I’ve spent my entire life waiting to see Barsoom brought to life on the big screen and it’s finally here. Today Disney releases the movie John Carter, loosely based on the first book of the series, A Princess of Mars. While the early reviews have been mixed, I’m holding our hope that it will be enjoyable and true to the core story lines. I’m seeing it tomorrow with some friends at the local Alamo Drafthouse, the best place in Austin to watch movies.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, or ERB, is most famously known as the creator of Tarzan, but the truth is, Tarzan was the second major character created by this imaginative author. John Carter, a Virginia Captain in the Confederate army was the first. He was dying in the Arizona desert but is soon whisked away to Barsoom (Mars) via some unnamed mechanism akin to teleportation, a dream state, or something else, it was never made clear in the series and all could apply at one time or the other. There he encounters a dying civilization, huge multi-limbed creature known as tharks, and the before the book ends, the love of Dejah Thoris.
What is most amazing about this was the actual year ERB wrote the book it was 1911! It was published using the title Under the Moons of Mars by All-Story magazine the next year as a serial. Yes, ERB was writing fantastical imaginative adventures long before the pulps of the 30’s and 40’s. He would continue to do this throughout his life.
A Princess of Mars, cover art by Robert Abbett for Ballantine Books
I first encountered the Martian books of ERB in my local library. They were the paperback editions published by Ballantine Books during the mid-60s as shown to the right. The covers were sleek and really invoked a strange melange of feelings. They had kind of a Roman look to them, but with radium pistols. To a young teenager, a combo of swords and pistols, flying sleds, a dying planet, and all the fantastical beasts. Of course, to a prepubescent male, Dejah Thoris, the princess of Helium (the capital of Barsoom) became the model for all my future heroines and the epitome of desirable women. At least until I encountered Heinlein’s idea of the perfect woman years later.
I loved them. If memory serves, they may have been the first science-fiction, fantasy books I ever read. I think I originally found his Tarzan books having seen some of the movies and devoured them one after another. When the library ran out of that series I simply moved onto everything else he ever wrote. From then on I was hooked on book series. So much so that when my first book project was planned it turned into, you guessed it, a trilogy.
A Princess of Mars, cover art by Frank Frazetta for SFBC
But it was the Science Fiction Book Club editions, with their gorgeous Frank Frazetta covers that really clinched the series in my mind. Frazetta’s beautiful lyrical paintings on the covers and the interior artwork done in crisp and clean ink excited me like nothing else. I saved my lunch money for weeks to afford those wonderful volumes, and they remain in my library to this day, enclosed in plastic protective sleeves to keep them as pristine as the day they arrived in the mail.
If any of this is interesting at all, Ryan Harvey has done an excellent write-up on Burroughs and the Martian series at his blog The Realm of Ryan called Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 1: A Princess of Mars.
It has always been my wish to see Barsoom on the big screen in all it’s glory. Now that the technology has arrived to let us envision anything we can imagine, I’m looking forward to what Andrew Stanton, who previously directed Pixar’s Finding Nemo and WALL-E films, has been able to do.
