Two Martian Odysseys
Oct. 19th, 2005 01:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersFor the past few years, when I've read SF and fantasy it has tended to be the older, pulpier variety. Lately, I seem to be embarking on the project of rereading some of my adolescent favorites, spurred by enjoyable recent tours of Andre Norton and HP Lovecraft.
When I was a teenager, my favorites (after I was done with Norton) were Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and JRR Tolkien, all of whom I read and reread fervently, as did my friend Reid, who also joined me in making up trivia quizzes about the different minor characters and secondary world zoology. I stopped reading all of them when I went to college and got serious about literature and thus started reading New Wave SF writers instead. Later, I went back to Tolkien, but I've never had any interest in rereading Burroughs or Howard. But somehow I was prompted to give Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon a reread, and from there it wasn't much of a reach to try Burroughs' A Princess of Mars again.
Back in the day, I read practically everything by Burroughs except for the Tarzan books (which didn't interest me much), but the Mars books were always my favorites. This time around I found Princess pretty slow going after the Brackett book. Burroughs is writing in a 19th Century -- or perhaps (cf. Fussell) pre-WWI -- mode, and the genteel and refined diction seem ponderous in a genre work. The method of John Carter's travel to Mars -- essentially astral projection -- is also very old-school, giving the story an archaic feel.
On the other hand, once he got to Mars and looked around a bit, I found the world-building fascinating. As a kid, I knew very little about Percival Lowell's theories about Mars, but now I see how much Burroughs took from him. Lowell's theories have of course long been debunked, but they still make for a splendid, exotic world for adventures in Burrough's fanciful variations: the dead sea beds covered with ochre moss, the canals carrying water from melting ice caps to irrigate the crops, the vast ruined cities of ancient civilizations, the last semi-barbaric remnants of these people struggling to survive via unimaginable arcane super science. Burroughs throws in other ideas such as an atmosphere factory to replenish the dissipating air of the dying planet, and he throws science to the four winds by explaining that the replacement atmosphere is a distillate of mysterious ninth rays from the sun that reach Mars but not Earth. Likewise the eighth rays that allow ships to float in the air via antigravitic properties.
But while the science is imaginary, it still signifies an attempt to explain the world in rational, materialist terms. Much of the books consists of expository descriptions of various aspects of this strange new world, and to a large extent the action of the plot exists to carry us on a travelogue that shows us all the most interesting things about the people, wildlife, cities, and customs of Mars. There is a real grandeur to the sprawling landscape, too. This is just as well, because despite all the odd alien creatures involved, the action itself is pretty standard pulp adventure stuff, with fights, chases, disguises, threats of torture, daring leaps, inescapable traps, and ever so miraculous escapes. John Carter is a superhero, although there are aspects of his abilities that are explained science fictionally, in a way that foreshadows Superman. Carter's Earth muscles give him greater power in the weaker gravity of Mars, so he can bound around like a jacked up kangaroo and fell giant aliens with a single punch to the jaw. Of course, there's no consideration that his muscles might weaken over time, but at least the thought was there. His superhuman swordsmanship, however, bears no explaining.
One interesting bit of background that isn't dwelled on too much is that Carter, a Virginian, was an officer in the Confederate Army in the US Civil War. This establishes him, for the purposes of the story, as the nearest equivalent to an aristocrat as could be found in the US. Thus when he woos the haughtyScarlet Martian royal princess, he knows the moves and is accepted as worthy of a marriage with her. He is such a gentleman that he only takes brief notice of the fact that she's running around without any clothes on, and for that matter so is he. Even when she presses her warm form against him as they ride across the mossy plains with a lively thoat between their legs, the warmth never turns to heat. The unperturbable nobility of his character is rather tiresome, in fact, although like the she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not gyrations of the romantic subplot, it's all part of the formula, I guess.
Still, as romantic subplots go, I find the formulaic gyrations more interesting in Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon. It was apparently originally published under the title, "The Sea Kings of Mars," which not only avoids the misleading names from the Mabinogion that unfortunately litter the text, but also hints at the twist on the Burroughsian version of Mars that Brackett pulls here. Brackett's dying Mars is in a space opera future, not contemporary as in Burroughs, but through her own evocation of (cue Thomas Dolby) super science, her Earth character is sent back to the Martian past, when the planet is still covered by opalescent seas and emerald forests.
Like Burroughs, Brackett populates this world with stock aliens and characters. There are flying people and swimming people and (boo hisssssssss) snake people, and there's a conniving but loveable fat thief and a haughty princess who just needs her imperial seal broken by a manly man. What's interesting is that these tropes are mashed up with tropes from hardboiled detective pulp, so that our hero Matt Carse is something of an antihero, and any nobility to be found is of the tortured variety seen in Phillip Marlowe. Nobility isn't the only thing that's tortured, nor is it just a threat of torture: it's all part of the foreplay. The princess isn't just haughty, she's downright cruel and bloody-handed. Carse isn't the cool-tempered superhero, but a wracked and haunted one. He hears voices, he feels possessed ...
Brackett apparently didn't work out her stories beforehand, and the plot certainly feels like a live thing struggling in her hands to get away. In other words, she's making it up as she goes along. It's all the traditional pulp adventure moves again (see list above), and again it's the exotic world that's most interesting. Except that the divided, tormented characters here are more compelling than Burroughs' noble and thorougly honorable aristocrats. (Perhaps the most interesting character in A Princess of Mars is Sola -- one of the giant, green, four-armed Tharks who, alone of all her incubator egg-hatched people, knows who her parents were and knows who killed her mother, yet because of custom cannot tell any of this to her oblivious father.) In the end, the resolution to the story is much the same, but the movement through the tropes is much more lively and much sexier.
Whoever wrote the article on "planetary romance" for Wikipedia makes the interesting claim that the subgenre was heavily influenced by "Eastern Adventure Stories ... where Earth takes the role of the British in colonial occupation stories." I'm really curious about how true that is. I can see Burroughs' debt to Lowell, but where did his aliens come from, with their gold armbands and sleeping silks and mixture of swords and rifles? From Burton's translation of 1001 Nights? From Kipling? Are those long-range rifles of the Tharks an echo of the Afghani jezail? For that matter, where did this idea of green Martians come from originally? What else was written about Mars between Wells and Burroughs?
Questions to consider when I read the next two Burroughs Mars books, and I've got the Fantasy Masterworks collection of Brackett on the way as well. But first ... Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. "A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I, unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth." Howling, piping wind? Could it be ... blasphemous flutes? Brrrrrrrr!
When I was a teenager, my favorites (after I was done with Norton) were Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and JRR Tolkien, all of whom I read and reread fervently, as did my friend Reid, who also joined me in making up trivia quizzes about the different minor characters and secondary world zoology. I stopped reading all of them when I went to college and got serious about literature and thus started reading New Wave SF writers instead. Later, I went back to Tolkien, but I've never had any interest in rereading Burroughs or Howard. But somehow I was prompted to give Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon a reread, and from there it wasn't much of a reach to try Burroughs' A Princess of Mars again.
Back in the day, I read practically everything by Burroughs except for the Tarzan books (which didn't interest me much), but the Mars books were always my favorites. This time around I found Princess pretty slow going after the Brackett book. Burroughs is writing in a 19th Century -- or perhaps (cf. Fussell) pre-WWI -- mode, and the genteel and refined diction seem ponderous in a genre work. The method of John Carter's travel to Mars -- essentially astral projection -- is also very old-school, giving the story an archaic feel.
On the other hand, once he got to Mars and looked around a bit, I found the world-building fascinating. As a kid, I knew very little about Percival Lowell's theories about Mars, but now I see how much Burroughs took from him. Lowell's theories have of course long been debunked, but they still make for a splendid, exotic world for adventures in Burrough's fanciful variations: the dead sea beds covered with ochre moss, the canals carrying water from melting ice caps to irrigate the crops, the vast ruined cities of ancient civilizations, the last semi-barbaric remnants of these people struggling to survive via unimaginable arcane super science. Burroughs throws in other ideas such as an atmosphere factory to replenish the dissipating air of the dying planet, and he throws science to the four winds by explaining that the replacement atmosphere is a distillate of mysterious ninth rays from the sun that reach Mars but not Earth. Likewise the eighth rays that allow ships to float in the air via antigravitic properties.
But while the science is imaginary, it still signifies an attempt to explain the world in rational, materialist terms. Much of the books consists of expository descriptions of various aspects of this strange new world, and to a large extent the action of the plot exists to carry us on a travelogue that shows us all the most interesting things about the people, wildlife, cities, and customs of Mars. There is a real grandeur to the sprawling landscape, too. This is just as well, because despite all the odd alien creatures involved, the action itself is pretty standard pulp adventure stuff, with fights, chases, disguises, threats of torture, daring leaps, inescapable traps, and ever so miraculous escapes. John Carter is a superhero, although there are aspects of his abilities that are explained science fictionally, in a way that foreshadows Superman. Carter's Earth muscles give him greater power in the weaker gravity of Mars, so he can bound around like a jacked up kangaroo and fell giant aliens with a single punch to the jaw. Of course, there's no consideration that his muscles might weaken over time, but at least the thought was there. His superhuman swordsmanship, however, bears no explaining.
One interesting bit of background that isn't dwelled on too much is that Carter, a Virginian, was an officer in the Confederate Army in the US Civil War. This establishes him, for the purposes of the story, as the nearest equivalent to an aristocrat as could be found in the US. Thus when he woos the haughty
Still, as romantic subplots go, I find the formulaic gyrations more interesting in Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon. It was apparently originally published under the title, "The Sea Kings of Mars," which not only avoids the misleading names from the Mabinogion that unfortunately litter the text, but also hints at the twist on the Burroughsian version of Mars that Brackett pulls here. Brackett's dying Mars is in a space opera future, not contemporary as in Burroughs, but through her own evocation of (cue Thomas Dolby) super science, her Earth character is sent back to the Martian past, when the planet is still covered by opalescent seas and emerald forests.
Like Burroughs, Brackett populates this world with stock aliens and characters. There are flying people and swimming people and (boo hisssssssss) snake people, and there's a conniving but loveable fat thief and a haughty princess who just needs her imperial seal broken by a manly man. What's interesting is that these tropes are mashed up with tropes from hardboiled detective pulp, so that our hero Matt Carse is something of an antihero, and any nobility to be found is of the tortured variety seen in Phillip Marlowe. Nobility isn't the only thing that's tortured, nor is it just a threat of torture: it's all part of the foreplay. The princess isn't just haughty, she's downright cruel and bloody-handed. Carse isn't the cool-tempered superhero, but a wracked and haunted one. He hears voices, he feels possessed ...
Brackett apparently didn't work out her stories beforehand, and the plot certainly feels like a live thing struggling in her hands to get away. In other words, she's making it up as she goes along. It's all the traditional pulp adventure moves again (see list above), and again it's the exotic world that's most interesting. Except that the divided, tormented characters here are more compelling than Burroughs' noble and thorougly honorable aristocrats. (Perhaps the most interesting character in A Princess of Mars is Sola -- one of the giant, green, four-armed Tharks who, alone of all her incubator egg-hatched people, knows who her parents were and knows who killed her mother, yet because of custom cannot tell any of this to her oblivious father.) In the end, the resolution to the story is much the same, but the movement through the tropes is much more lively and much sexier.
Whoever wrote the article on "planetary romance" for Wikipedia makes the interesting claim that the subgenre was heavily influenced by "Eastern Adventure Stories ... where Earth takes the role of the British in colonial occupation stories." I'm really curious about how true that is. I can see Burroughs' debt to Lowell, but where did his aliens come from, with their gold armbands and sleeping silks and mixture of swords and rifles? From Burton's translation of 1001 Nights? From Kipling? Are those long-range rifles of the Tharks an echo of the Afghani jezail? For that matter, where did this idea of green Martians come from originally? What else was written about Mars between Wells and Burroughs?
Questions to consider when I read the next two Burroughs Mars books, and I've got the Fantasy Masterworks collection of Brackett on the way as well. But first ... Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. "A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I, unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth." Howling, piping wind? Could it be ... blasphemous flutes? Brrrrrrrr!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-10-19 10:00 pm (UTC)She also wrote a number of great screenplays, in case you didn't know. Westerns directed by John Ford, and I think she had a hand in the Elliott Gould version of The Long Goodbye.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-19 10:40 pm (UTC)I'm really looking forward to reading more of her SF, because there's an interesting eroticism to go along with the exoticism. Right now I'm very keen on the old Mars and Venus of the pulps, the desert planet and the swamp planet. I may well take a look at her mysteries at some point, although I still haven't caught that genre bug as hard as a lot of SF fans. Still, I enjoyed reading a couple of Dorothy Hughes novels last year.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-20 05:59 am (UTC)I also read Jack Vances Planet of Adventure books, and also the Dragon Masters -- Vance at his pulpiest, but still with that classic weird Vancian edge, with lots of descriptions of bizarre social customs etc.
I find I can't reread Lovecraft the same way, though. I focus too much on his faults, the racism, the outrageous adjectives, etc. I can't help but read him with a critical eye. I still enjoy it, but I don't enjoy him the same way I did when I first read him.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-20 03:54 pm (UTC)I wasn't a big fan of Lovecraft as a kid (I'm not much of a horror fan still), although I did really like Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath in my Lin Carter-influenced Ballantine Adult fantasy reading days. I find it interesting that in the meantime (i.e., since the mid-'70s) he has achieved a degree of mainstream or at least academic acceptance and respect. I read an interview with an editor of a recent edition of Conan stories who argued that Lovecraft had joined Hammett and Chandler as 20th C. pulp writers who have achieved such acceptance. (He hoped that Howard would join them eventually.)
The more scholarly part of me is just happy that folks like Lovecraft and Howard are getting scholarly editions of their work published, since it means people are straining over old manuscripts for interesting editorial changes and original intent and all those textual holy grails. Nerds of a different order. It's all good!
no subject
Date: 2005-10-20 04:21 pm (UTC)I was a fan of Lovecrafts horror as a kid, I have quite vivid memories of staying up late reading it in bed when I should be asleep.
I do have the annotated Lovecraft books, and it has made me read Lovecraft and enjoy it again. But I do read it a different way now. It is definitely interesting the way that he has achieved at least some acknowledgement of his cultural significance, though I think his excesses as a prose stylist (not to mention dubious politics) will always keep him a bit of a guilty pleasure and a locus of controversy.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-20 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-20 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 10:18 pm (UTC)Curiously I seem to have covered much the same ground as you did, reading much of Burroughs and Howard, as well as Lord Of the Rings. However my experience is slightly different to yours in that while I read ERB's Barsoom series and his Venus series and one or two others I never liked them enough to want to reread, not back then and not now. Many of Howard's stories on the other hand I reread a great many times though I'm not sure I could repeat the feat now.
At much the same time I was still reading Norton and had added the likes of Eric Frank Russell, Jack Vance, Harry Harrison, Poul Anderson, Clifford Simak etc. They all seemed to be writing about the same galactic empire, at least that's the nebulous vision of endless worlds and endless starports to reach them that I formed. I don't know if it's possible for anybody discovering sf today to reach this particular galactic empire since so much of the relevant fiction doesn't appear to be easily available.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 10:51 pm (UTC)I'm not sure how much by Russell, Vance, Harrison, Anderson, and Simak (let alone "etc.") is available in reasonably priced editions these days. It might take some digging. But there's plenty of modern space opera, and the best stuff isn't written by boring Yanks, so maybe there's no need to look back for the youngsters.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-21 11:08 pm (UTC)