My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs A (on a sentimental curve)
Actually looking back, I gave this book on first read as grade of 3 1/2 stars out of my 1- 4 star rating system in 1971. It is a great work of imagination, but I always wish there was more depth to it. Deeper characters, more dialog and more time spent on the story. But this is my complaint about all of those pulp stories and all of the early science fiction I read in my youth when I try to read them as an adult.
I read this and the next two books featuring John Carter to my kids as bedtime stories, and every so often I go back and read it again. I usually don't continue on, as it is just more of the same; one strange adventure after the next.
I will, however, take this opportunity to let you, dear reader, on a great secret that has been kept for over a hundred year. And that is that unbeknownst to John Carter himself, he is perhaps the last survivor of the original inhabitants of Barsoon, the civilization that built all those dead cities. The evidence is clear.
1) John Carter can't recall his childhood or past. All he remembers is being a soldier who never ages.
2) There a variety of races with different skin colors in the lost ages, all of who intermixed to form the current race of red skinned humans. Thus Carter's whiteness is consistent with being a member of the first civilization.
3) The strange method of his return to Mars - simply by wishing to return - and finding a different body awaiting him, though inexplicable by our science could be explained by some sort of ancient time-travel mechanism, and so it all but confirms his Barsoonian heritage. Apparently he is some sort of time traveler, part of an experiment from that lost and distant age.
4) And then consider the fact that not only could he consume any and all food found on Mars, but he quickly (re)developed his telepathic abilities. It is extremely unlikely that an ordinary Earthman would be able to digest the food or possess any telepathic abilities.
5) Given the fact that he never seemed to age can easily be explained by him being a Martian, who can live a thousand years or more.
6) And the final and undeniable proof of his Martian origins is that he was able to sire offspring with an egg-laying human(oid), the incomparable Dejah Thoris. It is almost impossible to believe that an Earth human could impregnate a Martian whose internal organs were said to be different, not to mention the egg-laying.
The inescapable conclusion is John Carter, that gentleman from Virginia is, and always has been a Martian, likely given the vast age between the old civilizations on Mars and 1865, some sort of time traveler who got lost in time and space. QED
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