In pursuit of the ultimate discovery of the secret of story-telling, one could do worse than study the rhythms of Edgar Rice Burroughs' prose. Because of his stereotypical characters and defects as a plotter, he must derive his power from some other source, and the source has eluded convincing explanation. It is all very well to say that his standard of invention is good and his writing vivid and clear; other authors in the field of Planetary Romance have achieved as much, but lack his special magic. I suspect the answer is to be found in the cadences of his prose.

By this I do not necessarily refer to 'purple passages'. The way ordinary things are said, the way information is put before the reader, is what matters.

Following the defeat of his little army, Ras Thavas had disappeared and been all but forgotten as are the dead, among which he was numbered by those who had known him; but there were some who could never forget him. -- Synthetic Men of Mars (1940)

Here we have what I call the typical Burroughs L-shaped transitional sentence, glueing one theme (the disappearance of the master surgeon) with the next (the persistence of speculation about him). The turning point comes after the word 'dead'.

It is ironical that whereas short sentences are a sign of dumbed-down journalese, long sentences are the stock-in-trade of a 'pulp' writer like Burroughs who was also a journalist in later life (he witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbour). The L-shaped or double-backed sentence performs a vital role in keeping the reader careeering on through the tale. Here is an example from A Fighting Man of Mars (1930) of two such sentences following on consecutively;

I do not know that John Carter fully realized the loss that I sustained, but I suspect that he did, for he offered me all the resources of Helium in my search for Tavia.

I thanked him, but asked only for a fast ship; one in which I might devote the remainder of my life to what I truly believed would prove a futile search for Tavia, for how could I know where in all wide Barsoom Tul Axtar would elect to hide?

The first of these sentences is merely a simple antithesis, but the second actually has a wide transitional middle part, consisting of the clause "what I truly believed would prove a futile search for Tavia", which stands like a plateau between two slopes.

Sometimes he gives us a whole paragraph consisting of one sentence. An example from earlier in the same novel:

After we had passed beyond the crater of the ancient volcano, which formed the bed of the valley in which lay sombre Ghasta, we saw below us, in the moonlight, a rough volcanic country that presented a weird and impressive appearance of unreality; deep chasms and tumbled piles of basalt seemed to present an insurmoutable barrier to man, which may explain why in this remote and desolate corner of Barsoom the valley of Hohr had lain for countless ages undiscovered.

Here the 'deep chasms... barrier to man' section of the sentence acts as the summit of the plateau of meaning, with slopes up to it and down from it on either side.

Limpidly clear, but masking the art of a great storyteller.

Robert Gibson is caretaker of the Ooranye Project, creating a fictional giant planet which can be explored on www.ooranye.com. The project's aim is to meld the subgenres of Future History and Planetary Romance, resulting in over a million years of civilization with its own societies, customs, conflicts, triumphs and disasters, politics, philosophies, flora and fauna, empires both human and non-human, and adventures that range over an area ten times that of the surface of the Earth. Lovers of planetary adventure are invited to view the history, comment on the progress of the project, access the tales and keep in touch with the developing destiny of Ooranye.