John Carter primer on SFSignal

My primer on John Carter (to go along with the earlier one on Doc Savage) has bee published on SFSignal.

An excerpt:

With Disney’s trailers and announced March release of the movie John Carter, readers of the books that inspired the movie are at once hopeful and fearful: hopeful that the movie will actually capture the imagination as well as the initial reading of Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom series did; fearful that the movie will be an unfaithful adaptation, or, at worst a lemon in the tradition of pulp movie adaptations like the Doc Savage movie.

Though never a large Tarzan fan, I, like many readers my age, tore through the other worlds created by ERB. But Barsoom was always the cornerstone. Here, then, is a Primer on John Carter and the Barsoom series of novels.

SPOILER ALERTS – for those readers who have not read the books and would like to be surprised at the movie plot (which hopefully doesn’t stray to far from the book plot line), this primer is written with the potential spoiler pieces at the end. Feel free to read the Author section. The John Carter section contains a bit of preview, but stay away from the sections below that if you want to go into the movie fresh.

THE AUTHOR

Born September 1, 1875, Edgar Rice Burroughs held numerous non-writing jobs before breaking into the world of print in 1912 (at the tender age of 37). He is better know as the creator of Tarzan, but he also created many other worlds and characters. And the very first one he created was called Under the Moons of Mars, the original name of the story that would be known as A Princess of Mars, the first novel in the Barsoom/John Carter series.

The legend of ERB says that he held a job checking the advertisements in the pulp magazines of the day, and dreamed that he could write on better. This first attempt was one crazy daydream, and contained a fairly fully conceived world within it.

When initially submitting the story to The All Story magazine for publication, he was concerned that its plot was so fantastic that publishers and the public of 1912 would think him quite mad. So he submitted it under the pen name Normal Bean. The publisher presumably thought this was a typo and changed the author’s name to Norman Bean. Thus Barsoom and John Carter were born.

ERB created many more worlds and characters than just Tarzan and the Barsoom of John Carter. He imagined the adventures of David Innes in Pellucidar At the Earth’s CoreCarson(Napier) of VenusThe Land That Time Forgot trilogy; the Moon Maid and others. And the success he had with these inspired the pulp writers of Doc Savage and The Spider, who themselves inspired the science fiction writers that we all know and love.

In all, through 1967 with the release of I Am A Barbarian, ERB published almost 70 books of these worlds and others.

In his later years, ERB spent time in Hawaii, and was living in Honolulu during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He volunteered to be a war correspondent, and was the oldest one in the Pacific Theater. He died in 1950.

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The rest of the article covers John Carter, Barsoom, the rest of the books in the series and a link to other sources.

Read the full article here.

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2 Responses

  1. antares says:

    I enjoyed both your print primer and video primer. Linked to both of them on my blog with accolades to you. Good stuff.

    • admin says:

      Thanks very much. The video primer is going to be shown during the NY Review of Science Fiction Readings, this Tuesday at 6:30pm at the SoHo Gallery of Digital Art (if anyone happens to be in NYC).

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