Book Review: A Princess of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic planetary romance about a disgraced former Confederate soldier turned Martian serial killer.
Ever since university, I’ve kept in the back of my mind the idea of reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Why university? Because one of my lecturers was a Barsoom super-fan. One time, I wrote an essay for his class which was about writing the preamble to a constitution for a new human settlement on Mars under John Carter. The trouble was, it needed to be 500 words. Most preambles to constitutions are 150 - 200 words long. So, using my imagination, I came up with an entire story to fill out the word-count of how these people escaped the tyranny of Earth and established a settlement on Mars. Unfortunately, having never read or even heard of the Barsoom series at that point in my life, all of it was of my own creation, and I was marked down for it. Not just marked down, mind you, but publicly derided, as the thing was sent around the entire class with an explanation of how stupid it was. At the end of the derision was a little note saying it would have been marked favourably had it been anything to do with the actual series. Thankfully this was only a practice piece, but you can imagine I was mortified.
Anyway, back to A Princess of Mars… I’ve mentioned before how during Drew Wagar’s Monday night livestreams, we’ve been taking a look at classic sci-fi and fantasy stories available on Project Gutenberg. This time it was the turn of A Princess of Mars. It was the perfect opportunity to dive into this series and see what made it so special. And so, here’s my review:
Beware: major spoilers below.
Blurb
The first book of the Barsoom series introduces the reader to John Carter, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, who is mysteriously transported to Mars, where he finds that he has great strength and superhuman agility.
Review
A Princess of Mars starts off well enough with an intriguing foreword from Edgar Rice Burroughs regarding his rich “Uncle Carter” who mysteriously dies and is placed in a tomb which can only be opened from the inside. The story then continues on with Burroughs reading John Carter’s diary, in which he relays the entire experience. Compared to other works around this era that we’ve looked at, I felt like this was a lot easier to read. Much more accessible in terms of its vocabulary, with a much faster pace. It also gets right into the story, whereas others felt the need to explain themselves to the audience before being allowed to continue. Obviously, for the time period in which it’s written, there’s myriad racial insensitivities relating to Native Americans, and immediately I wasn’t feeling all that sympathetic towards Captain Carter for being a former Confederate soldier.
Coming from a modern perspective, the story asks you to suspend an exorbitant amount of disbelief when it comes to the setting of Mars - or Barsoom, as it is known by its native inhabitants. Clearly we know a lot about Mars these days, but even for well before the time in which this was written, people knew certain things about Mars which are outright ignored in this book. The War of the Worlds handles worldbuilding a living Mars much better than A Princess of Mars does. But giving credit where it is due, the setting is so vastly different from what we’re used to seeing of the Red Planet that it strangely becomes a lot easier to suspend disbelief. Burroughs isn’t trying to rationalise cramming life onto the dead planet we know. Instead, there’s air and water and life in abundance. The only nod to it being an environment unlike Earth is that it has lower gravity. Overall, science isn’t the name of the game here for this swashbuckling planetary romance.
I really enjoyed the alienness of the Green Martians. Carter’s first interaction with them is in finding an incubator for their young, just as the hatchlings are emerging. The way he describes them is done really well. Although here we do hit on something utterly ridiculous with the worldbuilding - the Green Martian rifles, which have an effective range of *checks notes* THREE HUNDRED MILES!? More suspension of disbelief required, since the horizon on Mars is only about 3 miles away at a normal observer height. How in the heck are they shooting that far when they can’t even see what they’re shooting at?
Carter’s interactions with the Tharkian Green Martians are interesting, and I liked how he gradually learned their language and customs (this is something the Disney John Carter movie does very poorly). His “dog” Woola is a lovable animal companion, too, and is in fact one of the best characters in the book. In general all the characters that come out of the Tharkian community are really great, and there’s plenty of internal strife and political intrigue with good cultural worldbuilding. However, the character of Dejah Thoris - the titular princess of Mars (who is a human-like “Red Martian”, by the way) - is a bit, well… underdeveloped. Surprisingly she has some agency later on in the book, but otherwise she’s just there to be the perpetually almost-naked love interest for Carter. As the romance develops it gets a little fawning and clichéd at times - although some of these clichés were probably a lot more fresh at the time the book was being written.
John Carter himself, though, turns into a bit of a self-parody. He’s great at everything: he’s super-strong and can jump really high because of the Martian gravity, but he’s also a master swordsman, an expert pilot, and he fits himself right in with the Green Martians, becoming a chieftain and a leader. But as the story progresses, he turns into a complete and utter serial killer - rather unintentionally, I might add; he’s still supposed to be the hero of this tale, and we’re supposed to root for him. The moment he realises he can kill things on Mars with a single punch, that essentially becomes his version of diplomacy - wanton murder. Case in point: much later on in the book, he’s faced with a dilemma to do with Barsoomian customs around betrothal, and his first instinct is to say nonchalantly that he’ll just kill the other guy. The only thing that stays his hand is another custom. Everyone else in the story is just cannon fodder for John Carter. I got 80% of the way through the book before he decided to not kill someone. His body-count by the end of the book is astonishingly high.
Then, unfortunately by the end the book just completely goes off the rails with the atmospheric plant plot-line, in which they have three days to live, and nobody does anything for two and half of those days - they just accept their fate, Carter included. That is, of course, until hundreds of people are already dead, and Carter suddenly decides “Nah, can’t be bothered to die, I’ll save Mars instead”. The man is lunatic, and a danger to everyone around him.
Overall, A Princess of Mars starts off well, asks much of its audience (and that’s without saying anything about the Ninth Ray and Burroughs bringing back the aether), and then becomes unintentionally hilarious all the way to the end. The Disney movie’s plot is much tighter, makes a little bit more sense, and is still recognisable as A Princess of Mars. Watch that instead.
