Martians than for its drama and its portrayal of mankind’s response to adversity. The story is timeless, but it has surfaced to popular approval at times when it resonated with the public.
Barsoom
If The War of the Worlds told us about Aliens, it told us but little. For most of the book, the invaders were faceless enemies, ensconced inside their craft as they ravaged the countryside. The walking tripods, with their powerful ray guns, can be seen as a metaphor for the later Panzers and Stukas of the Nazi blitzkrieg or the more recent “shock and awe” of American escapades in Iraq. Faceless, mechanized, enemies went where they wanted with near impunity. The tripods could have been replaced by robots.
For a different vision of Martians, we need to turn to another author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs was born in Chicago and spent some time in the U.S. army in Arizona. After a medical discharge, he drifted for some years, doing menial jobs. The year 1911 found him working as a pencil sharpener salesman. It was then that he began to write. His first story was Under the Moons of Mars and was serialized in The All-Story , a monthly pulp magazine. This story was retitled A Princess of Mars when it appeared several years later in book form. As his Mars story was coming out, Burroughs also wrote the first of the Tarzan series, published in the same periodical. Burroughs eventually wrote about seventy books and pioneered the idea of exposing his storiesacross many media outlets, from books, to serializations, to comics and movies. The public couldn’t get enough of Tarzan, and it’s a story we still know today.
However it was in A Princess of Mars that he wrote of life on our sister planet. He eventually was credited with eleven books in the Barsoom series, with some others written by his son. While these books were never intended to be taken seriously, they were written as if they were totally true stories. The hero, John Carter, was introduced as Burroughs’s family friend, and supposedly had given the manuscript to Burroughs with instructions not to publish it for 21 years.
The story went something like this. John Carter was a captain who fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. He was a strapping man, 6’2” and every bit the iconic hero. He reveals in the book that he has no memory of childhood, always having been 30 years old. People have grown old around him, yet he never ages.
Carter was mustered out of the Confederate army and joined forces with a military buddy and began prospecting for gold in the part of the country that later became Arizona. After striking it rich, he and his companion were attacked by Apache Indians, and his friend was killed. Carter retreated into a cave, where he was overcome by fumes and apparently died. And then the fun began.
Carter awoke in Barsoom, which is the native term for the Red Planet. Burroughs’s Barsoom will be familiar to those who recall Percival Lowell’s Mars. A million years ago, Barsoom was a lush place, covered with oceans. However, in the intervening years, the water evaporated, lost to space. Barsoom was a dying planet, dry and sandy. The residents worked feverishly to build canals to bring water from the polar ice caps to the equatorial regions, trying desperately to keep alive.
The residents of Barsoom were not only humanoid but very much like Homo sapiens , except for being oviparous. They had navels—in spite of laying eggs—and breasts, assuring the eye-catching covers that were typical of the pulp serials at the time. They lived at least 1,000 years, although it is possible that they lived longer. Their culture required that when Martians reached that age, they travel down the River Iss. This trip nominally brought them to paradise, although, as we will see, the trip was considerably less pleasant than that.
Martians came in different colors and with different temperaments. They were red, green, yellow, white, and black, and their
Barsoom
If The War of the Worlds told us about Aliens, it told us but little. For most of the book, the invaders were faceless enemies, ensconced inside their craft as they ravaged the countryside. The walking tripods, with their powerful ray guns, can be seen as a metaphor for the later Panzers and Stukas of the Nazi blitzkrieg or the more recent “shock and awe” of American escapades in Iraq. Faceless, mechanized, enemies went where they wanted with near impunity. The tripods could have been replaced by robots.
For a different vision of Martians, we need to turn to another author, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs was born in Chicago and spent some time in the U.S. army in Arizona. After a medical discharge, he drifted for some years, doing menial jobs. The year 1911 found him working as a pencil sharpener salesman. It was then that he began to write. His first story was Under the Moons of Mars and was serialized in The All-Story , a monthly pulp magazine. This story was retitled A Princess of Mars when it appeared several years later in book form. As his Mars story was coming out, Burroughs also wrote the first of the Tarzan series, published in the same periodical. Burroughs eventually wrote about seventy books and pioneered the idea of exposing his storiesacross many media outlets, from books, to serializations, to comics and movies. The public couldn’t get enough of Tarzan, and it’s a story we still know today.
However it was in A Princess of Mars that he wrote of life on our sister planet. He eventually was credited with eleven books in the Barsoom series, with some others written by his son. While these books were never intended to be taken seriously, they were written as if they were totally true stories. The hero, John Carter, was introduced as Burroughs’s family friend, and supposedly had given the manuscript to Burroughs with instructions not to publish it for 21 years.
The story went something like this. John Carter was a captain who fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. He was a strapping man, 6’2” and every bit the iconic hero. He reveals in the book that he has no memory of childhood, always having been 30 years old. People have grown old around him, yet he never ages.
Carter was mustered out of the Confederate army and joined forces with a military buddy and began prospecting for gold in the part of the country that later became Arizona. After striking it rich, he and his companion were attacked by Apache Indians, and his friend was killed. Carter retreated into a cave, where he was overcome by fumes and apparently died. And then the fun began.
Carter awoke in Barsoom, which is the native term for the Red Planet. Burroughs’s Barsoom will be familiar to those who recall Percival Lowell’s Mars. A million years ago, Barsoom was a lush place, covered with oceans. However, in the intervening years, the water evaporated, lost to space. Barsoom was a dying planet, dry and sandy. The residents worked feverishly to build canals to bring water from the polar ice caps to the equatorial regions, trying desperately to keep alive.
The residents of Barsoom were not only humanoid but very much like Homo sapiens , except for being oviparous. They had navels—in spite of laying eggs—and breasts, assuring the eye-catching covers that were typical of the pulp serials at the time. They lived at least 1,000 years, although it is possible that they lived longer. Their culture required that when Martians reached that age, they travel down the River Iss. This trip nominally brought them to paradise, although, as we will see, the trip was considerably less pleasant than that.
Martians came in different colors and with different temperaments. They were red, green, yellow, white, and black, and their
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