Finishing On Jupiter For This Evening

We are surprised to find some adventure, imagination and characterization in the concluding chapters of ERB's "Skeleton Men of Jupiter." There is also a hastily written ending to what had been meant to be the opening instalment of a short series to fill a volume. Carter is only just about to be reunited with Dejah Thoris but they have neither returned to Mars nor prevented the threatened invasion of that planet. It is as if ERB knew that there would be no more and tried to convey a sense of a conclusion even though the action remained unresolved.

Meanwhile (in my reading order), Poul Anderson's Edward Anglesey, on his version of Jupiter, sees lightning and hears thunder as flame erupts and a hillside falls in a sodium explosion. He enters his dugout of frozen and compressed water ventilated by a tiny smoke hole and lit by an oil lamp. This sounds more like Earth than (what we now know of) Jupiter. 

He eats a dead dekapod raw and drinks liquid methane. This does not sound like Earth. But the methane comes from a jug, which does. He has to make his own tools with teeth, claws, icicles and fragments of a spaceship and it will take him years to live comfortably. When he lies down to sleep on Jupiter, he takes off his helmet on Jupiter V, a man with two bodies.

James Blish's Helmuth controls machines, not an organic body, from Jupiter V. Similarities but also differences. Simak's characters become the bodies in which they explore Jupiter. Another difference.