![]() Howard’s Hyborian Age, inventing a mythical past for humanity that, for Howard, slipped between the cracks, between the sinking of Atlantis and the dawn of recorded history several thousand years ago. The same is true of Michael Moorcock’s City of the Beast, the first of a trilogy of short science fantasy novels Moorcock churned out in the mid-1960s featuring his John Carter, the American scientist Michael Kane, a tall, musclebound hero who is able – thanks to new technological experimentation – to travel to Mars, but the Mars that existed thousands if not millions of years ago, when the planet was host to a great civilisation (the people – and they are clearly human like us – who inhabited this ancient Martian civilisation subsequently upped sticks and moved to Earth). We don’t feel what’s at stake so much as acknowledge it. But even though the stakes are high, we are never encouraged to care particularly about this. The rather unremarkable male hero is the reader’s locum in the adventure, so the (usually male) reader can experience the thrills of exploring exotic landscapes, battling and overcoming fearsome monsters, and getting the girl all vicariously through John Carter. Discerning readers, even of popular fiction, don’t like their dreams to come true too easily, and Burroughs’ stories are high on action and plot and less strong on psychological depth or emotional complexity. They’re unashamedly male wish-fulfilment fantasy, and therein lies both their appeal and their limitation. After all, if the continent of Africa was exotic and far-flung for most British and American readers, just think how exciting and alluring the landscape of another planet could be!īurroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels were pure escapism: adventure for its own sake. ![]() Rider Haggard’s bestselling novels, such as She and King Solomon’s Mines – and combine it with another genre or subgenre, the planetary romance. Burroughs’ contribution was to take the existing template for the adventure novel – particularly the imperial romance, most famously exemplified by H. There had been planetary romances set elsewhere in our own solar system before the Tarzan creator unleashed the first John Carter of Mars book, A Princess of Mars, on readers in 1912: George Griffith’s 1890s Stories of Other Worlds is just one example of earlier adventure tales set on the Red Planet, and Griffith’s newlywed travellers actually visited many of the planets in the solar system in the course of their adventures. In fact, even Burroughs was standing on the shoulders of other writers.
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