A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a child I read a great deal of pulp fantasy from the shelves of Harpenden public library, but for some reason I never picked up anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, probably because I mainly associated his name with Tarzan - a character that never really appealed to me. Recently I noticed that the first of the John Carter novels was available on Project Gutenberg, and so I downloaded it to have a read.

The story opens with a framing device with the author describing a manuscript entrusted to him by the late John Carter, a veteran of the American civil war. The manuscript gives an account of how John Carter, on the run from a murderous posse of Apaches, hid himself in a mysterious cave and from there was somehow projected from his Earthly body to find himself on Mars. There then follows a breathless series of adventures amongst the various warring tribes of Mars, where Carter's martial skill combined with the benefits of the lower gravity gives him a distinct advantage. He struggles to understand the various strange cultural mores of the inhabitants of Barsoom, as their world is called, and he fights for and eventually wins the hand of a beautiful Princess.

It is a novel very much of its time, but there are some fine speculative ideas about the nature of life on Barsoom amidst all of the sword fights, swashbuckling battles and general derring do. The romantic subplot threatens to go a bit Mills and Boon in places, with tragic misunderstandings and each believing the other to have died, but on the whole it does take a back seat to all of the action.

It's not a great work of literature, but then again it doesn't pretend to be. If you don't take it too seriously, and treat it as a historical romance rather than a work of serious science fiction, then it is an enjoyable light read.

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