I actually really like
Otis Adelbert Kline! His best work is easily “Planet of Peril,” which is about
a supremely muscular alpha male hero who trades minds with a person on Venus,
or as the inhabitants call it, Zarovia. Sure, it’s an obvious Burroughs Planet
Romance pastiche of the kind that existed by the armfuls in the first few
decades of science fiction, but it had a few interesting twists that made it
different.
For one thing, you know the beautiful alien princess the hero rescues
and falls in love with? She is actually the villain
(or at least is initially introduced to us that way, she becomes more complex
as the story goes on), and when the hero arrives on Venus, he starts as “the tyrannical
amazon empress’s slave.” So basically, the opening of this is a reverse-Return
of the Jedi. (When I explain this premise to women, they usually say “oooh,
that sounds interesting.”)
Kline’s Venus is
actually an interesting place, because unlike the Arizona-like dying Mars of
Burroughs, his Venus is a hot jungle world at the Mesozoic level of
development, which means there are dinosaurian creatures everywhere and
colossal insects. This is related to a scientific belief in the Victorian era
that the planets were all created at different times, with the ones furthest
out being the oldest. So, Mercury, closest to the sun, was a “young molten
Earth” Venus was in the Mesozoic age, Earth is “just right,” and finally, Mars
was a dying, dried up future earth.
Otis Adelbert Kline’s
Planet of Peril has the following things:
Giant Vampire Bat
Monkeys
A city of colossal
termites
Prisoner of Zenda-style
royal intrigue and schemes
Duels resolved by
swordfighting
I am probably making it
sound better than it really is. For example, at one point, our hero stumbles
into a cave by dumb luck and finds a solution to his problem. This is terrible;
remember, you can use chance to get your hero into trouble, but you can’t use
chance to get your hero out of it. Planet of Peril and its sequels are fun
books, but Kline is no Edgar Rice Burroughs. In fact, that’s probably what Otis
Adelbert Kline is best known for today: his supposed rivalry with Edgar Rice
Burroughs.
Every so often, a pop
culture rivalry emerges, but usually, these things are incredibly one sided. In
the eighties, it was Gobots vs. Transformers. In the 1960s, it was Lost in
Space vs. Star Trek (and by the way, Lost in Space consistently got twice the
ratings in their initial broadcast). If Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of
Mars is Transformers, Otis Adelbert Kline is Gobots.
According to legend,
Burroughs was so incensed by Kline’s Venus stories that he created his own
setting on Venus, and when he heard this, Kline started to set stories on Mars.
Apparently, it was possible in the early days of scifi to “call” planets like
foul balls. There’s no evidence for the story of this rivalry; it’s believed it
came into being because the two writers shared a publicist.
If you like John Carter
of Mars, check out Planet of Peril and Kline’s Venus stories. Another very
similar planet series I’d recommend is the Radio Man, about a hero who reaches
Venus by radio. Radio Man is interesting because our hero, unlike the Southern
John Carter, was a Massachussetts Boston Brahmin, what today we would call a “preppy.”
Every 15th word out of his mouth is “Harvard.”
In fact, that reminds
me: people say that John Carter of Mars inspired Flash Gordon. Eh…it did, but
in a roundabout way. I’d say the Burroughs imitators had more on an influence
on Flash Gordon than Burroughs had directly. For instance, Mongo, like Kline’s
Zarovia, was a hot Mesozoic world with dinosaurian life forms, with Mingo City
being kind of like Brasilia, a capital created in defiance of the jungle. Likewise,
Flash Gordon was an athletic Kennedy-like New England Ivy Leaguer who played
polo and who had Yale University explicitly as a part of his backstory, very
much like Ralph Milne Farley’s hero in the Radio Man.
As to whether Kline’s
work is in the public domain, I’m sorry to say that it probably isn’t. Planet
of Peril was published in 1929, on the wrong side of the cutoff for the PD.
Answering this question is more complex than it appears, because in the US,
prior to 1976, copyright was not automatic; it required registration. Copyright
was 25 years, plus another 25 years with a renewal (anything under copyright in
1976 was subject to the life + 70 term extensions). So the question is whether
anyone bothered to renew the copyright prior to 1976.
One of the greatest
problems with the insanely extended lengths of copyright is that there are
occasions where something is under copyright, but the copyright holder can’t be
found. The vast majority of works under copyright aren’t Harry Potter, still in
print and making money. This is why there is a growing necessity for what is
called “orphan works” legislation, where, if a copyright holder can’t be found,
the work is considered to be in the public domain…a law like this would be a
great boon to librarians and archivists, and is absolutely necessary,
especially for works like Klein’s. Copyright was never meant as a squatter’s
right.
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