This classic story was made available through iPulpFiction and the AppEngines ebook reader for iPhone and iPhone Touch. All-round gentleman of the frontier John Carter mysteriously awakens on Mars and goes through plenty of heroic adventures while rescuing a beautiful princess from the clutches of her warrior enemies.
While it’s early science fiction, it doesn’t have too much in common with what we think of as hard science fiction now. Short, action-packed, and violent, it’s instead an example of pulp fiction known as ‘planetary romance’.
For a modern reader (ie me), there’s plenty of flaws. The ’science’ is laughable and has more in common with fantasy tropes than actual science, the character development is minimal – he tends to gloss over such things as the development of friendships – and character portrayals are unsubtle, and plot holes are dealt with as he notices them (for example, oh, we can fly faster than our enemies who are in the exact same type of craft as us because, um, oh yes, we modified them earlier to get better performance…).
Also, the action-based plot had the effect of distancing me – along with the tendency to give away what’s going to happen in the text or in the chapter titles – so I felt little suspense or concern for the characters. Which would be normal for action-based plots.
On the plus side, so much happens in this book that a modern re-telling, taking time to flesh out characters and explore motivations, would take three to seven volumes, so the somewhat superficial attitude is really a relief. A quick and easy pulp fiction read.
Burroughs wrote several sequels in the same style, and was, of course, also the creator of Tarzan.
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