Cinematic Spaces: Book Exerts

At the Earths Core

Edgar Rice Burroughs

1914

At the Earth's Core is a 1914 science fiction story, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, this being the first in his series of stories about the fictional inner earth world of Pellucidar. The story first appeared as a four-part series of stories in All-Story Weekly (an American pulp magazine that ran 1882 to 1978) from April 4–25, 1914. A. C. 

McClurg was the first to publish it as a hardcover book in July 1922.

At The Earth’s Core tells the story from the authors perspective and starts out with a journey through the Sahara desert, where he encounters a remarkable machine and its pilot David Innes.

David turns out to be a mining heir who is financing the experimental "iron mole," an excavating machine designed by his inventor friend Abner Perry. In a test run, they discover the vehicle cannot   turn, and it digs straight down 500 miles into the Earth. They later emerge in an unknown world they believe to be the surface of earth, but latter discover they have surfaced inside the earth at its core where a prehistoric land still exists.

In Burroughs' concept, the Earth is a hollow shell with Pellucidar as the internal surface of that shell. Pellucidar is a land inhabited by prehistoric creatures of all different time eras, and controlled by the Mahars, a dinosaur bird like race of reptile capable of flight. The Mahars enslave and feeds upon the stone aged humans that live within the earth’s core.

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