Nicholas Diak, an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan and scholar of peplum cinema (don’t know what that is? Visit his site and find out!) has posted a wide-ranging interview with me. Included in it are some relatively obscure fact about my background and interests, along with news about my next book project (I’m about halfway through and having tons of fun with it!) and my first time ever of being the Guest of Honor at a significant fannish event. I’ve been a Special Guest at the San Diego Comic-Con, which is cool, but they have 20 or 30 Special Guests every year, so it’s hardly unique. At this gathering, there’s only one Guest of Honor, and it’s moi. I’m the one honored by the distinction. Another cool thing about the interview is that it has absolutely the best title of any piece that’s ever been done about me: Thunder in God’s Country: Interview with Jeffrey Mariotte.
The event is the Edgar Rice Burroughs Chain of Friendship (ECOF) Gathering in Willcox, AZ, September 25–28, 2025 (so, yeah, next month. Sorry for the late notice!). 2025 is the 150th anniversary of Burroughs’s birth on September 1, 1875 (80 years and 6 days before my birth) and the ECOF is celebrating that as well as Burroughs’s service at Fort Grant, AZ, just north of Willcox, where he was assigned as a cavalryman with the 7th Cavalry in 1896. On September 27, a monument to that service will be placed at the restored Southern Pacific train depot in Willcox, where he would have gotten off the train to begin his service. The cave that served as John Carter’s transit point to Mars in ERB’s Mars series was in this part of Arizona, which is up the Sulfur Springs Valley from where I lived from 2004–2014, on forty acres in the middle of nowhere.
I’ll be giving a keynote speech of some kind—better start working on that, huh?—and I’ll have a table in the huckster’s room with an assortment of my books available.
The related news is that my next book was announced at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. In 1915, Burroughs wrote a short novel called Beyond Thirty, which told the story of Navy lieutenant Jefferson Turck. With three of his men, Turck was abandoned at sea in a small boat. They had inadvertently crossed the 30th longitude, which had been forbidden for 200 years, since the outbreak of WWI—the only way to keep the war from spreading to the Americas (now united as the Pan-American Federation). Turck and company land in what used to be England, which is now overrun by savage beasts and barbaric tribesmen.
At the end of the book, Turck and Victory—a barbarian woman descended from Britain’s royal family—have returned to Pan-America, where plans are being made to return her to her homeland and install her on Britain’s crown, as she deserves. But Burroughs never wrote the rest of the story, so ERB, Inc. asked me to do so. It’s another honor, on top of being asked to write Tarzan and to be the GoH at the ECOF. My book will be called Beyond Thirty: A World Reborn.
One more thing: I’m writing occasional pieces for Thought Catalog, a website covering lots of cool topics. I’m covering comics/superheroes/anime & manga news. You can find them here. And if you have any news in those areas, let me know! My contact info is on the…ummm….Contact page.
