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First Editions - Pellucidar Series

Pellucidar - ERB's Hollow-Earth World

Burroughs opens Tarzan at the Earth’s Core with these famous lines,
“Pellucidar, as every schoolboy knows, is a world within a world, lying as it
does, upon the inner surface of the hollow sphere, which is the Earth.” Which
all makes complete sense if you understand that in Burroughs’ literary
universe, Pellucidar is the inside surface of our hollow Earth, whose crust is
only 500 miles thick.
In this world, every land feature is the opposite of its counterpart on the outer
surface of the planet. Oceans on Earth are land masses in Pellucidar, and visa
versa. The outer surface is convex with a finite horizon; the inner world is
concave having no definable horizon, only geography that sweeps upwards
until it is lost in the distant haze.
A small sun floats at the center of the Earth lighting Pellucidar with
unchanging never-ending daylight. Without the diurnal cycle to guide our
human sense of time, Pellucidar is an oddly timeless world.   This inner sun has
a moon that revolves around it at the same speed as the Earth’s rotation, thus
to earthly eyes, remaining always in the same space in the sky. The shadow
cast by this moon blots out the sunlight stunting the vegetation growing in this
“land of Awful Shadow.”
Various human and non-human stone-age cultures occupy Pellucidar, some
more or less advanced than others. Over the centuries some heroic groups
from the surface have entered Pellucidar via Mechanical Mole and through the
polar opening located at the northern magnetic pole. Only in the novels of the
Pellucidar series can we become one of these heroic peoples. So let's join
David Innes, Abner Perry, Tarzan of the Apes, and all the other ERB heroes in
this wondrous land of contrasts beneath the earth.

                                                                           Charlie