A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

It's been a while since I've posted a book report, and it's not because I haven't been reading. This last spring I kind of let computer game design take over my life. But over the summer, I expect to spend less time at my computer.

So I read A Princess of Mars back in March. It's one of the first popular space adventure stories, told by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the writer of Tarzan stories. Despite the pulp-magazine nature of this work, Burroughs' language is very formal in contrast to many of his hard-boiled peers.

This novel tells the story of John Carter, a Confederate hero of the civil war who ended up with nothing. On a desert quest for gold, he found himself trapped in a cave by american indians who were mysteriously decimated before John's spirit escaped to the planet Mars.

You may have guessed, the princess of Mars is his love interest. Her species are humanoid, but red, and lay eggs. And I like this kind of romantic story between two 'people' of very different culture and physiology. Originally published in 1912, this piece certainly fails the Bechdel Test. The other species of aliens on mars are war-hungry bugs who love to kill each other and everything else.

So John takes it upon himself to impress the princess and become the greatest hero the planet has ever known. There are some touching scenes in this book, but I would only reccomend it to those with a yearning for this kind of niche. After all, the trappings of a space adventure have expanded a great deal in the last 110 years. But it's nice to see where (much of) it all started.