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By 1939 it was becoming obvious to most of the people of the world that war such as the Earth had never seen was about to engulf the planet. Edgar Rice Burroughs penned a tale in 1940 that foretold the horrors of unrestricted warfare and predicted the assault of military forces against civilian cities, propoganda machines run amok and the indoctrination of youth into ideologies that would cause them to betray family and friends to oppressive governments. These predictions did not take place on our world. Burroughs created a world at war 450,000 light years from Earth--a world which had been in heavy conflict for over 100 years. This war was costly in the lives of men and civilians and was fought with advanced technologies embodied in air armadas of immense size and destructive capability. An Earthman, known only by his Polodan name "Tangor" had perished in the skies of 1939 wartime Europe and reappeared in the nation of Unis on Poloda.There he is befriended by those of the beleaguered nation and becomes an aviator to protect his adopted country. Poloda is much like earth with many creatures which are counterparts to those of our planet, but we see little of the world itself as it is War, in all its horror and brutality, that is the landscape upon which the story is told. Burroughs invested a great deal of time devising the background for Beyond The Farthest Star and Tangor Returns. An alphabet, numbers, social structures and traditions were created, as he did with many other stories of distant world, but for Poloda he went a step further and invented an entire solar system of a most unusual nature.
Ed Burroughs did not return to Poloda to give us more stories before his death in 1950, but the possibilities for an entire series of tales on strange and exotic worlds seem quite evident. For an outline of what MIGHT have happened, see The Brothers Bozarth's Beyond Poloda. The Poloda Series
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The Omos Solar System contains eleven planets orbiting a sun very like ours in a SHARED orbit. Each planet is approximately the same size. What is most unusual about this system of planets is that they all share a common atmosphere, a doughnut shaped belt of breathable air connecting all the planets together. At the end of Tangor Returns our heros and Handon Gar, a Unisian, are about to embark on a voyage of interplanetary discovery in an airplane equipped with a solar-powered generator as the motive force.