I grew up loving the artistry of not only Frank Frazetta (who did this fine image of Conan before Hollywood ruined him), but the great J. Allen St. John, Roy G. Krenkel, Jeff Jones, Gray Morrow, Howard Pyle, Hannes Bok, and all the rest. And has any of this permanently twisted my mind? No, dont answer that question. I will say that there is a surprising amount of wisdom in these works. Burroughs, for instance, was way ahead of his time in portraying a heroic old Jew (in The Red Hawk), brave Africans and black Martians, noble Indians (especially the unforgettable Shoz-Dijiji) and courageous women (above all the wonderful Tavia in A Fighting Man of Mars). And Robert E. Howard may or may not have read Ibn Khaldun, the great Persian philosopher who invented sociology, but Howard essentially reinvented Ibn Khalduns cyclic theory of civilization - that humans start out solitary and self-reliant, and begin to mass together, and the more mass there is the more specialization of work and mutual reliance, while at the same time greed leads to corruption and thievery, until the latter overbalances the benefits of massing together, and either a barbarian force conquers the rotted city-state or people flee it to live solitary and self-reliant again. In short, dont sell short these pulp writers -- the people who wrote these trash books often had Ph.D.s in one or another scientific discipline, and were literary omnivores. I had the great fortune of getting to know Andre Norton in her last years, and she was a lovely, brilliant woman indeed. One would never guess that a quiet, warm, thoughtful, erudite former librarian could write novels of such power and depth, but she did!
Posted on: Thu, 12 Jun 2014 19:54:34 +0000
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