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Literature has long held that the interior of the earth is inhabited, but nowhere in the dusty tomes of by-gone days was there a more realistic or vast inner world described than Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar. At The Earth's Core, first published in 1914, begins a seven novel series that spanned Ed Burroughs' writing career. The earth's core, according to Burroughs, was a mirror reverse of the outer world, beginning some 500 miles beneath the surface. Where land existed on the crust, oceans lay in Pellucidar, thus giving rise to the incongruity of a smaller inner world having more land area than the outer world!
A riot of vegetation, including varieties which passed with the dinosaurs on the surface, chokes large sections of the land masses. The atmosphere is thick with cloud and moisture, but on clear days one can view the astonishing vista of the horizon curing upward!
Pellucidar has native Sagoths (a kind of intelligent ape) and Mahars (intelligent flying reptiles) and primitive human races, but it also has cultures from the outer world who entered through the polar openings and carved out large empires from the vast Pellucidarian landscape. Pellucidar has one other distinction in all the ERB canon: it is the site of a cross-over story between the inner world of David Innes and the outer world of Tarzan of the Apes. In Tarzan At The Earth's Core Lord Greystoke arrives with Jason Gridley and others on a rescue mission, but even mighty Tarzan had his hands full surviving the perils of Pellucidar! The Pellucidar Series
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Pellucidar has a miniature sun and stationary moon orbiting at the gravitational center of the earth. There is no night in the land of the noonday sun, thus time has little or no meaning to the inhabitants and the weird and wonderful beasts within. Gigantic dinosaurs exist side by side with huge mammals long extinct in the outer world.
Ed Burroughs always created worlds with great detail--the biology, flora and fauna, even the geology is plausible and correct (he was well-educated in this field), but the reader's enjoyment stems from the variety and inventiveness of the human and humanoid cultures that populate these worlds of imagination.
