Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Once a bestselling author and now largely forgotten (2012’s calamitous John Carter movie aside), Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) offered his readers energetic pulp adventures in exciting settings: African jungles, the Earth’s hollow interior, an overgrown Venus, a dying Mars. This Festschrift includes 11 stories from a variety of SF authors; all are original to this volume except Resnick’s own “The Forgotten Seas of Mars,” first published in the fanzine ERB-dom in 1965. Included are homages to Tarzan of the Apes (Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Tarzan and the Great War”), Carson Napier of Venus (Richard A. Lupoff’s “Scorpion Men of Venus”), and mysterious Pellucidar (Mercedes Lackey’s “The Fallen: A Tale of Pellucidar”). The high point is Lansdale’s “Tarzan and the Land Time Forgot,” a crossover between two of Burroughs’s series. The other contributions are variable in quality; the nadir is Lupoff’s, which reads more like a fragment of a novel than a short story. An exercise in compulsive nostalgia, this anthology is uneven but quite sincere. (Oct.)