John Carter of Mars

I have to admit, this was a bit of a shock to the system after the eminently readable, richly plotted stories with their well-imagined characters that I've been reading recently. Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars felt a lot more like a Thongor story. It is apparently the 11th novel in the Barsoom series, and is a very thin book containing two stories. It was very clunkily written, partly because it was written to be serialised, and probably also because it didn't quite end up getting published until about 20 years after the rest (I assume because Burroughs didn't consider it really up to scratch).

I had to keep reminding myself to treat this as a historical document; Burroughs was a pioneer of science fiction and fantasy literature, and he was building a genre of ideas rather than creating quality literature. This is astonishingly primitively written, compared to modern science fiction, or even to other things written at the same time. These is almost no personality at all to the characters - they feel like cardboard cut-outs (or, amusingly enough, the dodgy acting done in bad 50's science fiction films). Dialog is bizarrely unwieldy compared to the action going on:

A furtive figure melted away into the semi-gloom of the passageway, with Carter close behind. Seeing escape impossible, the stranger halted, sank to one knee and leveled a ray-gun at the approaching figure of the earthman. Carter saw his finger whiten as he squeezed the trigger.
"Carter!" Kantos Kan shouted, "throw yourself to the floor."
With the speed of light, Carter dropped prone.

How does Carter see a finger whiten in semi-gloom, when it is probably hidden by the trigger guard and body of the ray gun? How does Kantos Kan have time to shout a fully formed sentence between the stranger's finger whitening on the trigger and the ray-gun firing? In fact, after he shouts that, he throws some kind of long knife at the stranger and kill him, even before the ray gun is fired.

The whole book is full of passages like that, that leave you struggling to reconcile timings, facts, and motivations. By the end, it almost becomes part of the entertainment of reading the book.

Despite the fact that it reads like it is written by an overenthusiastic twelve year old, it ends up kind of fun to read. There is a certain swashbuckling flavour to it all, and despite the silliness of some of the worldbuilding that Burroughs does, there is still an attractive atmosphere to the universe that John Carter lives in, and the odd combination of high- and low-tech on the planet Barsoom (which is what the natives of Mars call their own planet.