Back to Ancient Opar

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan has proven an unstoppable force. While misguided movies, TV series, and musicals do their best to rob the ape man of his savage nature and integrity in the name of mass marketing and political correctness, Burroughs’ original Jungle Lord perseveres. Conventional wisdom may suggest time has passed him by, but it’s the vitality of the original that keeps readers coming back for more. Happily, talents like Joe R. Lansdale, Philip Jose Farmer, and most recently Will Murray have been willing to give fans further adventures of the real Tarzan.

Turn back the clock four decades and you’ll find Philip Jose Farmer’s seminal fictional biography, Tarzan Alive (1972) had much to answer for in terms of launching the Wold Newton movement in popular fiction as well as boosting Burroughs’ cachet. While the book may be relatively obscure today, the ripples it created are still felt on the beaches of pulp fiction. For his part, Farmer launched a series of officially sanctioned books recounting the history of ancient Opar. Longtime readers of Burroughs’ work will know that Opar was the first of the author’s lost cities (an outpost of forgotten Atlantis) that survived undiscovered in Tarzan’s African jungle.


Farmer’s Opar books served as the missing link between Burroughs and Robert E. Howard in terms of crafting the pre-Cataclysmic kingdom of Khokarsa. What separated Farmer’s tales of noble barbarians and beautiful seductresses from the sword & sorcery books that flooded bookshelves in the 1970s was a desire to treat the material as realistically as possible. Farmer’s characters die, their sexual encounters lead to unplanned pregnancies that destroy marriages and change the course of kingdoms. For all the notoriety of Farmer’s so-called adult fiction, his superior work in treating the adventure fiction of his youth as reality rather than fantasy remains his greatest accomplishment.

To read the entire article, please visit

https://www.blackgate.com/2015/09/20/back-to-ancient-opar/