CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION BOOK REVIEW: “Gods of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1918)

I’d been holding off of the “John Carter of Mars” series for pretty much my entire life since it always seemed kind of dumb and beneath me. It sounded like “Conan the Barbarian” set in space, and that’s just not my bag (Though to be fair, the “Gor” series is more like Conan the Barbarian in space). Just the same when I finally got around to reading the first book I have to say the purple prose and breathless excitement of it won me over. It’s kind of like going on a date with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Yeah, there’s a lot of low cards in that hand, but they all add up to more than the sum of their parts - or at least seem to over dinner - and it’s just hard not to like someone so completely engaging on every level. You have a great, great, night that lasts all weekend, and you’re pretty sure you’re in love.

Then normal life reasserts itself, and you realize it takes you all week to recover from dancing and drinking until 5AM all weekend long, and her friends are super-annoying, and they smoke a lot of pot - a HELL of a lot of pot - and dammit she won’t shut up about her campaign to Save The Homosexual Whales Of Japan, and she leaves increasingly paranoid messages on your answering machine every half hour, and you think “Oh, God, what have I gotten myself in to?” and you want to break up with her, but you know she’s got a gun…

So it’s understandable that I had some hesitance about reading the next book in the series. I mean, once or twice is good for your soul, but a steady commitment is a quick trip to the madhouse. But I bit the bullet and went on my second date with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of Speculative Fiction that we call “Barsoom.”

And you know, it wasn’t that bad.

It really wasn’t. I hesitate to say it was more ‘laid back’ than the first book, because it’s pretty much an unending series of naked, gory battles for two hundred pages, but in some ways, yeah, it’s more relaxed. It isn’t trying as hard as it did on the first date. In some ways this is refreshing, in others it’s kind of a disappointment.

Last time, as you recall, John Carter died in the old west and woke up on Mars (for no adequately explained reason) where he had adventures and fell in love with the princess Dejah Thoris. They spent ten years together, and then he died saving the entire planet, whereupon he wakes up back in the old west (For no adequately explained reason). He then spends ten years on earth, makes his nephew Edgar Rice Burroughs the executor to his will, and drops dead again (for no adequately explained reason). The conclusion of the frame story in that novel has Burroughs musing on the fact that Carter has once more been dead for ten years…

This time out, we begin with Burroughs getting a message to meet someone in a bar. He goes and meets his “Uncle Jack,” who hasn’t aged a day because he’s immortal (Which was pointed out in the first book, but, again, never adequately explained). Even