John Eric Holmes

• 1. Introduction

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  John Eric Holmes spent his career mapping the human brain, but the worlds that consumed his imagination lay far beneath the earth's surface, in forgotten realms populated by weresharks and warlords. Born on the 16th of February 1930, he was a professor of neurology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, a Marine Corps veteran, and a devotee of fantasy fiction who became one of the quiet architects of the role-playing game hobby. His most consequential act in that world was a single proposal to a game company called TSR: let me write a version of Dungeons and Dragons that younger players can actually understand. The book that followed, the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set of 1977, introduced an entire generation to the dungeon. What brought a neurology professor to that table, and why did some of his most personal work spend more than a decade blocked from publication? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A Military and Medical Pedigree

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  Wilfred "Jasper" Holmes, John's father, was a US Navy officer who wrote adventure stories under the pen name Alec Hudson. That double life, professional duty alongside a hunger for fiction, planted itself in his son. John Holmes served as a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps and fought for two years in Korea before pursuing medicine. He became an associate professor of neurology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine and worked as a medical doctor. His pen operated under several names over the years: his full name, John Eric Holmes; the shortened Eric Holmes and J. Eric Holmes; and the pen name Sidney Leland. He co-authored the textbook Basic Human Neurophysiology with David F. Lindsley in 1984, demonstrating that his professional writing and his pulp enthusiasms ran on separate but parallel tracks. His son Christopher West Holmes carries the family name forward.

• 3. The Fan Before the Author

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  Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. P. Lovecraft were the writers Holmes returned to throughout his life. He described himself as a long-time science fiction fan, and his earliest published work, a short story that appeared in 1951, predates his academic career. By the early 1960s, he was contributing factual articles on neurology to the science fiction magazine Astounding and its successor Analog, threading his expertise into the pages of a genre he loved. Fantasy role-playing games joined that enthusiasm, and Holmes became known both as a Dungeon Master, the referee who runs D&D sessions, and as someone who could analyze the psychology of gaming with a clinician's eye. He wrote on Dungeons and Dragons from both angles, producing four short stories and one novel set in a D&D-influenced world. Those stories, joined by a previously unpublished tale, were collected in 2017 in Tales of Peril: the Complete Boinger and Zereth Stories of John Eric Holmes, edited by Allan T. Grohe Jr and published by Black Blade Publishing.

• 4. Rewriting the Dungeon Door

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  Holmes walked into TSR with a specific diagnosis of the game's problem: Dungeons and Dragons, as it stood in the mid-1970s, was written for college-age players and locked out younger audiences and the mass market. His proposal was to develop a cleaner introductory version. TSR agreed, and the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set appeared in 1977. It was a revision of the original Dungeons and Dragons by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, drawing also on three early supplements: Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry. Holmes did not simply abbreviate the existing rules; he shaped them into something a newcomer could hold. Before that book reached shelves, he had already added to the D&D creature roster. In July 1976 he published the wereshark monster in Alarums and Excursions issue 13, giving the game a predator that bore his personal stamp.

• 5. Pellucidar and Its Obstacles

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  Holmes wrote two novels set in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar, the fictional hollow-earth world that Burroughs invented. The first, Mahars of Pellucidar, was authorized by the Burroughs estate. The second, Red Axe of Pellucidar, was reportedly blocked by that same authority. Holmes had Red Axe ready for publication in 1980, but it only reached readers thirteen years later, through a private printing. Both novels were ultimately given official releases by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. in 2022 in hardcover, paperback, Kindle, and audio CD, as part of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe series. A third Pellucidar novel, Swordsmen of Pellucidar, was planned but never finished. His other pastiches saw uneven outcomes as well: a Buck Rogers novel called Mordred was published, but a Conan novel contracted and paid for by Tor Books was ultimately rejected. A collaboration with John Coleman Burroughs, son of Edgar Rice Burroughs and a man Holmes helped treat for Parkinson's disease, titled Danton Doring, was never completed.

• 6. A Community's Recognition

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  Holmes was a regular presence at Edgar Rice Burroughs fan conventions, events known as ECOF, the Edgar Rice Burroughs Chain of Friendship. At ECOF '93, held in Willows, California, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his Burroughs pastiches. He was named Guest of Honor for the 2004 ECOF Convention in Sacramento, California, but suffered a stroke before the event and could not attend. He recovered enough to appear as a special guest at the June 2005 ECOF in Portland, Oregon. Holmes died on the 20th of March 2010. The 2022 release of both Pellucidar novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. means his authorized fiction in that universe now reaches readers who were born decades after he first submitted Red Axe for publication.