I’ve been reading an old Edgar Rice Burroughs book that I hadn’t read before – Beyond the Farthest Star. It seems to be a very late attempt by ERB to revive the idea of another new planet, like his much earlier series about Mars, Venus, a Pellucidar. This was written in 1941 about the distant planet Poloda that the hero (who doesn’t give his “Earth name”, identifying himself by the named “Tangor” bestowed on him by the Polodans) finds himself transported to, as John Carter got mysteriously transported to Mars. Burroughs evidently wanted it to be a series, but only one story got published in his lifetime. In 1964 Ace published it and a second unpublished story as a single volume.
When the Polodans elect a leader, they submit him to an examination that includes an intelligence test. This leads Tangor to muse:
I refrain from the obvious comments – they’re too obvious. But I do have to wonder why ERB wrote this. The proper lens to view speculative fiction through is its own time and place. ERB was writing for a United States witnessing a world at war, and about to get sucked in itself. Elsewhere in the story it’s clear that he doesn’t hold with the pacifists. But what could he have been thinking about here?
I put this in the Pit instead of Café Society, because it has great potential to devolve into Pit material.