Greatly Belated Book Reviews: Treasure of the Black Falcon

Treasure of the Black Falcon is a novel by John Coleman Burroughs. If that name sounds familiar, it should: John Coleman Burroughs was the son of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and others.

Like his father, the author's work (of which this is actually apparently the only example) is highly imaginative and original, if not especially scientific or rich in meaning. In effect: I love it.

Not that it's a masterwork of plotting or anything-TotBF is a pretty basic sort of plot, and I have a notion that if J.C. had ever had the kind of output E.R. did, similar repetitive patterns would have arisen. (Although there was a reasonably clever frame story such as was used by E.R., it seems likely he picked the idea up from his father.)

The story centers initially on the adventures of a deep-sea salvage sub that was invented by its owner, and which has truly remarkable abilities for exploration, such as cannot be found in many vessels even today. Unfortunately for it and its crew, it gets caught in a huge undersea current and sucked into a deep sea cave, where it comes out in a mysteriously low-pressure zone that basically defies all laws of physics. There, the world-building skills of the author come into play.

They find an impossible giant underwater bubble, which is inhabited by very strange creatures-animals who are white, and which, upon examination, have no internal organs. But they look a whole lot like familiar animals, such as fish and pelicans.

It turns out, as the reader eventually discovers, that these are Jogulars, bizarre, improbable lifeforms probably from outer space, who infect and replace other creatures, turning into duplicates of them. (Human-form Jogulars, because of peculiarities of the process, often have the appearance of clothes molded onto themselves.) Jogulars have no bones, no internal organs, and do not need to eat food in the normal fashion-instead, they absorb microorganisms from their environments for nourishment. (Their bonelessness gives them a gait that sounds as if it probably belongs to a cartoon character.) They also retain mental characteristics of the creatures they mimic: Human-form Jogulars think like humans, act like humans, and even need to pretend to eat like humans. Jogulars are further gifted with powerful telepathy. There is a second type of Jogular: A creature that is essentially "trapped" in a sort of "larval" shape that can never change (they look like brains with single pink eyes), which is minimally mobile but has an incredible power to compensate-mind control. All Jogulars also, in addition to being white, lack normal organs such as eyes; they rely on their telepathy and upon the single pink Jogular eye for their use. Jogulars also do not age, and thus are nearly immortal.

The Jogulars, in a word, are insanely awesome. Okay, two words.

Of course, they defy all known laws of biology, but that's okay.

There are plenty of other things to love about this bizarre undersea world. There are other undersea monsters, although few of them are especially iconic or interesting; the characters have rifles that, in a footnote, are connected to a fictional invasion of Los Angeles or San Diego or someplace by association of the way they operate; and the Jogular human community is being ruled by a guy who thinks he's a Roman emperor. No joke.

All in all, it's a decent piece of pulp fiction, and if you like John Carter of Mars, or some of the other books I have belatedly reviewed, I would suppose you'd like this plenty.

-Signing off.