Mark's Reviews > Stories of Mars

Part 1: A Princess of Mars

Recent comments in the Forum I help run coincidentally led to this tome arriving on my desk. I approached it with some caution, admittedly. Whilst aware of the dated nature of stories from a similar age – racism, sexism, gender bias, etc – what else is there to say on a book which has influenced so many classic science fiction writers?

After all, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance, Arthur C Clarke, and George Lucas have all been influenced by this series. (I’m sure that there are many others.) Scientists such as Carl Sagan have said how much the books inspired them when they read as a child.

But I was intrigued. Would a book, much beloved by many, still hold up 110 years after it’s initial publication?

Certainly if my view was based on the majority of comments made about the Disney movie of 2012, it would not be good (although I liked the movie myself.)

Ok. To business. The plot -  John Carter, a Confederate soldier from Western Virginia, finds himself mysteriously transported to the planet Barsoom, which we know as Mars. There he finds that his Earth-based muscles allow him to do strange things in the Martian environment. He can hop hundreds of feet into the air and strike killer blows, thanks to the lower gravity and thinner atmosphere.

On his arrival to Mars he is taken captive by Tharks, green-skinned, six-limbed creatures. His superhuman abilities are seen as something of great prowess by the war-like Tharks, and Carter is soon made to be a chieftain.   Tars Tarkas, once his captor, becomes his friend.

When Dejah Thoris, red-skinned Princess of Helium, is captured by the Tharks, Carter returns her to her people and eventually manages to get the Tharks and people of Helium to work together, leading a horde of Tharks against the city-state of Zodanga, the historic enemy of Helium. Carter and Dejah fall in love. Carter becomes Prince of Helium, and the two live happily together for nine years.

All seems good, but when the Atmosphere Plant that sustains Mars’s air supply breaks down and endangers all life on Barsoom, Carter, with the aid of an engineer, fixes it but falls unconscious in the process to find himself awake and back on Earth, left to wonder what has become of Barsoom and Dejah.

As you might expect, the science is pretty improbable, even allowing for what Mars was thought to be like in 1912. We have weapons designed to impress - rifles that, unrestricted by atmospheric friction or gravity, can fire bullets that can travel for hundreds of miles, for example.

There’s mentions of the actions of blood-thirsty Indians in Arizona that would not sit well with a modern audience, although the Tharks are perhaps more so. The good manners of southern gentleman Carter and the aristocratic mannerisms of Dejah Thoris read rather like a Martian version of Gone With the Wind – totally polite and rather archaic today, but their romance has charm.

 

“And the sight which met my eyes was that of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life. She did not see me at first, but just as she was disappearing through the portal of the building which was to be her prison she turned, and her eyes met mine. Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.”

 

The chivalrous male defending a female’s honour still has a place in Edgar’s tale.

As I rather suspected it would be, the body count is large, although graphic details are thankfully few. And whilst Martians seem to be dispatched with relative ease and rapid regularity, there is no consideration of the moral consequences of such actions. This is not that kind of story. The actions of the characters are clear with little ambiguity, and their behaviours match the sense of adventure. There’s little time for contemplation here. The lack of ambiguity was actually quite refreshing.

Perhaps most of all, I liked the sense of antiquity that the story has. There is a sense that Mars is an age-old planet with a long history, both physical and social. The vivid images of Martian plains, ancient canals and historical cities make this a Mars I’d like to see. I can see why such creative descriptions have remained in the imagination.

“The remainder of our journey to Thark was uneventful. We were twenty days upon the road, crossing two sea bottoms and passing through or around a number of ruined cities, mostly smaller than Korad. Twice we crossed the famous Martian waterways, or canals, so-called by our earthly astronomers. When we approached these points a warrior would be sent far ahead with a powerful field glass, and if no great body of red Martian troops was in sight we would advance as close as possible without chance of being seen and then camp until dark, when we would slowly approach the cultivated tract, and, locating one of the numerous, broad highways which cross these areas at regular intervals, creep silently and stealthily across to the arid lands upon the other side. It required five hours to make one of these crossings without a single halt, and the other consumed the entire night, so that we were just leaving the confines of the high-walled fields when the sun broke out upon us.”

 

As such examples show, Rice Burroughs’s prose is rather purple in its vibrant descriptions. It is ERB’s first story published, before the more famous creation of Tarzan, and it does show. It feels like it is written in a proto-Weird Tales style (even though the magazine is not due until 1922-23!) that is readable, if not quite as verbose as say Clark Ashton Smith or Lovecraft.

A Princess of Mars may not be the greatest literature ever, but then it has never claimed to be. It is from an age of innocence – before the First World War, don’t forget, from the same year as Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Zane Grey’s western, Riders of the Purple Sage, to which it clearly owes a common heritage in pulp fiction. If further context was needed, Robert E Howard (Conan) was six and HG Wells’ War of the Worlds was less than fifteen years old when this was first published.

With this context, it is easy to see why A Princess of Mars was written in this way. It is a pulp adventure story, designed to sell to the magazines but also to spur the imagination and entertain – which it still does.

I can see the influence it has had on successive science fiction writers and stories, and fans of those other books and films would do well to recognise the source material. There are connections I can see to Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, to Mike Moorcock's Kane of Old Mars trilogy, Heinlein’s “World as Myth” multiverse and even Lucas’s Star Wars*, as well as others besides. The origins of science fantasy, as opposed to science fiction, and sword and sorcery are evident here too.

In summary, I was surprised how much I enjoyed the story, and I will read further. For all of its age, there’s a lot that still holds up, although its weaknesses to modern readers are noticeable. (I suspect with the later books that Dejah Thoris needs a lot of rescuing, although she can fight her own corner when she needs to!)