Review: A Princess of Mars

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Princess of Mars is sci-fi rendered in primary colours.
John Carter, our hero, is able to determine almost immediately which civilizations are good and which are evil, at which point he feels no qualms about wiping out hundreds of thousands of people. It's helpful that he's essentially invincible, due to his Earth-muscles being disproportionately powerful in the lower gravity of Mars. His greatest flaw? "My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty" - he has no choice but to be brave.
This certainly makes for an adventure, but I found myself skimming pages to see if anything would actually happen. All too often I ran headlong into sentences like this:
"While the court was entirely overgrown with the yellow, moss-like vegetation which blankets practically the entire surface of Mars, yet numerous fountains, statuary, benches, and pergola-like contraptions bore witness to the beauty which the court must have presented in bygone times, when graced by the fair-haired, laughing people whom stern and unalterable cosmic laws had driven not only from their homes, but from all except the vague legends of their descendants." (Chapter 12)
All characters are prone to lengthy digressions in excruciating detail about mundane and often irrelevant aspects of Martian life. It's an exercise in world building, sure, but it's the kind of thing that should be in a Mars extended universe wiki, not an adventure story.
I haven't looked, but I'm sure someone has turned them into comic books. Go read those instead.

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