My 14-year-old nephew finally convinced me to read Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes last night. Although the story itself is preposterous gobbledygook, with misogynist and racist undertones, I actually found it to be fun reading. I thought the anthropology was especially interesting, if oversimplified. Burroughs had to invent a fictional species of ape in central Africa for the infant orphan Tarzan to be raised by, but that's ok. These apes were somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale than either gorillas or chimpanzees, with the biggest difference being that they had a spoken language. The "learning window" for human infants for acquiring language closes somewhere around five or 10 years, but if the child learns one language by then, then he'll be able to learn more later. This is what happened with Tarzan. Learning the language spoken by the apes allowed him to learn English as an adult. As a child living with the apes, Tarzan found the stock of books left behind when his real parents had been killed, and taught himself to read and write, even before he was able to speak the English he was reading. In real life, this idea would be ludicrous beyond belief, but Burroughs somehow makes it sound plausible. Actually, you have to suspend belief for a lot of things in the story, but hey, what the heck ... as long as it keeps you turning pages, who cares?
I read every Tarzan book I could get my hands on, back in my early teens. His sense of smell being so developed gives him a completely different super-hero characteristic! I used to absolutely LOVE those books.
the author wrote science fiction stories also if i'm not mistaken.burroughs had several series of books.the teens and 20's appears to be very popular for the adventure novels.
I would consider Tarzan to be science fiction. You have to sort of set credulity aside, but at least it's based on something resembling real science.
