Summers Metaphorical

This Is The Guiltiest I've Ever Felt For Not Completing My Novel

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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.