Finished Edgar Rice Burroughs' first novel A Princess Of Mars the other day. Part of my quest to read all of the classic adventure novels.
Burroughs, as you are probably aware, was the author of the Tarzan novels, but supposedly his favorites to write were his Mars novels starring civil war vet transported to Mars via astral projection, John Carter.
It isn't hard to see why. It was a rip roaring delight; it never slows down for anything, least of all to make anything any more plausible than is absolutely necessary.
John Carter has an out of bady experience and then, just light that, he's on Mars (known to the inhabitants as Barsoom). John Carter is a bit like Superman on Mars because the lower gravity means that, in comparison to the denizens of the red planet, he's incredibly strong and can jump tall buildings in a single bound, etc. He falls in with the gigantic, six armed green men of Mars and then goes about just generally Lawrence of Arabia-ing until he meets the titular character of the novel, the red woman, Dejah Thoris, and falls in love.
What follows is a series of rather easily concluded (usually with swordplay) rescues of said Dejah Thoris, and then John Carter accidentally gets beamed back to his body back on Earth.
The romance of the book is palpable. It is drenched in that old adventure novel glaze and it is utterly saturated with the vision of Mars I think we all wish were true. Indeed, not long after this novel was published, we began to learn enough about Mars to quash all of our dreams of an inhabited red planet, crisscrossed with canals and dotted with ancient cities. Sad, in a way.
In any event, it's a light, breezy pulp novel from the year 1917 and it is every bit as much fun as Tarzan (and thankfully is mostly free from the blemishes of racism found here and there in that seminal book). I recommend it highly, it's like Star Wars, but without the spaceships and the coming of age story.
I envy you. You are only just now discovering the joy of Barsoom. I wish I could recapture that first time again. I first read these books over 40 years ago and they blew my little mind at the time. Especially imagining Dejah Thoris running around naked, being rescued by the also naked John Carter all the time.
ReplyDeleteYou've got to read at least the next two books in the series. Together they form a complete trilogy, with a beginning, middle and end. The other novels are interesting in their own right, but the first three are a complete series and should be read together.
You may or may not already know this, but Disney has been working on a series of three movies covering the first three novels. The first of these movies, John Carter, is due out next year, one hundred years after A Princess of Mars was first published in All Star Magazine. I can't wait to see what they've done with the story.