Lords of Creation

Science fiction author S. M. Stirling has recently started a new series called "Lords of Creation" that features to date one novel---The Sky People and another one In the Courts of the Crimson Kings scheduled to come out later this Spring. I quote a portion of this Acknowledgements from the first book:

Thanks to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Otis Adelbert Kline, Leinster, Heinlein, and to all the other great pulpsters for gracing my childhood with John Carter, Northwest Smith, “Wrong-Way” Carson of Venus, and all the heroes gifted with a better solar system than the one we turned out to inhabit. From the jungles of Venus and the Grand Canal of Marsopolis, I salute
you.

Frankly, I think anyone who freely acknowledges that he's writing an alternate history science fiction where Venus and Mars are as envisioned by writers like Burroughs, Brackett or Kline to be on the right track. I'm almost ½ of my way through The Sky People right now; Venus is much like Pellucidar; a mixed bag of dinosaurs, sabertooths, Neanderthals and beautiful primitive Cro-Magnon like humans, and the rival Soviet and American colonies get off to a bit of trouble when a Soviet ship carrying a cargo of AK-47's crashlands in Neanderthal territory.

As much as I like The Sky People, I have to admit that the prospect of In the Courts of the Crimson Kings set on Mars sounds even more exciting to me. Maybe that's just because I love the Mars of Burroughs and Brackett so much, though.

Holy cow. As much as it's fashionable to hate George Lucas these days, I love him to death. Not least because he made old fashioned science fiction like used to be in the pulps and Republic serials a viable (and indeed extremely popular) genre to work in again.

George Lucas, S. M Stirling, Leigh Brackett and Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as Murray Leinster, Otis Adelbert Kline, Edmond Hamilton, Ralph Milne Farley, Alex Raymond and even Lin Carter... as well as countless others... I salute you!