BEYOND THIRTY (not, it's not about getting older)
SPOILERS AHEAD
Just so you know
One of Burroughs' least well-known books, BEYOND THIRTY appeared in the February 1916 issue of ALL-AROUND magazine (after being rejected by ALL-STORY) and was not seen again until a limited edition book was published in 1957. Ace reprinted it during their Burroughs craze of the 1960s as THE LOST CONTINENT, sporting a neat little Frazetta cover showing a man in a Flash Gordon-style paramilitary uniform facing a half dozen lions in the ruins of a city, while a healthy brunette jungle girl lends moral support.
BEYOND THIRTY has none of the famous ongoing characters like Tarzan or John Carter or even Carson Napier as a drawing card, but I think one reason for its obscurity was the unfortunate timing of its anti-war theme. There's a definite cycle in pop culture. Each war we get into starts with a wave of gung ho propaganda (both official and spontaneous) about the fiendish villainy of the enemy (whether the Kaiser's Huns, the Japanese, Koreans, Viet Cong, or Islamic terrorists) to get the public all worked up and ready to fight. So there's a period of bravado in the media with stalwart American boys trampling the foe almost like a children's game. Then, when it's all over and the soldiers and sailors return with their gruesome stories of what war is really like, books and movies swing over to show all the misery and suffering and bitter victories.
I would guess BEYOND THIRTY was written too early in the cycle and might have been better received ten years later. It's a haunting tale that shows Europe literally reduced to scattered bands of Stone Age savages wandering through barely-visible remnants of cities. The message isn't brought across with too much subtlety - this is early Edgar Rice Burroughs, after all - but the hero's gradual understanding of what has happened is still very effective.
We start off in the year 2137. After the Great War of the early Twentieth Century raged without stop for sixty years, the Western Hemisphere reacted by withdrawing into complete isolationism. United as the Pan-American Federation, all of North and South America were brought together under a single government. (Right off the bat, I have reservations about the idea of Canada simply abandoning the Commonwealth to sign up with the USA, not to mention all the varied South American nations going along, but let it go.) Going beyond longitude 175 or 30 West carries the automatic death penalty, with no extenuating circumstances accepted, and the edict is backed up by a huge and vigilant navy. So, for two hundred years, absolutely nothing has been heard from the Old World. The Pan-Americans live in a peaceful if something stagnant bliss untouched by the rest of the word.
(Personally, I find this idea of utter isolationism harder to believe than the anti-gravity flying submarines of the books; it just goes against basic human nature, which has always produced many restless souls hellbent to explore what lies beyond any barrier, not to mention merchants eager for trade and new markets. But again, this just has to be accepted for the sake of the story.)
Our hero is twenty-one-year-old Jefferson Turck, a lieutenant in the Pan-American Navy and commander of one of the flying subs. Coming from a family with a long tradition of military service but with no recent history of actual wartime experience, Turck has some naively bloodthirsty daydreams about the past. ("What boy has not sighed for the good old days of war, revolution and riots; how I used to pore over the chronicles of those 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...")
Turck's rather substandard flying sub stalls out and is swept by a storm over the forbidden line. Having crossed Thirty, he and his crew are doomed to disgrace and execution when (and if) they manage to return home. Just to complicate things more, Turck and four of his men are out fishing in one of the small boats when the sub starts up again and abandons them. Their only hope of survival is that they may been close enough to legendary, mostly-forgotten Europe to make it there. So the small team head for the British Isles.
Here things get increasingly poignant. As Turck's small party lands and explores, they find nothing but overgrown wilderness populated by large numbers of aggressive tigers (!?). There is no sign that England was ever civilized, much less the busy seat of a worldwide Empire. After the perplexed Pan-Americans encounter tribes of barbarians wearing furs and hides, armed with crude spears and having no memory of the past, Burroughs is back on familiar themes. Turck promptly tumbles for a nubile young babe named Victory, who as it happens is next in line to be Queen of England (for what that's worth at this stage).
After that, we're reading scenes that Burroughs would repeatedly beat like they owed him money - the lecherous tribal chief trying to claim sweet little Victory, lions chasing our heroes singly and in packs, fistfights and captures and escapes. All rowdy stuff we'll see in many Burroughs stories for the next thirty years. What gives it all some depth is the increasing awareness by Turck of how much the world has lost. Decades of industrialized warfare followed by centuries of encroaching wilderness have left almost no trace of the cities or roads or former inhabitants. Looking for London Bridge, he finds only that "there rises a few feet above the water a single, disintegrating mound of masonry." In the ruins of the royal palace, lions have settled and a cub sprawls on the very throne itself.
It's even more melancholy when you consider that, when Burroughs wrote this in 1915, it seemed entirely possible that Britain would indeed fall, and the splendors of Europe would burn to the ground in a war like none before it.
Then we encounter another story element which might not have created much enthusiasm in editors or readers of the time. (And which may be a big reason the book was so neglected.) Turck is captured by a vast army of African soldiers. These are highly trained and disciplined fighting men in uniform, riding horses and wielding crude but effective rifles. It seems that, having escaped the mutual annihilation that consumed Europe, the empire of Abyssinia (Ethiopa) rose to prominence under a military genius. King Menelek XIV. ("Those who did not fight were the only ones to reap any of the rewards which are supposed to belong to victory.") Now Abyssinian rule extends over "all the continent of Africa, of all of ancient Europe except the British Isles, Scandinavia and eastern Russia..."
For someone who would be flamed as a racist (and often with good reason), Burroughs could sometimes be remarkably fairminded. The African soldiers are "a fine looking race of black men - tall, muscular, with fine teeth and regular features.."). They are brave and loyal, they all are literate, and there is no expected mention of how shameful it is that the glories of the white men have fallen into dust and black men have now taken their turn as empire builders. (Imagine how infuriated Robert E Howard or H.P. Lovecraft would get if writing about a similar situation.) Burroughs even sneaks in a comment which must have annoyed more than a few readers back then: "...it is apparent that the black race has thrived far better in the past two centuries under men of its own color than it had under the domination of whites during all previous history."
Turck becomes a personal slave to a kindly old colonel and accepts the situation fairly well. (It's quite a comedown for the scion of a distinguished old Pan-American family, after all.) Then comes even more unsettling news. The rival Chinese empire is clashing with the Africans, and the battles are not going well for the black forces. In fact, the Asian armies are smashing closer all the time....
BEYOND THIRTY has a number of weaknesses, even if you accept the unconvincing future history set up (as a longtime pulp fan, believe me I've read far more unlikely epics). There is the heavy use of pure coincidence, as people happen to find each other in hundreds of square miles of wilderness just at the right moment; but that's Burroughs straight through, and if you can't swallow some wild synchronicity, he's not an author you should read. More troubling is that the book abruptly ends like a door being slammed. The epic battles shaping up are dismissed and everything is tied up in a few paragraphs. It reads exactly as if Burroughs suddenly wearied of the story and resolved it all in a page of summary. Too bad. Even so, BEYOND THIRTY has some genuine emotional power even today. I suppose that it once was ominous prophecy but now could be seen as a "what if" history of an alternate world.
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