![]() John Carter first encounters the 'green men' of the dead Martian sea-beds, the Tharks who stand ten feet tall and green skin, huge tusks, and four arms. The world where John Carter finds himself - called Barsoom by its inhabitants (to them, Earth is Jasoom) - is a fantastic place full of magnificent, often heroic peoples, including the 'red men' of advanced cities like Helium, men ruled by 'jeddaks' and transported by flying ships, men - and beautiful women - who dress scantily in Mars' sultry heat, talk like Elizabethan bravos, and live to fight courtly duels. Lowell wrote about that Mars in three books that became the most improbable of best-sellers, and his lectures on the subject packed halls and ampitheaters with intelligent, educated Bostonians avid for the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the solar system (readers familiar with the latest "water world" findings from NASA will know the feeling).That particular conception of Mars quickly proved untrue, but Edgar Rice Burroughs gave it immortality just the same. ![]() they were canals, obviously built by the living inhabitants of Mars in order to suck the last drops of vitality out of their planet's vanishing waterways. Percival Lowell devoted his leisure time (and since he was one of the ur-Brahmin Lowells, it was all leisure time) to studying the red planet, and his studies convinced him that the vivid lateral scorings he glimpsed through his telescope - scorings we now know to be massif ridges and long-dry canyons - were artificially created. But this wasn't the Mars we know today, the bleakly freezing world of missed barometric chances, no: this is instead a teeming, exotic wonderland of alien species and high-towered cities living a long last golden age in the thin air of a dying world.The planet may have been spat out from the sun billions of years ago, but the Mars poor transplanted John Carter encounters was created by a mild-mannered Bostonian. As the story opens, a desperate John Carter hides in a cave, passes out, and wakes to find himself stark naked on Mars. It was called "Under the Moons of Mars," and it featured a soldier named John Carter, a Virginian late of the American Civil War and now being pursued by Indians in the badlands of Arizona. Ages 12 up.Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom John Joseph Adams, editorSimon & Schuster, 2012All through the glorious summer of 1911, All-Story Magazine ran a science fiction serial unlike anything readers had ever seen before. A worthwhile introduction (or, for adult readers, a return) to one of Burroughs's most imaginative universes. The works closely honor Burroughs's own, with self-assured characters, concrete storytelling, high adventure, and touches of tongue-in-cheek humor. And in Garth Nix's "A Sidekick of Mars," a gold prospector transported to Mars by an old Indian curse explains in colorful Western lingo what it was like to be Carter's sidekick and to later discover that Burroughs omitted him when retelling the tales. Beagle's "The Ape-Man of Mars," Tarzan is transported to Barsoom where he meets John Carter and the two alpha males find it hard to coexist on the same planet. Lansdale's "The Metal Men of Mars," Carter is captured by a monstrous, Borglike, steampunk society planning to conquer the planet and turn everyone into machines. Taking advantage of the big-screen release of the film John Carter, this competent anthology, set on Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom, includes stories featuring the eponymous hero of the series, plus other characters now brought more fully to life in tales of their own.
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