The word on the street is that Disney made a film adaptation of this book, they called it John Carter, and they lost a snoot-load of money on it. I saw the film. I can understand why. So it baffles me how a good book can make a not-so-good movie.
John Carter is a derring-do survivor of the American Civil war. He goes prospecting in Arizona after the war and disappears for ten years. What folk don't know is that he was transported to the planet Mars and had a lot of adventures there before he was returned to Earth.
A Princess of Mars is the first Edgar Rice Burroughs novel I have read. It was first published in 1912, and Burroughs is considered to be one of the early pulp fiction writers. I can see how he would have been popular with his audience. His prose is plain yet eloquent; the narrative never bogs down in any one place, and the action is kept moving along. The plot is simple in its broadest sense, and yet there is enough sub-plotting to allow for some nicely executed twists. And there was a novelty in Burroughs' vision of a Martian civilisation.
Yes, the Mars that John Carter visits has quite a few cultures, and he has direct experience of a few of them. In a way, Carter acts as a kind of amateur anthropologist, relating to the reader his discoveries about the strange races of Mars and their histories. Of course, the century that has elapsed since the debut of A Princess of Mars has given us many repetitions of the novelties this book contains, and it is a generous reader who keeps in mind how original Burroughs might have in his day. It would seem that Burroughs keyed into the zeitgeist as radium features prominently in the story as a wonder material. Today we know the hazards of radium.
I enjoyed A Princess of Mars. It is a little tame by today's standards, but it is a good story and one well told.
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