Gelatinous Flesh
- GELETANOUS FLESH - A black ink and black color pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears in the book, "Cugel's Saga," by Jack Vance, published by Underwood-Miller in 1983.
Robert Silverberg is a noted writer of science fiction, he is also a critic of SF stories and their authors. This is what he wrote about one of America's most popular adventure-story writers, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the man who created Tarzan, and the Scientific-Romance novel; "His writing is unbelievably crude, the plot is unbearably silly, and the characters are faceless puppets or hopeless stereotypes". (from Silverberg's book review column, The Spectroscope, Amazing, July, 1964)
Silverberg's criticism of Burroughs ignores an important aspect regarding literature; it is a form of entertainment, and everyone in the world, regardless of their level of education and intelligence needs to be entertained because entertainment is what makes life bearable. Burroughs did not write his books for the intellectuals of the world, he wrote to please the young-at-heart who wanted to read exciting adventure stories.
Silverberg implies that Burroughs' technical writing skills were so bad that his stories do not deserve to be published. - Wow! Since when do critics decide who deserves to be published?
Burroughs' virtue as a writer may not have been in plotting storylines or character development, his talent as a writer lay in his imaginative story ideas, his unique creations; like Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and Carson of Venus. His books sold in the millions and continue to sell today. They continue to be popular because he was a talented and entertaining "story-teller" who wrote for the common man, not for literary intellectuals.
Since Silverberg does not see the virtues in Burroughs' books, I ignore his criticism of them.
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