Such are the tantalizing suppositions behind The Sky People, the first book in S.M. Stirling's Lords of Creation series, most of which takes place on Venus (with the next installment, In the Court of the Crimson Kings, scheduled to shift the action to Mars). This is a Venus different in its fertile particulars from that imagined by Burroughs, but the underlying engine of romance and adventure—along with a paternalistic civilization bringing enlightenment to a race of noble savages while smiting other, less noble savages—is so strikingly similar that it would not be too surprising to find Carson Napier putting in a cameo appearance ... which, in a sense, he does: One of the two ships making the Earth-Venus run for the United States Aerospace Force (USASF) is the Carson.

When a Soviet space shuttle crashes in the Venusian wilderness, circumstances compel the Russians to go hat in hand to the Americans for help in rescuing the crew. The joint U.S.-Soviet mission that is quickly dispatched—by airship, naturally!—soon meets a similar fate, leaving its crew stranded in the midst of an unimaginably hostile environment. Nor is all the hostility external; one of the surviving rescuers may be a saboteur working for the French-led European Union, an upstart power looking to muscle in on the Americans and Soviets.

Other tensions afflict the survivors of the airship crash. Lt. Marc Vitrac, USASF, a Cajun version of the traditional omnicompetent man, lusts after dusky Harlem honey Cynthia Whitlock. Problem is, so does Wing Commander Christopher Blair, RAF, an uptight, blue-eyed, blond-haired Etonian. Meanwhile, although their mission has changed from rescue to survival, the Soviet member of the team, Jadviga Binkis, is determined to continue the search for the missing shuttle pilot, who happens to be her husband, Franziskus.

Fortunately, Franziskus soon appears. Unfortunately, he shows up leading a murderous band of Neanderthal thugs (there seem no other kind in this novel) equipped with Earth weapons. Even worse, Franziskus appears to be under alien mind control.

Other evidence of an alien presence comes through the introduction of the beautiful Teesa, the queen/high priestess of the Cloud People, a tribe of Homo sapiens that befriends Marc and the others. Teesa wears a "simple circlet of light-colored metal with a green gem" that endows its possessor with telepathic abilities. When she communes mentally with Marc, can there be any doubt that a more intimate physical communion is soon to follow?

Meanwhile, the alien entity manipulating Franziskus sets into motion events that will threaten the Americans and Soviets on Venus ... and perhaps life on Earth as well.

Burroughs fidelity can be a weakness

When it comes to action, especially military action, Stirling is excellent. His set-piece battles between the Cloud People and their Earthly allies and the Neanderthals, featuring bows and arrows, blowguns and mind-controlled saurians in addition to automatic weapons, are crisply rendered and make for reading as propulsive as anything Burroughs wrote about Mars or Pellucidar, his land at the earth's core.

But unfortunately The Sky People is not all action. When it comes to backstory and character, Stirling falls short.

For a writer so skilled in the creation and extrapolation of alternate-history scenarios—see, for example, the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy—the clunky, threadbare setup here is mystifying. Stirling postulates a world in which historical events occurred as they did in our world up until the 1920s, when scientists on Earth first begin to amass evidence showing that Mars and Venus are both habitable and inhabited. (Of course, his history has actually diverged hundreds of millions of years earlier, due to alien intervention unknown to his contemporary humans until their arrival on Mars and Venus, but that's a different matter.) Even then, history is relatively unchanged from what we know until the '60s, when the Soviets and Americans, and their respective allies, channel all their treasure into a space race. There is no Vietnam, and the Middle East is "a sleepy backwater," apparently without notable hostility between Arabs and Jews post-1967 and no difficulties over Western appropriation of oil, which presumably is as necessary as ever. In terms of U.S. history alone, there are no civil rights or women's rights movements (at least, none is mentioned), no anti-war movement, no JFK assassination, no Watergate, etc.

These cultural absences are not reflected in the main characters of the novel, and they should be. Stirling's characters should be different than we are in regard to their racial and gender attitudes, at the very least, and they simply aren't. In fact, not only do they fail to come across as products of a culture and history significantly divergent from our own, they don't really come across as individuals at all.

That Cynthia Whitlock is a black woman from Harlem, for example, seems to play very little role in the kind of person she is beyond utterances such as "I'm not equipped to blanch—but consider it done!" and, upon first encountering the primitive city of Kartahown, "Shee-it, no. Not even the 'hood I came from was anything like this." Stereotypical much?

Mr. Omnicompetence himself, Marc Vitrac, is similarly stereotypical, a John Carter clone with a Cajun accent and history grafted on in place of a distinct personality. That in fact he's not really omnicompetent, nor even all that competent, seems less an ironic commentary by the author on the conventions of the planetary romance as practiced by Burroughs than it is blind adherence to those conventions. Burroughs was no Tolstoy when it came to creating believable characters, but that doesn't mean that Stirling, in paying homage to Burroughs, need emulate his flaws quite so diligently!

An intriguing mystery, all but ignored so far, is whether Burroughs and the other pulp writers whose visions of Mars and Venus have turned out to be so surprisingly accurate were somehow influenced by the aliens whose advanced technology is encountered by the heroes of The Sky People.