Author: Joel Jenkins

“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again and I’ll keep on saying it until they slam the lid shut: Dire Planet is the best Edgar Rice Burroughs novel not written by Edgar Rice Burroughs.” -Derrick Ferguson, author of Dillon and the Voice of Odin.

“If high adventure and deeply realized alien cultures with lots of beautiful warrior women are your bag, you owe it to yourself to check this sucker out.” -Russ Anderson, editor of How the West was Weird 1,2, and Campfire Tales.

This novel originated as a serialized story written for Frontier Publishing, appearing on a bi-weekly basis. I wanted to do something in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter Warlord of Mars–something that brought that sense of awe and excitement that I felt when I first read those stories–yet I wanted to write something unique enough to stand on its own.
Dire Planet fits nicely into the genres known as planetary adventure or planetary romance, but I like to call it sword and science fiction.  It takes place on Mars and features stranded American astronaut Garvey Dire, who is not nearly so good with a sword as John Carter of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels, but what he lacks in skill he makes up with persistence and tenacity, and the fact that his musculature is used to gravity that is three times stronger than on the Martian planet.
After Frontier Publishing was through serializing Dire Planet, this novel was published by Cyber-Pulp, Rage Machine Press, and now PulpWork Press which has also published the succeeding four novels.