Sure, he’s a hero, but does he need to be flawless? It’s a lot more fun to play off his failings and weaknesses.Ĭarter’s princess, Dejah Thoris, was always kidnapped as a plot device to give Carter something to quest after, but she never did a whole lot of talking. But I didn’t buy the idea that the heroic man needed to be superior to all he met. Strange aliens and weird customs, all good. The spirit of adventure – of not giving up in the face of insurmountable odds – that could stay. My other work was in comics, and that period of comics was all about deconstruction and reexamination of the form, so it followed if I was going to write a John Carter novel it would in part address what I felt would respect the source material while bringing it into the present. It was also a bit of a young man rejecting his childhood heroes that led me to look at the material with a critical eye. It is his rightful place in the order of things. The educated western man will invariably triumph and rule over savages.
The barsoom project cover series#
Both series of books are in the genre of colonial fiction. Rereading the stories as an adult in the late 1980s, some of the underlying assumptions in Tarzan and John Carter were out of place in today’s world. Whatever Burroughs may have lacked in subtlety in his writing, his stories were always imaginative and rich with detail. I continued on to read ERB’s other works, which included the Carter books. When I began reading the Tarzan books I was 12 or 13, and I thought they were fantastic. KF8/MOBI is the older Kindle format, for less than v5.8īurroughs is one of the best of the early science fiction writers who started out in pulp magazines. KFX is the current Kindle format, for v5.8 and greater I’m doing all the parts except the bass, which my wife, Dorothy, added.EPUB is for iOS, Kobo, Nook and many other programs and devices Just remember it’s Barsoom it never was Mars! No problem, my friend it’s all there in the pages In the red desolation with Dejah and Tars? Heads up, Grandson just get up on that spaceship!Ĭause the Terraform Project’s done brought it all back!Īnd Edgar won’t you send me neath the moons of Barsoom Grandpa will you see me to the Moons of New Barsoom? It’ll take some nerve and a few generationsīut someday we’ll send John Carter up there! Make it our second home with some water and air! So what can you do with a dusty dead planet?
It was larger than life and realer than real Lived by our wits and our swords of cold steelįaced foes and monsters and found our one true love We flew in airships, rode thoats cross the wastelands The lander’s cold data has turned it to Mars!
I’m sorry, cadet, you’re too late to go there In the red desolation with Dejah and Tars
With Captain John Carter and his green buddy TarsĪnd Edgar won’t you send me ‘neath the moons of Barsoom We found Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars Ī big box of books handed down generations If you like filk, and especially if you like filk and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I think you’ll be glad you did. I hope you’ll click on the audio icon below and check out the lyrics beneath it. I came up with another verse for the recording (verse two), and I made two or three tweaks to Gary’s words–which I hope he’ll forgive me. When I got ready to finally do it, I noticed that his finished product was one verse shorter than John Prine’s “Paradise,” to which the music of “Barsoom” is set. Many moons now, I been meaning to record Gary’s finished version of the lyrics. For trufans and Burroughs Bibliophiles the title will be a tipoff: the song concerns Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian novels. This process continued back and forth in our zines for almost a year. At the time, I commented on it in my zine, Dumbfounding Stories, and Gary’s next issue featured a revised version of the lyrics, which I also commented on. I’m posting a recording of “Barsoom,” a filk song Gary Robe ran in his fanzine Tennessee Trash for the Southern Fandom Press Alliance (SFPA) a few years back. This is the edition of A Princess of Mars that I first read
0 kommentar(er)
