Out of Time's Abyss

Written by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Narrated by Brian Emerson

On Caprona, the Land that Time Forgot, all of the world's savage past still lived. Here were dinosaurs and flying reptiles, here were the most primitive of cavemen, and the last of the Bronze Age barbarians. But there was one more secret that the claws and fangs and sharp-edged spears guarded most of all.

This is the story of the man who tried to find that final secret. When Bradley, the adventurer, dared to cross the last terrible barrier to the heart of Caprona, he entered a world of wonder, terror and danger beyond the imagination of any man-except Edgar Rice Burroughs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstone Audio
• Release date: May 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781455118236

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) is the creator of Tarzan, one of the most popular fictional characters of all time, and John Carter, hero of the Barsoom science fiction series. Burroughs was a prolific author, writing almost 70 books before his death in 1950, and was one of the first authors to popularize a character across multiple media, as he did with Tarzan’s appearance in comic strips, movies, and merchandise. Residing in Hawaii at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, Burroughs was drawn into the Second World War and became one of the oldest war correspondents at the time. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s popularity continues to be memorialized through the community of Tarzana, California, which is named after the ranch he owned in the area, and through the Burrough crater on Mars, which was named in his honour.

Reviews for Out of Time's Abyss

[randystafford · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Despite an ending that is far, far too neat and unbelievable in its chronological relation to the first two books in the series, this is the best of the lot. Burroughs tamps down his love of coincidence and provides some interesting - if incompletely worked out - ideas. But then Burroughs was never an author known for rigorously working out the implications of his premises.What Burroughs does deliver is romantic adventure. Yes, like The People That Time Forgot, this novel's hero, Bradley from the first novel, accidentally, inevitably falls in love with a native woman he rescues. The two are fellow prisoners in Oo-Oh, dubbed by Bradley as the City of Human Skulls. Their captors are the Wieroo, Caspak's most advanced humans. Not only do they have wings, but, unlike every other human group on Caspak, they have writing and textiles. They also, in bootstrapping their evolution and competing with the other humans on the island, developed a cruel culture dedicated to spreading the orthodoxy of their thought. (I suspect we are to see a parallel to the Prussianism of the villainous U-Boat commander from the first book - who makes a reappearance here.) Their religion is based on advancement by murder, and they really do like building out of skulls. Bradley's adventures among the Wieroo are good, exciting stuff.Burroughs also is more explicit here about some of the details on how human development works on Caspak, a land where most humans start out as tadpole-like critters in ponds and, barring accident and bad genes, become human. It's a three-quarters baked idea here but still interesting.This novel probably works better if you read its immediate successor, The People That Time Forgot, first.

[sylak_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This story marks a completely different type of Caspak adventure. Rather than trekking through the untamed wilds of a prehistoric world, slaying saurians and dispatching hairy savage natives with the odd well placed bullet; Early on in the adventure our hero, Bradley, is plucked from the skies above by a nightmarish winged demon called a Wieroo and carried off to a fortress city where he is held captive and has to make good his escape against impossible odds. On route he naturally meets a young girl whom he is too inept to realise is falling in love with him and he with her; but eventually, as happens in these stories, he figures it out - only at the very last minute mind you. Where do writers like Burroughs and O.A.Kline get these emotionally retarded men from I wonder?Just a couple of oversights which spoilt it for me:I was reading the 1975 Tandem edition of this story: originally written for Blue Book Magazine in 1918, so it is most likely that my copy has been heavily abridged - as many of these mass market paperbacks were; but:Never once through the story do I recall ever being told the name of Bradley's female companion? In fact through out the novel she is only referred to as 'the girl'; yet roughly ten pages before the end Bradley suddenly introduces her to his friends as 'Co-Tan' - What? 'the girl' has a name? When did this news come out?Then the big secret which Bradley is concealing from her the whole time they are together: that he failed to save the life of her brother An-Tak, whom he had previously shared a cell with, suddenly appears to be common knowledge to her when she announces this fact to her father in conversation! Huh?Like I said, I only read the Tandem copy of 'Out of Tme's Abyss' so I expect these facts may have been addressed in Burroughs original story?

[andyray_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm giving it five stars because ERB finally saw he was repeating himself in other adventures, and here he makes it conside, concrete, and of course the hero gets the girl. I was broiught up on these kind of women, the kind Burroiughs (and others of the time) created. These women will stick to the man like his own skin and go anywerhe and do anything he does.