A Princess of Mars

After seeing the film John Carter, which is based on this book, I decided to read the book again. It’s been quite a long time and many books ago so I was curious. After the first number of chapters already I was aware that ‘based on’ in this case should be taken very lightly. Yes, there is a John Carter and yes, he goes to Mars or Barsoom. Most of the characters are there, like Dejah Thoris, Sola and Tars Tarkas. Most of the adventures and locations however were changed or entirely discarded. This is quite a lot for a 140 page book.

Again I found the book to be better than the film. So far this has never been different (only with Lord of the Rings I can say that the films equal the books in many places but still there the books are the best).

Edgar Rice Burroughs did an outstanding job in creating the people and conditions on Mars, considering he wrote the book in 1917. With the knowledge of the red planet from those days he had a lot of things quite right, which is why I give it that 5th star. Of course now we have the Curiosity Rover, but that does not take anything away from the brilliance of this book. I can highly recommend it.

I'm rereading this series because of the movie coming out this week, and I'm being a bit generous with a 4 star rating just because of the age of the book; published in 1912 it's among the earliest speculative fiction and is a classic I grew up with. Really there's very little plot at all; the story centers around civil war hero John Carter, mysteriously transported to Mars (aka Barsoom) where he happily finds himself in possession of near-superhuman strength due to the weaker gravity of Mars. He moves from one battle or crisis to another, winning friends with his fighting skills, and there really isn't much to the plot beyond that; just John Carter valiantly and usually single-handedly fighting various villains of Mars in various different locations with a sketchy plot to explain his presence. The men are all strong, chivalrous, and brave; the women are all beautiful, virtuous, and loyal; and the villains are all black-hearted, shifty-eyed, and vicious. No surprises here, and throughout the series Burroughs is frequently inconsistent within his own universe which can be annoying (for example remembering that the Mars year is twice the length of the Earth year only when convenient; or having John Carter waste a day or more failing to choose which is the correct path to take to follow the princess, despite having his martian hound Woola by his side who could presumably have smelled the correct path in seconds, etc etc). Nonetheless it's one of the earliest written novels set on another planet, and a remarkable imagination considering the time it was written. Pulp fiction it is, but classic pulp fiction and sometimes charming in its archaic style.