The protagonist of At the Earth's Core, David Innes, spends ten years of his life, beginning at age nineteen or twenty, in Pellucidar. He is a serious man with a noble heart who had been diligently working in his late father's firm as a faithful son who wished to fulfill his beloved father's wishes for him. Even though heroic, he is quite bland, without much sense of humor or passions beyond his love for Dian.

This is typical of heroes of escapist fiction; authors often make such heroes indistinct, with few individualized characteristics so that their readers may imagine themselves as the hero and attribute their own personalities to him.

If David is bland, the characters around him are not. Perry, inventor of the machine that drills from the surface world into Pellucidar, is eccentric and full of ideas. Prone to wander into trouble...