As a neophyte to Smith and his work, I have a question which I don't think has been addressed in the forum though it might have been in Smith's letters or critical works on him.

Did CAS ever read any Edgar Rice Burroughs and, if so, when?

In the notes to his "The Metamorphosis of the World" in [u]The End of the Story[u], CAS says that he hadn't read a lot of science fiction when he wrote the story in 1929. Did that include Burroughs? (Most of Burroughs would not, at the time of its publication, been labelled science fiction but adventure or romance, I believe.)

I ask because I wonder if a couple of stories I've read are a kind of deliberate answer to the plots of Burroughs. Specifically, "The Planet of the Dead" and "The Uncharted Isle". "The Planet of the Dead" and Burroughs' [u]A Princess of Mars[u] share interplanetary travel via mental projection and travel to dying worlds at that. Both protagonists rescue women though John Carter, of course, has to have a princess. The protagonists are separated from their loves at story's end. CAS' story, though, is not about the celebration of foes bested and blood spilt but the "supreme ecstasy" before "merciful numbness" and oblivion. The Decadent Smith forgoes any confrontation when Melchior rescues Thameera. They simply slip out of the city.

My wife, a Burroughs' fan, notes "The Uncharted Isle" is almost an anti-Burroughs story. It's not only a story of alienation, but the hero is mostly passive. Burroughs would have had the sacrificial child rescued. Irwin leaves the island. There is no interaction with this "lost race", no confrontation even though the set up of a mysterious island was something Burroughs used in his work. A Burroughs character is, of course, heroically engaged with the world. CAS' hero watches and ponders. No enragement leads to heroic action. Rather, disgust prompts solitary escape.

This leads me to something maybe Mr. Connors or Mr. Hilger can answer. When CAS talks about having a satiric intent in a story, was he satirizing social mores or parodying literary conventions or both?

While I'm neither of those, I hope you don't mind my throwing out my thought on this. "The Uncharted Isle" has always struck me, in many ways, as something of an hommage to Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle". It has the same eerie, dreamlike feel, the inability of the inhabitants to detect the narrator, the same feel that they are both incredibly aged yet hale, the same feeling of a mysterious doom hanging over the people described, the same distortion of sound, etc. It is interesting that Smith viewed it as a science fiction tale, as quoted in the notes; these days I suppose it would be called "science fantasy", a term sometimes used to denote a more hybrid form. It has always been one of my personal favorites, however, because of the dreamlike eeriness and sense of displacement it conveys.

This is a reply to both messages -
1) of course Clark had read the Tarzan stories, and all of the rest i suppose, he read everything.
2) The second letter's reference to Poe is probably the more accurate, I do not recall Clark's having any particular opinion about ERB since Burroughs was more about Darwin, whereas Clark liked to satirize Freud. How this planet got the way it is, was of desultory interest. Scott and Ron will certainly have thoughts on this matter that reflect their unique insights.
It is a pity that our old friend, Don Fryer is not available by internet to comment since he would have already given this topic some thought - I will rattle his cage by phone and put it to him and let you know.
Naturally, everything a person reads may have some peripheral effect on his work, but as often as not it is neither conscious or deliberate. For Clark, he never set out to write in a "category", and, indeed, found hyper-analysis and classification by species and genre highly offensive. His approach was -
"I write it -- you read it -- now, did you like it or not?" I recall a symposium once held in the chapel of the University Church at Syracuse Univ. where we had just completed a performance of T.S. Eliot's comedy,"the Cocktail Party" (myself as Reilly to Ted Koppel's Edward -1960) - and after much deep discussion among most of the panel members as to its theological and philosophical import, I put it to them that Mr. Eliot would want to know as a playwright, "did it work as theatre? and was it funny" - one panel member, poet Harold Holden stood and applauded this as the first relevant statement he had heard all evening. (my answer then and now by the way was "no".
All this pother notwithstanding, I am very pleased with your thoughtfulness and insights - Clark would have loved your minds' probing his work and sensing cognate concepts he may not have consciously intended, but are evoked nevertheless out of your experiences in reading -- all great works are greater than their author's will, as they expanded and deepened through the minds of subsequent generations of readers. Who could imagine that Bach would prefer that his Toccata, to be pure, only be played in the style imposed by the wheezy old organ at Magdeburg that he was stuck with?

Clark was aware of Burroughs, but there are remarkably few references to ERB in his letters (as opposed to, say, A. Merritt, another popular writer of similar fantastic fiction), I don't know of any books by Burroughs in his library, and I can't prove one way or the other that he read him to any great extent (although the odds are that he did, as Dr. Farmer points out). If there is any resemblance between A PRINCESS OF MARS and "The Planet of the Dead" insofar as the "astral projection" method of interplanetary travel, it may probably be attributed to both ERB and CAS utilizing aspects of theosophy, although in CAS' case we may also consider Camile Flammarion as a possible influence. I discuss some of this in the note to "The Planet of the Dead" in THE END OF THE STORY.

Scott

jdworth is right. "The Uncharted Isle" is reminiscent of Poe's "Ms Found in a Bottle". I read the two stories within two months of each other a couple of years ago and literally noted that. And then my sieve-like memory forgot.

Scott's right about Burroughs and Flammarion. [www.erbzine.com], a survey of ERB's library, shows he was pretty familiar with Flammarion.