Zanthar of the Many Worlds

Robert Moore Williams Zanthar of the Many Worlds (1967)
To continue thematically from yesterday, as with and the Daemons, Zanthar likewise builds upon the ancient astronaut thing while being subject to a puzzling reception on Goodreads. The latter is represented by a consensus view of Zanthar as an Edgar Rice Burroughs knock off, specifically John Carter of Mars, except it isn't anything like as amazing as Edgar Rice Burroughs because, you know, how could it be? The ancient astronaut aspect is, for what it may be worth, more like an outgrowth of Williams' seemingly singular worldview.

As a follower of Merritt - more so than he was of the aforementioned chortling Klan apologist - it shouldn't be too surprising that Williams whisks a brilliant two-fisted theoretical physicist off to an alien world in order to liberate strange beings from their despotic masters. More surprising is how much this one lurches so wildly from the alleged formula, and that Edgar's barmy army should have failed to notice the difference. Robert Moore Williams suffered from schizophrenic episodes and was subject to visions and voices, possibly not so much as to impair his ability to function from one day to the next, but it granted him a certain perspective and one which is vividly expressed in his otherwise notionally mainstream writing. Zanthar returns to certain themes and tropes characteristic of the author and his psychological landscape - the spy rays, the telepathy, a universe ordered according to a sort of theosophical hierarchy - in this case a demonic underworld of endless layers, and a universal force which pervades and affects all. If it's Jon Carter, then it's very much a psychedelic take on the same and can occasionally be as disorientating as you might expect of an idealistic older pulp writer who'd been hanging around with flower children.

Though each knew that physics had begun to lose its walls and barriers of all kinds that had existed for the world of materialistic physics had begun to go down, neither was prepared to face the reality that lay back of this hypothesis. As the great ship flew silently at enormous speed over the Pacific Ocean, each discovered within himself the truly enormous gulf existing between intellectual understanding of the universe and the actual experience of it. They were like hipsters who had read all the books on LSD, only to discover on the first trip that the books hadn't told the whole story.

See? Exactly like Edgar Rice Burroughs!

I'm being sarcastic.

Robert Moore Williams seemingly hammered out a million of these things, and they don't always make for a particularly smooth read where hastily constructed prose does its best to shoehorn pseudo-philosophical revelations into something wherein a man goes around hitting his enemies with a copper hammer; and the orientalism is a bit odd in this one, but - quite frankly - it pisses all over anything written by the genius who came up with Tarzan, and may even be one of the more coherent and engaging representatives of Williams' thoroughly weird body of work.