Part 1 (1/2)

JOHN CARTER OF MARS.

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS.

INTRODUCTION.

THE PUBLICATION OF JOHN CARTER OF MARS is an historic event for a number of reasons.

First, and most obviously, it is the long and eagerly awaited ”eleventh book” of the Martian series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For sixteen years, ever since the appearance of LLANA OF GATHOL, the tenth book in the series and the last of Burroughs' works to see print during the author's life, there has been a constant desire by his many followers to see the two remaining Barsoomian adventures appear in book form. They are at last available, in the present volume, to Burroughs' myriad fans and admirers.

The second historical aspect of JOHN CARTER OF MARS is its very name. Although JOHN CARTER OF MARS is a ”natural” t.i.tle for a book in the Martian series, it was never so used by Burroughs himself. It has been applied to a number of adaptations of the Barsoomian tales, including two completely different children's books and a comic magazine, but has never before been used as the t.i.tle of a ”real” book.

Regarding the two short novels (or novellas, or novelettes, or even long short stories, the t.i.tle is not worth the quibble) that make up JOHN CARTER OF MARS, each has a fascinating tale of its own, quite aside from the story content itself.

John Carter and the Giant of Mars (or Giant for short) first appeared in AMAZING STORIES magazine for January, 1941, and created an immediate furore. Dozens of readers wrote to the magazine challenging the authenticity of the story, which was stoutly defended by Raymond A. Palmer, the editor. The complaints were based mainly on two points.

For one, many of Burroughs' more dedicated and scholarly devotees found points on which the setting of Giant conflicted with the pseudo-world Burroughs ad constructed in the rest of the series. Specifically, there is the use of the three-legged rat in Giant, whereas Burroughs had quite graphically described the Martian rat, or ulsio, in CHESSMEN OF MARS, as ”fierce and unlovely ...

many-legged and hairless.”

Similarly, the imaginary geography of Giant has been criticized as placing cities in regions where other stories indicate only deserts or swamps, and including, without explanation, imaginary creatures and devices present in no other Barsoomian tale.

Another objection to Giant is the fact that it is narrated in the third person, while the Martian series was customarily told in first person. This charge, however, fails on two books, the fourth and fifth in the series. The fourth book, THUVIA, MAID OF MARS, is told in standard third-person style. The fifth, CHESSMEN, opens with an introduction in which Edgar Rice Burroughs recounts, in first person, the circ.u.mstances in which John Carter told him, Burroughs, the tale contained in the book.

The story CHESSMEN is told in third person, but this argument against Giant is mitigated by the first person introduction. Not so with THUVIA, which pretty thoroughly demolishes the ”first-person / third-person” case against Giant.

In planning the current book, JOHN CARTER OF MARS, it was my hope to verify or refute the charges against Giant of Mars once and for all. In order to do this, I wrote directly to Ray Palmer and asked him outright whether (a) the story had actually been written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and (b) if it had, whether or not Palmer or anyone else had tampered with the ma.n.u.script before publication; or (c) if it had not been written by Burroughs, who did write the story.

Simultaneously I wrote to Hulbert Burroughs, the author's son, and asked him to check through his father's files and records, and determine if possible (a) whether his father did write Giant and (b) if he did, whether a copy of the ma.n.u.script still existed for purposes of comparison with the magazine version.

Palmer's reply was the first to arrive, and in it he stated that (a) the story had indeed been written by Burroughs and (b) no one had changed it in any way prior to publication. Unfortunately, according to Palmer, the ma.n.u.script had been kept in the files of the Ziff-Davis Publis.h.i.+ng Company, publisher of AMAZING STORIES, and had been destroyed some years later in a records-clearance move.

An initial reply from Hulbert Burroughs was equally mystifying a search of the records of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., had produced an entry for the sale of John Carter and the Giant of Mars to Ziff-Davis. But an examination of ERB's notebook, in which the author usually kept painstaking track of starting, completion, and revision dates of all his stories, did not uncover the expected entry for Giant.

More or less reconciled, by now, to permanent mystification regarding the authors.h.i.+p of Giant, I was surprised and gratified to receive a further communication from Hulbert Burroughs, unravelling the mystery at last. Hulbert had continued to investigate both business and personal records of his father, and had discussed the question with other members of the Burroughs family. The story which was pieced together is this: In 1940 the Whitman Publis.h.i.+ng Company, which had published children's adaptations of a number of Tarzan stories with great success, asked ERB for a ”Big Little Book” featuring John Carter. The Big Little Books were a children's series following an extremely rigid format: stories had to be 15,000 words in length, and so constructed that they could be published with alternating pages of text and drawings, each picture ill.u.s.trating the action depicted on the facing page of text.

Edgar Rice Burroughs felt uncomfortable writing to the strict formula of this series, and so he asked his son John Coleman Burroughs, who was also the ill.u.s.trator of the book, to collaborate with him in producing the story. The result was a tale, essentially similar to John Carter and the Giant of Mars, which appeared under the Whitman impress with the same t.i.tle as the present volume: JOHN CARTER OF MARS.

At the same time, Ray Palmer of AMAZING STORIES was seeking a new Barsoomian adventure from ERB, to feature in his magazine. Taking the as-yet unpublished collaboration as his basis, Edgar Rice Burroughs lengthened it by some 5000 words and adapted it ”upward” for adult readers.h.i.+p, producing finally John Carter and the Giant of Mars.

The longer version appeared in AMAZING and the shorter one in the Whitman book.

The text used in the present volume is the AMAZING version.

Skeleton Men of Jupiter, the second story in this book, offers no such problem as does Giant of Mars. By contrast with Giant, Skeleton Men received nothing but extravagant praise from readers at the time of its first appearance in AMAZING in February, 1943. Its name may sound odd for a ”Martian” story, and indeed, most of the action of Skeleton Men takes place not on Mars, but on Jupiter.

However, the hero is John Carter, and the basic story rationale is part of the Martian series, so the tale well fits into the present book.

Skeleton Men of Jupiter was intended by Burroughs as the opening episode of the group of interconnected novelettes, probably to number four, which would have become a John Carter novel in the fas.h.i.+on of LLANA OF GATHOL or the Carson Napier book ESCAPE ON VENUS. This form of quasiserialization was one with which Burroughs experimented quite successfully in the early 1940s.

However, wartime service as a correspondent in the Pacific reduced Burroughs'

fiction output nearly to zero, and after the end of the war his health prevented ERB from resuming his former pace. As a result, the continuing episodes of John Carter's Jupiterian adventure were never written. Still, Skeleton Men is a complete adventure story, and an excellent one.

Writing (or at least dreaming) its sequels has become a favorite pastime of Burroughs fans over the years, and the reader is invited to join in the fun.

The Foreword of Skeleton Men of Jupiter, by the way, is published here for the first time. When the magazine version of the story appeared twenty-one years ago, the editor may have felt that a Foreword would serve only to put off readers, while a policy of ”On with the story” above all else, would have greater commercial appeal.

He may well have been right for the pulp magazine audience of a generation ago, but a.s.suming the readers of books to have a slightly more serious and patient outlook on literature, I have restored the Foreword, obtaining its text from a photostat of ERB's original ma.n.u.script, kindly furnished by Hulbert Burroughs.

If you are completely intolerant of forewords and wish, like the magazine audience of 1943, to plunge directly into the narration, you are welcome to skip the first 132 words of Skeleton Men of Jupiter. I personally find them a charming prelude and a minor but fascinating insight into the personality of Edgar Rice Burroughs, science-fictioneer.

The Martian series, of which this book is the final volume, is regarded by many readers as Burroughs' greatest sustained performance as a writer. Of course his Tarzan stories are the more famous, due largely to the popularity of their motion-picture adaptations. And there are many moments of excellence in the Venus and Pellucidar series, as there are in such ”singles” as THE MOON MEN, THE MUCKER, THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, and I AM A BARBARIAN.

Still, for eleven volumes, the adventures of Captain John Carter of Virginia, upon the planet Barsoom, and the comparable deeds of heroism performed by Burroughs' other Martian heroes, represent a series of tales unmatched in their author's works, and, for that matter, unequalled in the annals of science-fiction adventure writing The first three volumes in the series, originally appearing between 1912 and 1914, actually const.i.tute a single super-epic. In them, John Carter, a Confederate officer mustered out of service at the close of the Civil War, is miraculously transported to the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. He arrives in the middle of a desert, naked and unarmed, wholly ignorant of local customs and conditions, unable to speak the language of the natives (in fact, knowing nothing about the natives, or even that there are any). Shortly encountering a group of barbarian nomads, John Carter is taken prisoner, and would seem to face a life of degraded slavery ending in early and ignominious death.

Instead, through the display of courage and skill, Captain Carter rises to the position of Warlord of Mars, having along the way fought his way from pole to pole of the red planet, returned to Earth for a period of several years and then travelled again to Barsoom, encountered a variety of strange races of men and beasts, weird nations and weirder peoples. He has, in addition, gained the lesser t.i.tle of Prince of Helium (not the inert gas, but the leading city-empire of Barsoom), and has won the hand of the incomparable Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium.

The volumes in this trilogy are A PRINCESS OF MARS, THE G.o.dS OF MARS, and THE WARLORD OF MARS. Their enduring qualities have led to their translation into many languages, including even an Esperanto edition of PRINCESS. Further, the same book has been issued by Oxford University Press in its ”Stories Told and Retold” series, as a ”teaching novel” for school use. Other authors in the ”Stories Told and Retold” series include d.i.c.kens' Doyle, Shakespeare, Stevenson, Defoe, Wells, Sabatini, Anthony Hope, and Nordoff and Hall.

A mixed roll, these, and yet all have in common the characteristic of a literary quality which endures beyond their times, and makes their works part of the enduring body of the literature of the English language which stands a solid chance of living for centuries to come. The presence here of Burroughs' A PRINCESS OF MARS is perhaps the first important sign that this author, whose works have enjoyed public acclaim from the first, is beginning to receive the acceptance of educators and serious critics as well.

Having raised Carter, in three books, from a naked and unarmed stranger to the Warlord of the red planet, Burroughs faced the question, What do you do for an encore? Faced with the same question in his Tarzan series, Burroughs carried the Ape Man off into a seemingly interminable series of exotic settings, lost cities and forgotten empires dotting the African landscape so that they must ultimately have crowded one another into the sea!

In the Martian series, ERB tried another approach, I think a more daring one, and a completely successful one. Transferring his attention from John Carter and Dejah Thoris, Burroughs called the fourth book of the series TRUVIA, MAID OF MARS. The t.i.tle figure had been introduced in THE G.o.dS OF MARS as an equivocal character. She was the plaything of the degenerate group of cultist priests, involuntarily so, in fact the term ”white slave” might be applied except that for Thuvia, it would have to be ”red slave.”

Rescued by John Carter from her unhappy life, Thuvia at the end of the book is imprisoned with Dejah Thoris and a third Martian woman, the beautiful but treacherous Phaidor, in a sort of horizontal ferris wheel which is a Martian prison. Entrance to or exit from each cell is blocked for a year at a time as the giant wheel rotates through a huge hollow rock. As the cell containing the three women pa.s.ses from sight, Phaidor lunges at Dejah Thoris with a murderous knife-thrust, Thuvia throws herself between the two, seeking to save Dejah Thoris, and ... The tag line is not ”continued in the next thrilling installment,” but ”continued in the next thrilling book, THE WARLORD OF MARS.”

But Dejah Thoris and Thuvia escape, of. course, and by the book following WARLORD, Thuvia had reached the status not only of lead heroine, but of t.i.tle character, an honor shared with Dejah Thoris herself (the princess of PRINCESS) and with the granddaughter of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, LLANA OF GATHOL (tenth volume of the series). The action of THUVIA, MAID OF MARS, is no mere rehash of the adventures of John Carter, but blazes new trails across the Barsoomian horizon. The novel is full of invention and intrigue, the most brilliant probably being the Bowmen of Lothar, a phantom army of archers created by the sheer mental power of the Lotharians to counter the aggression of the Warhoons, their hereditary enemies.

THUVIA was first published in 1916, and following it, Burroughs turned his attention to other matters, including several books in his Tarzan and Pellucidar series, as well as several ”singles.” In 1922 he resumed the Martian series, producing THE CHESSMEN OF MARS. Again, Burroughs changed focus, this time making his hero Gahan of Gathol, a Martian n.o.ble, with the heroine this time Tara of Helium, the younger sister of Carthoris. Again, not mere action and adventure, but wondrous creations of imagination mark the book. The outstanding creations of CHESSMEN may well be the rykors and the kaldanes, inhabitants of the city of Bantoom.

Strange symbiotes, these two races, the rykors resemble headless humans, while the kaldanes are little more than animated heads, provided by evolution with chelae with which they attach themselves to rykors and control the bodies. A kaldane might change bodies any time he felt like it, even ”being” a man one day and a woman the next!

THE MASTER MIND OF MARS, next in the series, appeared in the AMAZING STORIES ANNUAL for 1927, and introduces a marvelous new hero in the person of Ulysses S.

Paxton, a U.S. Army captain apparently killed in the trenches in World War I, but whisked miraculously, instead, to Mars. Here he experiences a strange adventure with Ras Thavas, a brilliant Martian surgeon who has perfected the surgical transfer of the brain from one human to another. Valla Dia, a lovely Martian girl, is victimized by Ras Thavas, being forced into an exchange of bodies with the hideous Queen Xaxa. The action which ensues leads ultimately to the regaining by Valla Dia of her rightful body, and her marriage to Paxton (who has been dubbed with the Barsoomian appellation of Vad Varo).

The seventh book of the series, A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, is reported to Earth via a sort of super radio called the Gridley Wave. The narration is somewhat complicated. An introduction by Burroughs explains that the story recorded in the book was told him (via Gridley Wave) by Ulysses Paxton/Vad Varo. But Paxton had the story from its own central character, Tan Hadron of Hastor (a city enjoying a certain degree of self-rule but within the empire of Helium and subject to Helium's authority).

A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS perhaps epitomizes that form of science fiction formerly known as the ”scientific romance,” a tale of high action and wonder in which science is the basis of the situation, but plays little part in the development of the story. Tan Hadron faces peril and horror, travels to two marvelous hidden cities, faces a maddened monarch who specializes in torturing beautiful maidens, is sentenced to a form of execution known only as The Death, traverses a forest inhabited by giant spiders ... and in general has a rollicking swash-buckling time to the reader's utter delight!

In SWORDS OF MARS, serialized in BLUE BOOK magazine in 1934 and '35, Burroughs returned to John Carter as hero. The novel features an astonis.h.i.+ng prediction of the automatic control of experimental s.p.a.ce craft by computers, including the size, placement, functioning and even programming characteristics of the electronic guidance devices being built today, to guide the rockets that will carry first instruments and then Man to the planets. What a joy if one of those manned rockets set out for Mars and found Barsoom instead!

In SWORDS OF MARS the s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p is used to carry Carter and a number of others from the city of Zodanga on Mars to the Martian moon Thuria (Phobos). Here Carter encounters still more strange people and strange beasts, before returning to Barsoom.