I find this absolutely fascinating. Kaor indeed gives no hits when put into Google.
But searching on kaor Barsoom or kaor Burroughs immediately pops up over 80 hits.
Why? What in the algorithm would prevent the word from coming up on its own?
Damn straight they were! I know from where my zymolosely polydactile tongue originated!!
As for ERB, I owned a LOT of his books in hardcover, thanks to the Science Fiction Book Club. I still have some of those volumes.
Maybe it’s the digital version of fnord.
And yet fnord by its bare self gets 324,000 hits. Pretty good for something invisible. Heck, that’s more than Exapno Mapcase gets and I stole that from someone famous.
I was in maybe third grade and mostly reading comic books. The older guys in the neighborhood were reading ERB and I wanted in. Kurt loaned me his copy of A Princess of Mars and I was hooked. After a while I had read all of the ERB books at the library and asked the lady at the desk for a recommendation. She pointed me to Heinlein’s Time for the Stars. I never bought another comic book
There’s no string of seven or fewer characters that gives no hits from Google. “Kaor” gives me 740,000 hits (mostly from a radio station with those call-letters). What kind of search are you doing that gives no hits?
I meant no hits for koar from the Barsoom novels.
And if you actually examined the results, you would find that no matter what it says on page 1, there are only two pages, and page two shows there are only 137 hits total.
Page 2 of about 137 results (0.83 seconds)
However, I’m now seeing a few Burroughs hits buried on page 2. Still far less than the 80+ Google finds when Burroughs is added to the search term.
According to Rudyard Kipling in his autobiography, yes. (It’s the paragraph near the bottom.)
“If it be in your power, bear serenely with imitators. My Jungle Books begat Zoos of them. But the genius of all the genii was one who wrote a series called Tarzan of the Apes…He had ‘jazzed’ the motif of the Jungle Books and, I imagine, had thoroughly enjoyed himself. He was reported to have said that he wanted to find out how bad a book he could write and ‘get away with,’ which is a legitimate ambition.”
Setting aside whether the rumor is actually true, this is evidence that it was about Burroughs.
Og, I LOVE this board. Information and a cite, and now I can stop wondering. Thank you!
Interesting item I recently learned –
Although it seems obvious that the idea of Tarzan (a guy in the jungle raised by apes) was inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories and The Jungle Book (a guy in the jungle raised by wolves) – even to Kipling himself – it ain’t necessarily so.
Tarzan had a more direct inspiration in the H. Rider Haggard story Allan’s Wife, which featured a woman raised by baboons. Haggard’s story was published in 1889. Kipling’s Jungle Book stories appeared in serials in 1893-4 and in book form in 1894. So Haggard’s book clearly appeared first. Today, The Jungle Book is very well known (owing to at least three motion picture interpretations and countless “children’s editions”), while the Haggard book isn’t that well known, even to fans of Haggard, I don’t know what the situation was back in the early 1900s, or if Burroughs knew about both.
But I seriously doubt the story that Burroughs was trying to write the worst possible book – the man was trying to get published and needed the bucks. You can tell from his early publications that he was casting about for the most popular and best-selling variations he could find. Kipling’s saying that the book was among the bad imitators of his Jungle Book says more about him than about Burroughs.
http://www.telelib.com/authors/H/HaggardRider/prose/allanswife/allanswife007.html
Come to think of it, I think part of the story was that whoever this was was already a very successful writer, which was why he made the bet in the first place. We’ve all seen anecdotes about writers so successful that they refused to be edited, to the great detriment (and inflation) of their stories.
I would have no clue about Kaor without the reference to Barsoom.