Ratings91
Average rating3.4
Rediscover the adventure-pulp classic that gave the world its first great interplanetary romance—now featuring an introduction by Junot Díaz In the spring of 1866, John Carter, a former Confederate captain prospecting for gold in the Arizona hills, slips into a cave and is overcome by mysterious vapors. He awakes to find himself naked, alone, and forty-eight million miles from Earth—a castaway on the dying planet Mars. Taken prisoner by the Tharks, a fierce nomadic tribe of six-limbed, olive-green giants, he wins respect as a cunning and able warrior, who by grace of Mars’s weak gravity possesses the agility of a superman. He also wins the heart of fellow-prisoner Dejah Thoris, the alluring, red-skinned Princess of Helium, whose people he swears to defend against their grasping and ancient enemy, the city-state of Zodanga. John Carter first appeared in 1912 in the pages of The All-Story magazine and immediately entered the dream-life of American readers young and old. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s favorite among his many creations and remains a favorite of lovers of science fiction and fantasy everywhere.
Featured Series
10 primary books12 released booksBarsoom is a 12-book series with 10 primary works first released in 1912 with contributions by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Stuart Moore.
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Hmm... I gotta stop into these classics with high expectations, especially one with over a century of difference in values. To be perfectly honest, I found the John Carter movie to be much more entertaining and much more believable than the book (obviously, since the movie is much more recent). And because of the movie, I guess I was expecting something else.
I won't judge the scientific oddities, of which there are quite a few – radium, the incredible properties of the eighth and ninth rays of light, the terraforming of an entire planet within a one single plant, distance fallacies, and the somewhat illogical ideas regarding ground-to-air and air-to-air warfare.
What I found to be rather disappointing about the book's plot is that it's entirely created and conceived solely around the purpose of putting a human on Mars and making him moon over a Martian woman. All the plot hooks and events are engineered for that sole purpose – fortunate coincidences are around every corner – with implausible situations chalked away to sheer luck, sheer prowess, or simply left unexplained and ignored.
For example: How the heck did he go to Mars in the first place? The movie explained it. The book didn't even attempt to – even the protagonist simply accepts that he's on Mars. There are a lot of such details that are just glossed over. I guess it comes from its roots as a serial publication rather than being a novel right from the start.
His oh-so-manly physical prowess (I'm a guy and I cringe every time I read his self-praise) is also quite annoying. Telling the reader how good he knows he is, before performing an action is downright bad – doing it the other way round might've made it more tolerable.
I'm definitely taking the book way too seriously and from a way too modern outlook. It's obviously more of a planetary romance with bits of sci fi and bits of a primitiveness thrown in, as opposed to the action thriller the movie made it into. It's lacking in world-building, filled with bland, stereotyped and rather uninteresting characters (protagonist and princess included), and a plot littered with coincidences and holes.
Why two stars then? What I did like about book are two things: The pacing is great. There are no dragging moments in the book. It just zips from one incident to another. Reading the book, despite my dislikes, is quite a pleasure. The pulpiness of the plot is in there in full and the prose is not overly flowery, making for an easy and quick read.
I recognize that this was originally published in 1912, according to wikipedia, but it was one of the worst sci-fi books I've read. Maybe it was revolutionary and it exciting when it came out, but certainly hits just about every bad trope that sci-fi has become known for . . .
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