Book Review: A Princess of Mars

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Rating: 5 of 5 STARS
Source: Ten Year Reading List (see below)

I love the way we book lovers find new books to read. Usually there's a thread connecting one book to another and to another and to another. That's the case with this little book I came across some weeks ago, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Some of you may recognize the author as the creator of Tarzan. He was a prolific author, writing 83 books in many different genres. While working as a wholesale pencil sharpener salesman (really), Burroughs began reading pulp fiction magazines and decided if this 'rot' was what people found entertaining he would give it a go himself. His first book was A Princess of Mars.

I came across this book while researching on the Internet lists of books "you must read before you die." I came across some great lists like the Ten Year Reading List (where I found A Princess of Mars), The One Hundred Greatest Novels of All Time list, and The Novel 100: The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time (also on this link are the 100 Greatest Novels from 1923 to Present, and 100 Books That Shaped World History.) For the really brave, here's a link for "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die."

Summary of A Princess of Mars taken from Amazon: This is a wonderful scientific romance that perhaps can be best described as early science fiction melded with an epic dose of romantic adventure. A Princess of Mars is the first adventure of John Carter, a Civil War veteran who unexpectedly find himself transplanted to the planet Mars. Yet this red planet is far more than a dusty, barren place; it's a fantasy world populated with giant green barbarians, beautiful maidens in distress, and weird flora and monstrous fauna the likes of which could only exist in the author's boundless imagination.

Two things I found the most interesting about the book: 1) Written in 1917, Burroughs refers to "radium pumps" as the source of energy for sustaining the atmosphere of Barsoom (Mars). This is a "thread" back to book One in Three where I had just read about the history of radium as it relates to cancer and how many people at the time (including writers) thought radium was going to be the ultimate energy source. 2) Burroughs' Mars is populated by 'green' men - barbarians who own no property, everything being owned by the clan, have no families, children are 'hatched' never knowing their parents, and are extremely violent, living only to exist from day to day. Then there are the 'red' men - civilized, artistists, scientists, peaceseekers who value each other, their families, and the planet. The whole book is really the story of the clash between these two 'types' of people (ie, ideologies.)

Here's an excerpt about the green Martians and their children: "...But this counts for little among the green Martians, as parental ad filial love is as unknown to them as it is common among us. I believe this horrible system which has been carried on for ages is the direct cause of the loss of all the finer feelings ad higher humanitarian instincts among these poor creatures. From birth they know no father or mother love, they know not the meaning of the word home; they are taught that they are only suffered to live until they can demonstrate by their physique and ferocity that they are fit to live. Should they prove deformed or defective in any way they are promptly shot; nor do they see a tear shed for a single one of the many cruel hardships they pass through from earliest infancy."

Also, I fell in love with the hero, John Carter, a Virgian Civil War era gentleman. A Princess of Mars ends as a cliffhanger.....there are 11 more books in the series! (Oh, by the way, I had trouble finding a book cover I could put on my blog because the Barsoomians don't wear clothes!! This was the most modest cover I could find.)

Back to threads - as I was looking for background information on Edgar Rice Burroughs, I came across this site that you can download over 1,500 audio books for free: Librivox. They have Augustine's City of God...hmmm...only 40 hours of listening! :->