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Together they tell the saga of John Carter’s journey to Barsoom and rise to power as Warlord of Mars. Ray Bradbury from “Take Me Home” in The New Yorker June 4 & 11, 2012 IssueĪ Princess of Mars forms a single story with its two immediate sequels, The Gods of Mars (serialized 1913) and The Warlord of Mars (serialized 1913/1914). I would go out to that lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, “Take me home!” I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities. If you don’t believe me, take Ray Bradbury’s word for it when he said if he hadn’t read the John Carter novels when he was young, The Martian Chronicles would never have been written. When done right, it’s a blast of pure literary joy.
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Adventure, excitement, danger, great romance, these are the foremost concerns. It’s the first sword and planet story, a genre where low technology exists beside super-science on distant, exotic worlds, and there’s little concern about scientifically sound explanations for it all. A Princess of Mars is absolutely deserving of the mind-blowingly pulpy cover illustrations of Frank Frazetta.Įdgar Rice Burroughs’ second published novel (initially serialized in The All-Story magazine in 1912) is one of the foundational novels of modern heroic fiction.
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To some, that might sound juvenile, but they are wrong. A Princess of Mars is pure escapist fantasy, where the protagonist, standing in for the increasingly civilized American man Burroughs was writing for, fights and defeats all foes, outwits every enemy, and wins the hand of the most beautiful woman in the world. Along that path to glory, thousands of miles are traveled and thousands of foes slain. On Mars, a dying, barren world littered with the ruins of millennia-gone civilizations, he finds his great love and becomes the greatest hero that Barsoom, as its inhabitants call Mars, has ever known. By unknown means, he finds his spirit severed from his body and transported to Mars. Chased by torture-minded Apaches, Carter secrets himself in a cave. So reacts John Carter, ex-cavalryman of the Army of Northern Virginia, when he transmigrates to the red planet in A Princess of Mars (1917). You do not question the fact neither did I. I was not asleep, no need for pinching here my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. I knew that I was on Mars not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness. I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape.