Customer Reviews

Prince of Peril

Back in the early 1960s, there was a long-running and frequently passionate debate in the letters column of _Amazing_ over this burning issue: "Who was the better writer-- Edgar Rice Burroughs or Otis Adelbert Kline?" If memory serves, defenders of Burroughs cited his greater originality and powers of description. Defenders of Kline would argue that E.R.B. was overly verbose, whereas Kline would always get straight down to the action and would never let it bog down. There was one letter writer who did a parody of a Burroughs hero standing in a Martian tunnel meditating about what he should do. He finally decides to jump. But, forgetting the low gravity of Mars, he bumps his head and knocks himself out. Kline would never do _that_, the reader triumphantly proclaimed. He would keep things moving.

_The Prince of Peril_ (first serialized in _Argosy_ in 1930) is the second of Kline's Venus novels, though the action takes place at roughly the same time as the first novel, _The Planet of Peril_ (1929). It seems that shortly after Robert Grandon is transported to Venus, a second hero is sent by the good Dr. Morgan to another part of that planet. In _The Planet of Peril_, Grandon awakes in the slave quarters. The hero of _Prince_ wakes up as a nobleman who is the target of vicious assassins and sneering revolutionaries. He is later captured by ape men and mechanical men. And there is, of course, a beautiful princess in need of frequent rescuing, though she is not always properly grateful for the service.

One of the things that I like about this novel is the abundance of creatures. There are ship-gobbling ordzooks, whistling serpents, hairless bearlike creatures of chlorophyll green and yellow, slimy swamp slugs boiling out of the water, wild sheeplike freelas, reptilian krogers (including one baby), and more. The villains are all straight out of stock melodrama, but the creatures liven things up.

Now eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I did not state my own position in this Great Debate. Well, I felt at the time that it was all much ado about nothing. But if I were forced to pick sides, I suppose that I would plunk in favor of Burroughs for the reasons listed above. Still, _The Prince of Peril_ should appeal to fans of old-fashioned planetary romances who like a lot of non-stop action. And do you know, I liked it a lot better than I thought I would.

When Otis Kline decided to jump into the planetary romance genre dominated by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1920s, Kline started off with this book's companion novel, Planet of Peril. Unfortunately that book betrays its nature as an early work and is not one of the more engaging entries in the genre. Fortunately Kline rapidly improved his writing ability and produced this, his finest novel set on Venus. Prince of Peril is not so much a sequel to its predecessor as a companion novel. Despite similar plotlines, the books have separate heroes and take place essentially simultaneously, just in different parts of Kline's Venus. Borgen Takkor--the Martian who switched places with Earthman Harry Thorne in Swordsman of Mars--here switches places with a Venusian prince and goes through a series of adventures to win the hand of the princess of the most powerful kingdom on Venus. There's nothing new to the genre in the story, but Kline's description of his planet, crisp action scenes, and sense of pacing make up for that. Ultimately this is the best novel of Kline's Venus trilogy and is one of the better entries in the planetary romance genre outside Edgar Rice Burroughs' work.