Disposable Lit Reviews

A Princess of Mars (The Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs #1)
Del Rey, 1912/1987
159 pp.
ISBN 0-345-33138-9

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I ddin’t read this intending to review it. After all, do you really need me to tell you about a book that’s been beloved by thousands of readers since it was first serialized in 1912? Because to do so, I’d have to shamefacedly admit that I’ve never read any of Burroughs’ Martian adventures before. In fact, I’ve only read a smattering of any Burroughs series, simply because I buy most of my books used, and the first in the series doesn’t always fall into your collection at a convenient time.

So I read it with no intention of writing about it. Then I said, Well, maybe just a little paragraph in my blog, like I do with most other media that don’t merit a full review.

But shucks… There may be others out there who’re missing this important part of their SF canon education. (You know who you are.)

The premise is classically pulpy. Heroic ex-Confederate John Carter, prospecting in Arizona, is chased by hostile Indians into a cave and is overcome by noxious fumes. Next thing you know, his soul is pulled to Mars, where he falls in with the great green six-limbed Tharks, a barbarous race at war with the more humanoid Red Martians against the backdrop of a dying planet. Carter’s strangely hunky-dory with this arrangement until he catches sight of the Thark’s Red Martian captive, the famously voluptuous princess Dejah Thoris — an alien, yes, but human in all the right ways.

Yes, I know. The plot-ratcheting premise sounds suspiciously like that in the “Buck Rogers” origin story, Armageddon 2419 A.D., a novel bad enough to peel the paint off a Humvee. In fact, it may disturb you to count the ways in which the novels compare: Pontificating first-person narratives, prose so topheavy and purpled you have to cut it with a chainsaw, huge steaming dollops of unnecessary pseudo-science…

The difference is that, in spite of its crudeness, A Princess of Mars is fun. It’s broad, colorful hyper-melodrama, with adventures and escapes and more than a little sexism leaching in from the author’s era. (Hey, I’ll take background sexism over overt “Yellow Peril” racism, such as in Armageddon 2419 A.D., any day.) It’s energetic and zestful, and while one half of your brain goes to great pains to point out the clumsiness in prose and plot, the rest of your brain is enjoying it like a kid in a candy store. Everything is exaggerated in all the best ways, just like the illustrations that Frank Frazetta did of these novels in the ’60’s; nobody captured wish-fulfillment fantasy like Frazetta, and no author ever deserved Frazetta’s imagery like Burroughs. (The cover painting on my paperback, in use since 1979, is by Michael Whelan — no second-stringer, to be sure, but the story just screams for Frazetta.)

All of which tells you nothing more than what a century of Burroughs fans have already said: That the Martian novels are some of the best literary junk food ever. If more disposable lit were of this caliber, it wouldn’t be considered disposable.

Nathan Shumate