Conference noted::sf

    None on _John_Carter_of_Mars_, but there are two other topics on
    Edgar Rice Burroughs.  SHOW KEYWORD/FULL BURROUGHS showed topics
    40 and 458 (and now 964 because I added it).
    
    --Simon
    

RE: .0

Yes, I got the series while still a young teenager and really enjoyed them.  I
still do when I'm in the mood for mindless entertainment.  Like most of his
books, they're westerns in sci-fi guise (i.e. good guy looses girl, has lots
of prediciments to extract himself from, guy wins girl, etc.)

Paul

    I was lucky enough to read Burroughs before I turned 14.
    
    It's too late for most of us to do this, but I recommend
    any of his series books as gifts for young boys.  I'm not
    sure girls would find them as fun, and I know most adults
    cringe at the various "ism"s in them.
    
    		-John Bishop

     	I read them and was taken one step further. I like John Carter
    all of a sudden found MYSELF on the planet of Mars! 

    	After reading (in my teens) the prologue which goes into detail
    how John arrives on the surface of the angry red planet and his
    encounter with that scientist, I fell asleep and had the time of
    my life as John Carter. This made T.V. look like zippo! It was more 
    fun and exciting then any ride or show I've ever experienced. The
    neat thing was that after that first night on Mars It made me more
    starved to experience the next pages. I was scared out of my dream
    a few times (when I had to fight that large green, four armed, sword
    yielding native). Later I found that I was able to control some of 
    the events that were happening around this real world of mine.


    	I haven't been able to recreate this effect again lately (though
    I'm twice as old now and my imagination has lost some of its edge by
    now) But will always be a big fan of Edger for the trip to Mars (&
    Venus)
    
    
    	Chuck Swanner of Mars

    
    Hi, all
    
    I was just wondering, about the John carter/mars books.
    
    I read a while ago, a few books by Robert Heinlien about the Long
    family (Time enough for love, the number of the beast etc.), and he
    seems to have been quite enthralled with the john carter books.
    
    Are the books that bad, as indicated by the previous replies to this
    note or is it that the modern sci fi/fantasy reader has become jaded
    and bored with books that once seemed to be good ??.
    
    I read alot of books, 3-4 a week, as I have about a 1-1.5 hour train
    journey to work, so I get plenty of time to read, and I am a fairly
    quick reader. I have read most authors, from the "classic" sf author's
    eg asimov etc to out and out fantasy, and fantasy/humour, and as I read
    so much I get all my books from the local library (I can't afford 10-20
    pounds(lost my pound sign someware) per week, and was thinking of
    trying out the john carter books for a change, Any comments ???.
    
    
    Regards
    
    martin
      
    

  My advice is to give them a try.  I can't think of any ERB book that 
  didn't have some redeeming quality.  Well, perhaps I should qualify 
  that -- some stories got a bit out of hand along about the fifth 
  book in a series.  Not Tarzan, of course, which remained wonderfully
  readable through many, many books.  But I do remember tiring of John 
  Carter in "The Chessmen of Mars," which was probably book #7 or so.

  The stories are fine.  The science (what there is of it) is a dated.
  The writing is better than a _lot_ of what you'll find for sale on
  the shelves today.  

  I can still remember chuckling at the passage where Carter escapes from 
  the Apaches in "A Princess of Mars".  ERB says that the "savages" were 
  hurling arrows, bullets, and imprecations at him as he rode away toward 
  his destiny with Dejah Thoris.  ERB added something to the effect of:
  "Since imprecations, of those three, are the only things that can be aimed
  accurately by moonlight,..." JC managed to escape.

  And after you finish with John Carter of Mars, there are the ERB worlds of
  Tarzan, Pellucidar, Venus, The Moon Maid, and "The Land that Time Forgot" 
  to explore.    And I'm sure I must've forgotten some...

  JP

I'd recommend reading _A Princess of Mars_, _The Gods of Mars_, _The
Warlord of Mars_ (which form a trilogy of sorts), and _Swords of Mars_.
The rest are so-so (although i found them fascinating as a 13-year old).
Of the other ERB books, _Escape on Venus_ sticks in my mind for the
scene where the hero (Carson) murders his sadistic prison camp guard.
The trilogy consisting of _The Land That Time Forgot_, _The People That
Time Forgot_, and _Out of Time's Abyss_ is also pretty good, if you can
get over the half-baked science (consider when they were written) and
anti-German propaganda (circa World War I).  I think some of the _Pellucidar_
series are also OK.  I haven't re-read them in the last 25 years, FWIW.

								paul

Ah yes, many a happy childhood (well on into teenage years as well) day spent
with ERB stories.

I liked most of them, though never read the complete set of Tarzan books. I
started with John Carter, moved through the Venus series and down into
Pellucidar !

There was as I recall a historical romance style novel he wrote called the 

	OUTLAW OF GORN.

(might be wrong about Gorn.. maybe somewhere else). They all still are on my
shelves at home, waiting until the day my kids can read them (or maybe me in 
my second, third etc childhood...)

Mike

	p.s. They must have had some affect on me, I fence these days !

    Hi all
    
    Thanks for the replies, I will give them a try.
    
    I seem to remember reading some of the pellucidar books when I was at
    school. I may try those again sometime.
    
    
    Thanks
    
    Martin
     

  I do remember bitter disappointment when I learned in freshman physics
  that the inside of a hollow sphere is a zero-g environment.  Pellucidarians
  would not stick to the inside of a hollow earth...

  JP

    
    Althought Chessmen of Mars may seem like it was the 7th book, it was
    actually only the 4th.  I got bored on the same one and never finished
    past that point.  Someone mentioned 'Outlaw of Gorn'.  Could it be that
    they were referring to 'Outlaw of Gor' by John Norman?  Sort of similar
    styles, only Gor is one of my absolute all time favorite series' ever
    and I didn't make it very far in Mars though I will return to it after
    I read the Swords/Lost Swords stuff and a couple of others I have
    laying around.
    
    

Another writer who could easily be confused with ERB was Otis Adelbert Kline.
His stories were pretty similar to ERB's, including being re-released in the
1960s with covers by Roy G. Krenkel and Frank Frazetta.

								paul

    Re.11
    
    I have also read a lot of the gor books, they would sure please
    the S&M peaple out their. I am suprised that the feminists have not
    burned his books or crucified John Norman before now, as the books
    imply that it is every womans secret desire to be dominated by men.??
    
    
    Also,  Re the sword/lost swords books, are you refering to the Fred
    Saberhargen (??) series, if so you don't happen to know what comes
    after the 3rd book of lost sword (1=woundhealer, 2=sightblinder
    3=stonecutter? 4= ??----)
    
    
    thanks for the help and comments
    
    Martin
    An avid sf/fant reader
    
    

It was OUTLAW OF TORN. It was a sword fight epic set in the middle ages. 

A sword master teachs a 'king' to fight. The king has a son and the sword master
steals the son as a baby because he didn't get paid. He teachs the son all the
sword technics and even his secret technics. The lad is sent out to be an outlaw
as part of the revenge. After awhile the young man learns his identity and goes
after the sword master himself.... it is actually a pretty good novel.

I also liked all of the ERB books and really liked the John Carter books. The
ones where they god to the mooons and shrink and the ones where they went to 
Jupiter are a bit much but hey they were written in the early 1900's. 

A princess of mars was written in 1904 I think and Tarzan was the next year
ERB's John carter books were more popular than Tarzan for awhile. Also I think
Fredrich Pohl did a BARSOOM (Mars) book or it might have been Phillip Jose Farmer
or Larry Niven (I remember there are probably 2 or 3 Barsoom books by others)..

The last book was unfinished and published posthumanously by ERB's son..

  Philip Jose Farmer wrote a couple of Tarzan take-offs, including "Tarzan,
  Alive!," "Lord Tyger," and "A Feast Unknown."  "Lord Tyger" was actually
  pretty good -- it described a boy whose upbringing was as close as possible
  to that of Lord Greystoke in the original "Tarzan" book.  And it also
  described several unsuccessful attempts to raise such a real Tarzan.

  I didn't know that Pohl or Niven had done any but I'd love to hear more 
  about them.  There is some mention of Barsoom in the early chapters of
  Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast."

  JP

    re: .-1

    >And it also
    >described several unsuccessful attempts to raise such a real Tarzan.

    I hope these were fictional attempts!  All The cases 
    of feral children (i.e. raised without human contact) that I've
    heard of have been tragic and appalling.  The children are physically 
    and mentally stunted.   They never get their full growth or learn
    to speak properly.  A far cry from the superhuman Tarzan!  Anyone
    who really tried such an experiment should be shot.  /jlr

    It's fiction...the nice thing about the book is that you get to
    see both how the "Tarzan" character sees things and how the mad
    millionaire cut corners to save money.  Of course, once you've
    created a Tarzan, he kind of gets out from under your thumb.  The
    mad millionaire gets a super-hero, and winds up wishing he hadn't.
    
    Farmer's _Interview_with_Lord_Greystoke_ is another version of
    the same story, this time as though it were a bit more real (e.g.
    the "apes" Tarzan grew up with were not chimps or gorillas, but
    the last surviving population of Australopithecenes...).
    
    			-John Bishop

If i recall, "Lord Tyger" learned some rather interesting sexual customs
from his anthropoid tutors that didn't fit in with the Victorian Tarzan
legend at all well!  A fun read...
								paul

    re:.14
    
    PRINCESS OF MARS and TARZAN OF THE APES were written (or rather
    published) circa 1911, not 1904. But no matter...
    
    No one that I know of other than Burroughs has done any Barsoom
    novels (i.e. actually set on Burroughs' version of Mars -- I'm
    not counting allusions to Burroughs) though there are certainly
    many imitations.
    
    --- jerry

I once read a biography on Burroughs that said he got the idea for "A Princess
of Mars" while waiting to be seen for an appointment.  You see, ERB used to
be a pencil salesman.  Took up one of his own writing untensils and began
writing because he was kept waiting in that office.  I suppose if ERB were
selling chisels, he would have been a famous sculptor instead of writer.  :^)

As a young reader, I "cut my teeth" on Burroughs for entire novel reading; 
big jump from comic books and the "big little books".
Still never completed the entire John Carter series, although I think I got
up to 6 or 7.  There are 11 in all; the last one called, appropriately enough,
"John Carter of Mars".  I even made it up to book 15 or so for the Tarzan 
series.  Another stand-alone novel I read by Burroughs that I liked was
"The Monster Men".

Mike_L

    It occurred to me that the reason Niven's name might be tied to
    Burroughs' Mars books is because of a relatively recent book
    by Niven and Steven Barnes titled THE BARSOOM PROJECT, which
    really isn't a Barsoom novel.
    
    --- jerry

    re .15
    
    There was another Farmer Tarzan book called "Lord of the Trees" which
    was the second part of "A Feast Unknown".
    

    re:.22 re:.15
    
    A FEAST UNKNOWN and LORD OF THE TREES were part of a larger series
    that Farmer planned, though only one other book was written, THE
    MAD GOBLIN (which was originally published as half of an Ace Double
    with LORD OF THE TREES). In addition to the Tarzan-like character,
    Lord Grandraith, the books featured a Doc Savage imitation, Doc
    Caliban.
    
    Farmer had done one other Tarzan pastische, a short novel published
    as a small press book, THE ADVENTURE OF THE PEERLESS PEER, which
    crossed Tarzan with Sherlock Holmes. After its initial publication,
    the Burroughs estate made a big stink, as the Tarzan character was
    still their property (though the Sherlock Holmes character had just
    gone into the Public Domain).
    
    The novella was eventually re-written to remove the explicit Tarzan
    references and republished as part of another Farmer book. The title
    escapes me at the moment, but I'll look it up when I get home.
    
    --- jerry

Article: 330
From: [email protected] (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews #10: Edgar Rice Burroughs
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 15 Aug 93 15:39:09 GMT
 
		Belated Reviews #10:  Edgar Rice Burroughs
 
From the nineteen-tens to the nineteen-forties, Edgar Rice Burroughs
wrote the better part of a hundred books.  They were the stuff of
pulps -- cousins to Howard's books about Conan the Barbarian, and
written for much the same audience -- thrilling adventure stories
featuring larger-than-life heroes making (or hacking) their way
through more or less exotic locales to save the heroines from fates
worse than death.  (The fates in question generally arise from the
fact that Burroughs's apemen, aliens, and monsters all prefer human
women to their own.)  This is another set of books I loved when I was
in my early teens, though I might have found them intolerable had I
encountered them a decade later. 
 
That said, it is difficult to overstate the influence of Burroughs's
books. Until relatively recently, anyone who grew up reading science
fiction grew up reading Burroughs.  His books were part of the common
background of most science fiction fans and authors.  This isn't to
say that his readers turned around and started grinding out Burroughs
pastiches (with the conspicuous exception of Otis Adelbert Kline) but
that his writing became part of the shared context of the genre. 
 
(Digression:  Reading and writing sf both call for specialized skills
and knowledge.  It is notorious that mainstream writers who attempt to
write science fiction usually produce books that don't work well *as*
science fiction.  They lack the background to know which themes and
plot devices need to be explained in detail, which are old hat and can
simply be invoked, and which are overused cliches.  Burroughs is a big
part of this background: Even if you've never read his books, most of
the science fiction you'll have read was written by people who did.) 
 
Most of the books written by Edgar Rice Burroughs fall into a few series:
 
Tarzan of the Apes (***) is the best known of his works.  An English
lord and his wife are marooned in Africa, and when they die, their
infant son is adopted by great apes.  He grows up with all the
abilities Burroughs attributed to these apes (superhuman strength,
agility, sense of smell), but is also (by breeding, of course) an
instinctive gentleman.  The book which introduced Tarzan was followed
by twenty-three sequels, most of them placed in Africa.  This isn't
the Africa we know, but a continent of killer gorillas, witch doctors
whose magic works, and so many lost civilizations that it's amazing
they don't require special zoning.  In the first dozen books, Tarzan
tangles with Atlanteans, microscopic humans, crusaders whose ancestors
accidentally turned left when they got to the Mediterranean, and
descendents of Romans whose sense of direction was no better. 
 
"A Princess of Mars" (***) is the first of eleven books about John
Carter, an immortal Virginian who, after the Civil War, finds himself
on Mars.  (Never mind how.)  This Mars is an old old planet:  Its
atmosphere is thin, and there isn't much water left beyond what flows
in the canals.  The women are beautiful, and scantily clad.  (They
also lay eggs, which doesn't prevent folks from walking around with
navels.)  The men go around waving swords (despite their possession of
airships and guns), though none do so as well as John Carter, of
course.  Yes, it's silly, but don't underestimate its charms. (I
remember how hard I wished *I* could be transported to Mars.  It never
worked, of course, but that's probably because I made the mistake of
wishing on the *first* star, instead of on the *red* star.) 
 
(Readers might find a comparison of the plots of the first couple of
Mars novels to the plots of the first three Gor novels instructive. 
Books, like people, can't choose their own relatives.) 
 
"At the Earth's Core" (***) is the first book in the Pellucidar
series, which takes place inside the Earth.  Turns out the Earth is
hollow, and when you get past the crust you find yourself in a
prehistoric land. ('Prehistoric' means cavemen *and* dinosaurs.)  The
Earth's actual core is now 'up' of course (Burroughs is as innocent of
science here as he is in any of his other series) -- a flaming sphere
which serves Pellucidar (the name of this inner Earth) as a sun. 
(Since it's straight up no matter where in Earth you are, it's always
noon in Pellucidar.)  David Innes finds his way to Pellucidar with an
experimental mechanical borer, and eventually winds up making a life
for himself there and introducing *some* of the benefits of modern
civilization. 
 
"The Land That Time Forgot" (***) is the first in a short series with
a quirky premise:  This is a land in which evolution is personal.  You
go to sleep one night as a Homo Erectus and wake up the next morning
realizing that you've become a Neanderthal, and that it's time for you
to move to a more evolved neighborhood. 
 
There's a Venus series, too ("Pirates of Venus" (**) et. al.), but it
never really worked for me.  Many of his one-shots didn't work that
well either.  My personal favorites, back when, were "The Mad King"
(***), his rewrite of "Prisoner of Zenda", and "The Moon Men" (***)
(sequel to "The Moon Maid" (**)) -- a sequence of linked stories about
Earth's conquest at the hands of Lunar invaders, and its aftermath. 
 
%A  Burroughs, Edgar Rice
%T  Tarzan of the Apes
%T  A Princess of Mars
%T  At the Earth's Core
%T  The Land that Time Forgot
%O  The Burroughs books have been reprinted so often that a complete
%O  bibliography would be an act of madness and partial data would be
%O  pointless:  Just go to a used book store and find the shelf with
%O  thirty Burroughs books from twenty different editions.
 
Standard introduction and disclaimer for Belated Reviews follows.

Belated Reviews cover science fiction and fantasy of earlier decades.
They're for newer readers who have wondered about the older titles on the
shelves, or who are interested in what sf/f was like in its younger days.
The emphasis is on helping interested readers identify books to try first, 
not on discussing the books in depth.
 
A general caveat is in order:  Most of the classics of yesteryear have not
aged well.  If you didn't encounter them back when, or in your early teens,
they will probably not give you the unforced pleasure they gave their
original audiences.  You may find yourself having to make allowances for
writing you consider shallow or politics you consider regressive.  When I
name specific titles, I'll often rate them using the following scale:
 
**** Recommended.
***  An old favorite that hasn't aged well, and wouldn't get a good
	reception if it were written today.  Enjoyable on its own terms.
**   A solid book, worth reading if you like the author's works.
*    Nothing special.
 
Additional disclaimers:  Authors are not chosen for review in any particular
order.  The reviews don't attempt to be comprehensive.  No distinction is 
made between books which are still in print and books which are not.
-----
Dani Zweig
[email protected]
 
   Should 'anal retentive' have a hyphen? - unidentified passing t-shirt

    "The Monster Men" is a favorite of mine--at least in this case
    the artificial humans have a good reason to prefer the human
    heroine, considering their source!
    
    One of the things I like about ERB is that his villians are
    often sympathetic to some degree: they have comprehensible
    motivations and some minor "evil" characters are likeable.
    
    Philip Jose Farmer has a good article ("Interview with Lord
    Greystoke") which attempts to explain Tarzan as fact, in parts;
    he also wrote a novel about an attempt by a mad millionaire to
    create a Tarzan-like hero (title?).
    
    		-John Bishop

    
    Re: Tarzan-like hero
    
    "Lord Tyger" by PJF. One of my all-time favorites.
    
    JP

    Thanks for title.  It provides the (in retrospect obvious) point
    that if you create an authentic super-hero, he will act like a 
    super-hero--and in his opinion you (as a powerful secret manipulator)
    will be a super-villain!
    
    		-John Bishop