92 pages
Published 1918
Read from October 21 to October 22
Rating: 1 out of 5
The only reason to read this book, aside from a stubborn desire to complete the story begun in The Land that Time Forgot, comes at the start of chapter two. Our new paragon of white American masculinity, Tom Billings, has launched his “hydro-aeroplane” to search for his friend Bowen Tyler, lost in the mysterious land of Caspak. Almost immediately Tom finds his biplane attacked by an enormous “pterodactyl,” and engages his machine guns to dogfight it. There — I spared you the need to ever read the rest.
People has the sense to plop us right into Caspak instead of farting around with some convoluted sequence involving multiple sunken ships and multiple takeovers of a U-Boat. It is better-paced and, in general, far closer to what I had expected this series to be — full of prehistoric adventure, narrow escapes, nocturnal confrontations with cave bears, and so on. It never becomes as fun or engaging as Doyle’s The Lost World, but at least it reaches a benchmark of readability that eluded The Land that Time Forgot.
On the other hand, this is a vile, racist book. Its plot is structured around shitty early 20th century “race theory,” with individual people evolving Pokémon-style through the “stages” of human evolution from ape to white guy. (This has less to do with Darwinism and more to do with the Christian white supremacist “Great Chain of Being” ideology that appropriated Darwinism to justify itself.) Plus there’s the proto-Gorean “this she is mine” bullshit, a pulp power fantasy of sexual ownership. Then there’s Tom’s internalized revulsion at his miscegenation with the redoubtable Ajor. On top of that, all of Caspak wallows in a drearily modernist “kill or be killed” philosophy. There isn’t anything you can do to save or excuse a book like this. (Though it does contextualize “Maureen Birnbaum at the Earth’s Core.”)
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