![]() The antagonist race will all be evil, and led by a particularly cruel and tyrannical ruler. ![]() The antagonists will always be another Martian civilisation, apparently unknown to the red Martians despite having lived together on the same small planet for countless millennia. This damsel is kidnapped early on, and her rescue drives the plot. If Carter’s the hero then it’s Dejah Thoris, the titular Martian Princess of the noble “red race”. However, the lack of characterisation makes all the heroes fairly indistinguishable from each other. It’s usually John Carter, a Confederate officer transported mysteriously from Earth, but sometimes it’s not. Pretty much every book can be summed up as follows: First, there’s a hero. But if you approach it with the right expectations, it’s quite fun. It isn’t science fiction in the sense that would be recognised today: it’s more a series of swashbuckling adventures that happen to be set on Mars. So, what’s it like? Well, it’s very silly. But I decided to read them all anyway, in succession, to get a feel for the series as a whole. Even its fans tend to admit that the first three books are the best, and the rest rapidly drop off in quality. It isn’t widely read these days, and for good reason: it isn’t very good. Like many works which spawned their own genres, it has been eclipsed by the works which followed it and were influenced by it, in particular those of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs‘s Barsoom series, beginning with A Princess of Mars, is a seminal work of early 20th century pulp science fiction.
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