The One Hundred Year Test, or Let's Dust Off the Old Thoat [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Can you name one sports record from 1917? Football, baseball, hockey, anything? And to make it harder, a record that stands to this day? I rather doubt it. One hundred years is a long time when it comes to the ephemeral nature of pop culture.

And it’s the same for books. Looking at the top sellers of 1917, I see winners of the One Hundred Year Test (I'm a genre guy, so I'll stick to what I know): Oz books, John Buchan, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Anna Katherine Green, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Machen, Jack London, Edgar Wallace, James Branch Cabell. So what happened to the rest? Perly Poore Sheehan, Garrett P Serviss, Burt L Standish, H Hesketh Pritchard, Edgar White, Raymond S Spears, Sapper, Oscar Micheaux, and the list goes on... Any of these sound familiar? Of course not. Despite being popular magazine and book writers in 1917, they are all footnotes or known only to pulp specialists. The One Hundred Year Test (or OHYT as I will refer to it from now on) has eliminated them from the larger consciousness.

And it will happen again in 2117. Most of the writers now will be forgotten figures, too. It's a fact. Which ones will be remembered? I would not hazard a guess. I'm sure to be wrong. The top selling genre writer of 1917 was HG Wells with Mr. Britley Sees It Through (not a genre book, but a mainstream novel), followed by Zane Grey with Wildfire. Both authors have survived the OHYT, though Wells better than Grey. Most of the mainstream writers fared worse.

Genres in 1917 were largely still forming. The mystery is probably the most consolidated, recognizable back to 1841 with Edgar Allan Poe. Equally old is horror, but this would be either a Gothic tale (1765) or a ghost story (after 1820), approaching a more modern look by Dracula (1897). Adventure yarns began in earnest after Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1881) and HR Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885); the Western in 1902 with Owen Wister's The Virginian and the Northern with Jack London as early as 1897. And science fiction, still unnamed in 1917, usually called "off-trail fiction" or just "fantasy" would have to wait until 1926 and Hugo Gernsback to give it a name, though Jules Verne was popular from 1864 and HG Wells from 1895. In the actual genre “fantasy,” the books of Lord Dunsany were big.

All of these genres were evolving quickly in the magazines and early pulps. Edgar Rice Burroughs had just invented his brand of jungle lord adventure three years before in 1914 (though Kipling had his Mowgli twenty years earlier), as well as the interplanetary romance in 1912 with "Under the Moons of Mars." Hugo Gernsback was still nine or more years in the future as were the hard-boiled detective, the space opera, and the gangster crime drama.

The OHYT removes politics, commercial hype, and in some cases, unavailability. A reader in 1917 would not have found Tarzan or Oz books on the shelves of their public library. Librarians for decades campaigned against them in favor of "better" books. Readers today don't have to worry about beginning with Volume 3 in a series of 6. Nor do they have to wait for the installments that the original serial readers did. They have the complete run at their digital fingertips. They don't have to suffer banners reading "In the tradition of Robert E Howard" for a book that inspired that very writer twenty years earlier. (I speak of Harold Lamb, whose historical adventures inspired much of sword-and-sorcery. When Lamb was re-released in the 1970s in paperback he bore that very banner on the top of his books.)

The OHYT is a kind of guarantee. Not that the book will be easy to read - for there are changes in style in a hundred years, along with prejudices on race, gender, politics, and creed. No, it's a guarantee that the story is a good story, that people a hundred years ago were intrigued, excited, or felt something valuable by reading it. Because if these works were shallow, trendy, poorly executed, unimaginative, or dull, they would not pass the OHYT. The also-rans fall by the wayside and you are left with books that appealed to many people. (And it might not be “you” today - or “you” yet. I waited until my forties to enjoy Dickens, Twain, Haggard, Rohmer, and Stevenson. There is a future “me” who might one day be able to wade through Henry James or James Joyce.)

Let's look at a test case: Edgar Rice Burroughs versus Harold Bell Wright. ERB wrote sixty-nine novels from 1912 to 1950, creating iconic characters such as Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Harold Bell wrote melodramas with a religious theme like The Shepherd of the Hills in 1907, which sold a million copies. The two men share the following similarities: they both made huge fortunes from their writing, their books were both adapted into films, the critics hated or ignored them, both moved to California, both divorced and remarried, and both affected geography. Edgar Rice Burroughs developed and named the city of Tarzana, California. Wright has a subdivision in Tucson named after him, plus his novel also popularized Branson, Missouri, making it into a tourist destination.

Where the two men differ is that Edgar Rice Burroughs survived the OHYT and Wright did not. This is why we had a John Carter of Mars film. This is why Alexander Skarsgård is the next Tarzan. One hundred years is the copyright line in most cases (varying country to country). The public domain and online technology are making hard-to-find works available again. There is no guessing how many books will be rediscovered because of this line in the sands of time. But as they say in infomercials: Wait, there’s more!

With the advent of the public domain claiming legacy works, new "unauthorized" creations are springing up. This can be a big budget film like Tarzan (1999), John Carter of Mars (2012), or The Great and Powerful Oz (2013); all cases of Disney waiting until copyright has lapsed to avoid paying royalties. Or it can be less obvious fare. With the popularity of zombie rewrites like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith, writers are coming up with some unusual ways to enjoy old classics again. The steampunk writers have taken a shine to Baum's post-Victorian fantasy and turned out some new tales from the stuff of Oz. And this is great, for let's be honest, both Burroughs and Baum are great storytellers (largely unappreciated by critics until recently), but their works are a century old and a little dated. A new spin on old novels gives modern readers a way to enjoy the innocent favorites of childhood or teen years. It also gives you a way to go back and enjoy new stories in familiar places, if you've read all twenty-six Tarzan novels, all forty-one Oz books, or the eleven Barsoom sagas.

Now you may be tempted to write your own Tarzan novel. I know I've thought about it a few times. (While Burroughs’ first novels are out of copyright, the name “Tarzan” is still protected – for now.) Look at all the Sherlocks that have been written since 1987. There could be a mad rush on new jungle adventures appearing on Amazon already. Tarzan of the Apes with Zombies. John Carter of Mars versus the Sparkling Vampires. I'm waiting. I won't read them, but it wouldn't surprise me. What I hope to see is something more like the works of Guy Adams who writes post-Wellsian novels like The Army of Doctor Moreau (2012) or JW Schnarr's Shadows of the Emerald City (2009).

There is a movement under way right now in which writers are playing in other people's backyards, for example the comics of Alan Moore or the Anno Dracula stories of Kim Newman. It's exciting, but it is also... a little dangerous. It's great if it drives new readers to old classics. This will cement the fame of these OHYT winners with new generations and continue their fame into the 21st Century. It's dangerous if it floods the Kindle shelves with very poor hackjobs and juvenile fan fiction. (Though I have to wonder what the difference is between "fan fiction" and an "unauthorized" reworking. Not much outside of court, perhaps.) The result could be a muddying of the waters that results in a lack of interest. But I don't worry about this too much. Four million bad Lovecraftian pastiches and an equal number of bad Howardian Conan copies haven't blunted their swords. The Cthulhu Mythos and sword-and-sorcery are as healthy as ever. (Cthulhu and Conan are in a kind of grey area copyright-wise and we'll see them join the OHYT crowd soon enough.)

Reader sophistication is really what we're talking about. You can read the original Tarzan of the Apes, appreciate how it broke new pulp ground, how it's more than a little racist by modern standards, scientifically impossible, and not quite science fiction, but appeals to SF fans anyway, etc, etc. How you enjoy it is up to you. You can also then read the last two authorized pastiches: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold by Fritz Leiber (1967) or Joe R Lansdale's Tarzan: The Lost Adventure (1991), a book that is 25% Burroughs and 75% Lansdale. Or Philip Jose Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (1977), an unauthorized one! And you can decide if they hold up against ERB's wonderful storytelling. And now you can plunk down $4.99 and buy that latest novel, Tarzan and the Pyramid of Blood by Wryter B Anonymous or I Wright Kindles or whoever, and see if Tarzan pastiche is worth the time. Personally I would grab it if it was written by Joel Jenkins, the only writer I know who has captured Burroughsian excitement without slavish imitation. His Dire Planet series is as much fun as Barsoom. Your sophistication allows you to enjoy the Burroughsian or Ozian novel from a standpoint of connoisseur, as co-conspirator in a literary game that promises some new fun in old places.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Happy Robert Louis Stevenson Day!

He would've been 165 today.

Pirates of Treasure Island (2006)

Who's In It: Lance Henriksen (Aliens, The Terminator, Millenium), Tom Nagel (Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter's Cove and a bit part in Man of Steel), and Rebekah Kochan (Eating Out, Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds, Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat).

What It's About: A loose adaptation of Treasure Island in which Jim Hawkins (Nagel) is in his 20s and dating Anne Bonney (Kochan), while Long John Silver (Henriksen) lost his leg to giant insects.

How It Is: This found its way into my Netflix queue I'm sure because I was just adding pirate movies one day. If I ever knew what it was, I'd forgotten until I popped it in and saw the opening words, "The Asylum Presents." Coming out the same year as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, this was The Asylum's mockbuster rip-off of that franchise.

I go back and forth on my feelings about The Asylum and did so again during the ten seconds after I saw their logo on this thing. First my heart sank, dispirited that I wasn't about to discover some hidden gem. But that disappointment quickly turned into "let's do this" and a determination to enjoy whatever goofiness I was about to jump into.

The effects - what few there are - are actually okay. The giant insects that inhabit Treasure Island are rare, so the CGI team only needed to create a couple of them and they look pretty good. Director Leigh Scott even hired a real ship to film on, though it's obviously not moving in the scenes that are shot on deck. The effects and ship money all came out of the costume budget though. The wardrobe (as Chris Schweizer pointed out when I tweeted some images) looks like it was borrowed from a community theater, and even then some hats and other pieces get reused between characters.

We know going in though that any Asylum film is made on the super cheap, so let's not belabor that. What's worth judging is how they tell the story and Pirates of Treasure Island makes some fun choices. Making Jim Hawkins older changes the story in a big way, but it's still interesting, especially when his girlfriend turns out to be a famous, feared pirate who doesn't want that life for him. Giant insects are also a nice twist and an early indicator that the movie isn't taking itself at all seriously. As are the wacky novelty glasses worn by Blind Pew and having Captain Smollett demand that everyone use the French pronunciation of his name. And while I wouldn't dream of spoiling them for you, the dying words of a major character are unbelievably stupid and hilarious and end the movie in the same spirit that it began.

Rating: Three out five giant, peg-leg making bugs.

Dobutsu Takarajima, aka Animal Treasure Island (1971)

Who's In It: Nobody you know, but one of the animators is Hayao Miyazaki in pre-Ghibli days.

What's It About: A boy and his best friend, a mouse, team up with the granddaughter of Captain Flint to find the dead pirate's treasure before the anthropomorphic pig Silver and his gang of bumbling animal pirates do.

How Is It: Frankly, I wasn't expecting much, but sometimes I like watching old, crappy animated versions of classic stories and if I can't hack it, I just turn it off. But even though Miyazaki was only one of the many animators who worked on it, Dobutsu Takarajima has a lot to appeal to fans of the legendary director.

It's a very loose adaptation of Stevenson's book. It takes Jim (no last name in this version) and gets him the map in much the same way as he does in the novel, but then has him strike off on his treasure hunt alone except for his friend Gran and his stowaway baby brother. There's no Dr. Livesy, no Squire Trelawney, no Captain Smollet or Mr. Arrow. Jim and Company run into Silver at sea, get taken to Pirate Island where they're enslaved with Kathy, the granddaughter of Captain Flint, and the race is on to see who can control the map and find the treasure first.

Most of the animal designs are simple and not terribly inventive, but the three humans (Jim, Kathy, and Jim's brother) are strong. And whatever the movie lacks in character design, it makes up in backgrounds and sheer animation. There's a lot of imagination in the look of the world.

The jokes are all over the place from ridiculously slapsticky to legitimately inspired, but I chuckled a lot and my 12-year-old son couldn't stop laughing. Dobutsu Takarajima isn't classic animation, but it's much more than the cheap kids cartoon I anticipated and very recommended for Miyazaki fans.

Rating: Three out of five piratical pigs.

Long John Silver, Volume 1: Lady Vivian Hastings

A note at the end of Long John Silver, Volume 1 says that it doesn’t claim to be a sequel to Treasure Island, but merely an homage to it: an attempt to “find again a bit of stardust from the great dream that Robert Louis Stevenson sparked.” I don’t doubt the sincerity of that comment, but whatever Xavier Dorison and Matheiu Lauffray’s intent, they’ve created as good a Treasure Island sequel as any and a better one than most.

The connection to Stevenson’s novel isn’t immediately apparent. Dorison and Lauffray’s story opens with a beleaguered expedition up the Amazon River and then switches quickly to England where it introduces Lady Vivian Hastings. She’s the unfaithful wife to an absent nobleman and is quite pregnant with the child of another man. She’s let off the moral hook a little though when it’s revealed that her husband is not only just as disloyal to her as she is to him, but that he’s also selling off her inheritance to fund his search for a lost, Amazonian city rumored to be filled with treasure.

Lady Hastings is a deeply flawed woman, but her wits and survival instincts are strong enough to make her a compelling character. With no other ally than her less-than-loyal maid Elsie, Lady Hastings is forced to come up with a plan to endure the destitution that her husband is forcing on her. She decides that she’s due a cut of whatever her husband finds in the Amazon, but she’ll need help to claim it. Fortunately, Elsie’s heard that the local doctor Livesey is rumored to know a man: “a sailor with a peg leg … the kind of man who would follow you into Hell for the promise of gold.”



Unlike Treasure Island, Dorison and Lauffray’s graphic novel is extremely short on noble characters (Dr. Livesey is pretty much the only one), but that’s part of what makes it so interesting. It’s Pirate Noir, a genre that I’m surprised isn’t more popular since the age of piracy is a perfect setting for morally ambiguous crime stories. Making the Macguffin a hidden, jungle city is even cooler and so far Long John Silver is so far in my wheelhouse that it’s keeping a toothbrush there and has taken over my remote.

Lauffray’s lush, detailed art is spectacular and makes the story even more immersive. He was a concept artist on Brotherhood of the Wolf and gives Long John Silver a feel that’s similar to that awesome movie. Whether he’s depicting a snowy landscape, a magnificent ship, or a passionate woman, Lauffray creates a world and characters that feel utterly real. That means that when the peg-legged sailor does show up, he feels real too; as real and morally hazy as he did in Stevenson’s original story. Long John Silver isn’t just a worthy homage to Treasure Island, it’s also an ideal continuation of that story and I can’t wait to read the other three volumes.

Happy Robert Louis Stevenson Day!

Robert Louis Stevenson would've been 160 today. Google even made a special logo for the occasion. Since it's probably a bit late to start planning your celebration, just interject a few good "Arrrs" into conversation wherever you are tonight.

Either that or drink a strange concoction and get wild.