Early stefnal hand-waving
Nov. 9th, 2005 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersThe shaft was a mighty magnet, and when once a vessel came within the radius of its powerful attraction for the aluminum steel that enters so largely into the construction of all Barsoomian craft, no power on earth could prevent such an end as we had just witnessed.
I afterward learned that the shaft rests directly over the magnetic pole of Mars, but whether this adds in any way to its incalculable power of attraction I do not know. I am a fighting man, not a scientist.
--Edgar Rice Burroughs, Warlord of Mars
"I afterward learned" makes me wonder if this bit was tacked on after the magazine publication. That added explanation seems like a desperate, futile bid to placate objecting scientists. Also, as far as hack writing goes, the rote phrase "no power on earth" is a pretty funny in the context of a Martian adventure.
This is a terrible book. The first two are much better because of the imaginative world-building. They suffer from idiot-plotting too, but this one (which takes up the cliffhanger at the end of Gods of Mars) is all idiot-plotting without any interesting world-building. It read like something that was dashed off in a week to feed the maw of the pulp machine. About the only thing of interest is the vision of racial harmony at the end, albeit with each race politically segregated. "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight." Hm. And John Carter shares initials with Him.
It goes down a bit easier if you imagine Buster Crabbe playing John Carter and Jean Rogers playing the incomparable and fiercely helpless Dejah Thoris. However, when I came to "And from behind my shoulder, in the silvery cadence of that dear voice, rose the brave battle anthem of Helium which the nation's women sing as their men march out to victory," it was pretty much impossible not to think of Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup.
From there, it's a quick move to dreaming of the Marx Brothers parody of Burroughs, with a script by SJ Perelman. Harpo would play the Holy Thern in the blond frightwig, tormenting the deluded seekers of Barsoomian heaven by cutting off their inexplicable and unnecessary ties, then chasing lecherously after Dejah Thoris (played by Dumont) while Groucho Carter pauses to ogle the willowy Thuvia (played by Thelma Todd).
"Remember, men, you're fighting for this woman's honor ... "
I afterward learned that the shaft rests directly over the magnetic pole of Mars, but whether this adds in any way to its incalculable power of attraction I do not know. I am a fighting man, not a scientist.
--Edgar Rice Burroughs, Warlord of Mars
"I afterward learned" makes me wonder if this bit was tacked on after the magazine publication. That added explanation seems like a desperate, futile bid to placate objecting scientists. Also, as far as hack writing goes, the rote phrase "no power on earth" is a pretty funny in the context of a Martian adventure.
This is a terrible book. The first two are much better because of the imaginative world-building. They suffer from idiot-plotting too, but this one (which takes up the cliffhanger at the end of Gods of Mars) is all idiot-plotting without any interesting world-building. It read like something that was dashed off in a week to feed the maw of the pulp machine. About the only thing of interest is the vision of racial harmony at the end, albeit with each race politically segregated. "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight." Hm. And John Carter shares initials with Him.
It goes down a bit easier if you imagine Buster Crabbe playing John Carter and Jean Rogers playing the incomparable and fiercely helpless Dejah Thoris. However, when I came to "And from behind my shoulder, in the silvery cadence of that dear voice, rose the brave battle anthem of Helium which the nation's women sing as their men march out to victory," it was pretty much impossible not to think of Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup.
From there, it's a quick move to dreaming of the Marx Brothers parody of Burroughs, with a script by SJ Perelman. Harpo would play the Holy Thern in the blond frightwig, tormenting the deluded seekers of Barsoomian heaven by cutting off their inexplicable and unnecessary ties, then chasing lecherously after Dejah Thoris (played by Dumont) while Groucho Carter pauses to ogle the willowy Thuvia (played by Thelma Todd).
"Remember, men, you're fighting for this woman's honor ... "
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 06:18 am (UTC)I think you have to read the ERB books very very fast. Or else be nine years old, which was what worked for me.
You might like the science in the Pellucidar (Inner World) books more, dinosaurs and cavemen and the horizon curving upward and the little moon and sun inside the earth. In that series I am particularly fond of how the pirates sailed into the hollow inside of the earth through a hole in the arctic, so you can have pirates and cavemen.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 04:23 pm (UTC)I didn't like the Pellucidar books as much as the Mars and Venus books as a teenager. In general, the caveman and dinosaur scene wasn't as interesting to me as weird aliens. Didn't care much for Tarzan, either.
But pirates are always good. I enjoyed The Gods of Mars a lot more than Warlord, and the fact that it had pirates -- and black ones at that -- was certainly a factor. And ... they sail (in their air ships) into an underground country at the south pole of Mars, where there is an underground sea. Pretty frickin' cool! Gods is just about perfect as a planetary romance, as it throws weird aliens (the plant men) and lost races (therns and First Born) and elaborate religious myths at you, amidst all the thud and blunder. Warlord suffers from the fact that it's just thud and blunder, without much interesting scenery. In fact, the introduction of a tropical jungle -- on a nearly dry Mars, ferchristsake -- just seems like a bad idea.
I'm going to move on to CL Moore and Leigh Brackett for a while now, but I'll probably come back to Burroughs at some point. I've been enjoying my revisit so much that I bought a whole stack of the old Ace paperbacks with Roy Krenkel covers. I think they'll be replacing the wrinkled old Van Gogh print (Cypress Trees, 1889) that's been on the wall above my desk since I moved here in 1984.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 05:12 pm (UTC)I recall you wrote about the Princess (must google that rumor of the blockbuster movie).
no subject
Date: 2005-11-11 06:19 pm (UTC)The first Burroughs book I acquired was a copy of Escape on Venus, which I shoplifted from a Safeway spinrack because of Frazetta's cover of a big-assed girl confronting a tiger in a swamp. Frazetta drove me to a life a crime! But I have mixed feelings about Frazetta at this point. I still find his paintings vivid and full of incredible dynamism and beautiful exotic detail, but I find his exaggerated human figures repetitive and eventually embarrassing in the obsessiveness of type. But he does get an atmosphere across, and a thick, ham-handed eroticism ...
Krenkel isn't anywhere near as consistent as Frazetta, but his best stuff -- like the winged alien carrying the woman into the clouds on Pirates of Venus -- really captures the mood of strange adventure. He seems to be closer to the tradition of J. Allen St John, who was of course the first great Burroughs artist. In fact, Krenkel's covers for Pirates and The Moon Maid are very similar to St John's.
more ERB
Date: 2005-11-11 06:31 am (UTC)(And then there is The Cave Girl, in which an effete young Bostonian named Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones washes up on a tropical island and must learn proper caveman ways to survive, and of course to impress his savage lady love.)
Hmm. Since I'm not going to Novacon, and don't have that excuse for skipping NaNoWriMo, I should have hauled out my Son Of The Monster Men to work on. Ya think? Instead of staying up late to read LJ?