A PRINCESS OF MARS by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I wrote this post on the literary source of the movie John Carter before it came out. In retrospect, it has more meaning now since many moviegoers complained that John Carter was just a re-hash of other sci-fi movies - especially Avatar. In a way, it’s the other way around. We think John Carter was the most unfairly-panned film of 2012. Judge for yourself on Saturday, February 12 at 8 p.m. at Ponyride, 1401 Vermont in Detroit.

I love to practice “literary archeology.” That is, I love to dig down to find out who inspired and influenced the writers I like. For example, one of my favorite writers is H. P. Lovecraft. A friend of mine introduced me to Lovecraft’s stories when I was a teenager and I’ve been hooked ever since (I’ll save the full story of my introduction to Lovecraft for a separate post). As I got older, I started to explore the authors that Lovecraft grew up reading and those that influenced him: Edgar A. Poe, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood. By doing this, I’ve discovered some wonderful stories, and, in the case of Poe, I’ve read an author with fresh eyes.

I’ve just started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. A movie version titled John Carter will be coming to the Big Screen this March and I wanted to read the book first. While I’ve never read Burrough’s first story of John Carter’s adventures on Mars, I’ve been bumping into the story’s DNA for many years. A Princess of Mars was the model for H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. It was very influential on the work of Robert E. Howard, in particular his Conan stories. Both have a “barbarian” warrior coming into contact with an ancient and dying civilization, which itself is built on the ruins of an even more ancient civilization. Leigh Brackett wrote several novels set on Mars in the style of Burroughs’ creation and went on to write an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back. And then there is Avatar which features a stoic army veteran who travels to a far away planet, meets an alien princess, falls in love with her, and becomes her people’s champion. Yeah, James Cameron’s probably read Princess.

All of this is to say, A Princess of Mars is the ground zero of science-fiction/fantasy and I am looking forward to delving into it. I’ll have to wait and see how the movie version, John Carter, measures up.