John Carter of MarsJOHN CARTER OF MARS EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS Contents Introduction John Carter and the Giant of Mars Abduction The Search Joog, the Giant The City of Rats Chamber of Horrors Pew Mogel The Flying Terror The Reptile Pit Attack on Helium Two Thousand Parachutes A Daring Plan The Fate of a Nation Panic Adventure's End Skeleton Men of Jupiter Foreword Betrayed U Dan The Morgors of Sasoom... ...And the Savators I Would Be a Traitor Escape! Pho Lar In the Arena To Zanor! [About this etext] INTRODUCTION THE PUBLICATION OF JOHN CARTER OF MARS is an historic event for a number of reasons. First, and most obviously, it is the long and eagerly awaited "eleventh book" of the Martian series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. For sixteen years, ever since the appearance of LLANA OF GATHOL, the tenth book in the series and the last of Burroughs' works to see print during the author's life, there has been a constant desire by his many followers to see the two remaining Barsoomian adventures appear in book form. They are at last available, in the present volume, to Burroughs' myriad fans and admirers. The second historical aspect of JOHN CARTER OF MARS is its very name. Although JOHN CARTER OF MARS is a "natural" title for a book in the Martian series, it was never so used by Burroughs himself. It has been applied to a number of adaptations of the Barsoomian tales, including two completely different children's books and a comic magazine, but has never before been used as the title of a "real" book. Regarding the two short novels (or novellas, or novelettes, or even long short stories, the title is not worth the quibble) that make up JOHN CARTER OF MARS, each has a fascinating tale of its own, quite aside from the story content itself. John Carter and the Giant of Mars (or Giant for short) first appeared in AMAZING STORIES magazine for January, 1941, and created an immediate furore. Dozens of readers wrote to the magazine challenging the authenticity of the story, which was stoutly defended by Raymond A. Palmer, the editor. The complaints were based mainly on two points. For one, many of Burroughs' more dedicated and scholarly devotees found points on which the setting of Giant conflicted with the pseudo-world Burroughs ad constructed in the rest of the series. Specifically, there is the use of the three-legged rat in Giant, whereas Burroughs had quite graphically described the Martian rat, or ulsio, in CHESSMEN OF MARS, as "fierce and unlovely ... many-legged and hairless." Similarly, the imaginary geography of Giant has been criticized as placing cities in regions where other stories indicate only deserts or swamps, and including, without explanation, imaginary creatures and devices present in no other Barsoomian tale. Another objection to Giant is the fact that it is narrated in the third person, while the Martian series was customarily told in first person. This charge, however, fails on two books, the fourth and fifth in the series. The fourth book, THUVIA, MAID OF MARS, is told in standard third-person style. The fifth, CHESSMEN, opens with an introduction in which Edgar Rice Burroughs recounts, in first person, the circumstances in which John Carter told him, Burroughs, the tale contained in the book. The story CHESSMEN is told in third person, but this argument against Giant is mitigated by the first person introduction. Not so with THUVIA, which pretty thoroughly demolishes the "first-person / third-person" case against Giant. In planning the current book, JOHN CARTER OF MARS, it was my hope to verify or refute the charges against Giant of Mars once and for all. In order to do this, I wrote directly to Ray Palmer and asked him outright whether (a) the story had actually been written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and (b) if it had, whether or not Palmer or anyone else had tampered with the manuscript before publication; or (c) if it had not been written by Burroughs, who did write the story. Simultaneously I wrote to Hulbert Burroughs, the author's son, and asked him to check through his father's files and records, and determine if possible (a) whether his father did write Giant and (b) if he did, whether a copy of the manuscript still existed for purposes of comparison with the magazine version. Palmer's reply was the first to arrive, and in it he stated that (a) the story had indeed been written by Burroughs and (b) no one had changed it in any way prior to publication. Unfortunately, according to Palmer, the manuscript had been kept in the files of the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, publisher of AMAZING STORIES, and had been destroyed some years later in a records-clearance move. An initial reply from Hulbert Burroughs was equally mystifying � a search of the records of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., had produced an entry for the sale of John Carter and the Giant of Mars to Ziff-Davis. But an examination of ERB's notebook, in which the author usually kept painstaking track of starting, completion, and revision dates of all his stories, did not uncover the expected entry for Giant. More or less reconciled, by now, to permanent mystification regarding the authorship of Giant, I was surprised and gratified to receive a further communication from Hulbert Burroughs, unravelling the mystery at last. Hulbert had continued to investigate both business and personal records of his father, and had discussed the question with other members of the Burroughs family. The story which was pieced together is this: In 1940 the Whitman Publishing Company, which had published children's adaptations of a number of Tarzan stories with great success, asked ERB for a "Big Little Book" featuring John Carter. The Big Little Books were a children's series following an extremely rigid format: stories had to be 15,000 words in length, and so constructed that they could be published with alternating pages of text and drawings, each picture illustrating the action depicted on the facing page of text. Edgar Rice Burroughs felt uncomfortable writing to the strict formula of this series, and so he asked his son John Coleman Burroughs, who was also the illustrator of the book, to collaborate with him in producing the story. The result was a tale, essentially similar to John Carter and the Giant of Mars, which appeared under the Whitman impress with the same title as the present volume: JOHN CARTER OF MARS. At the same time, Ray Palmer of AMAZING STORIES was seeking a new Barsoomian adventure from ERB, to feature in his magazine. Taking the as-yet unpublished collaboration as his basis, Edgar Rice Burroughs lengthened it by some 5000 words and adapted it "upward" for adult readership, producing finally John Carter and the Giant of Mars. The longer version appeared in AMAZING and the shorter one in the Whitman book. The text used in the present volume is the AMAZING version. Skeleton Men of Jupiter, the second story in this book, offers no such problem as does Giant of Mars. By contrast with Giant, Skeleton Men received nothing but extravagant praise from readers at the time of its first appearance in AMAZING in February, 1943. Its name may sound odd for a "Martian" story, and indeed, most of the action of Skeleton Men takes place not on Mars, but on Jupiter. However, the hero is John Carter, and the basic story rationale is part of the Martian series, so the tale well fits into the present book. Skeleton Men of Jupiter was intended by Burroughs as the opening episode of the group of interconnected novelettes, probably to number four, which would have become a John Carter novel in the fashion of LLANA OF GATHOL or the Carson Napier book ESCAPE ON VENUS. This form of quasiserialization was one with which Burroughs experimented quite successfully in the early 1940s. However, wartime service as a correspondent in the Pacific reduced Burroughs' fiction output nearly to zero, and after the end of the war his health prevented ERB from resuming his former pace. As a result, the continuing episodes of John Carter's Jupiterian adventure were never written. Still, Skeleton Men is a complete adventure story, and an excellent one. Writing (or at least dreaming) its sequels has become a favorite pastime of Burroughs fans over the years, and the reader is invited to join in the fun. The Foreword of Skeleton Men of Jupiter, by the way, is published here for the first time. When the magazine version of the story appeared twenty-one years ago, the editor may have felt that a Foreword would serve only to put off readers, while a policy of "On with the story" above all else, would have greater commercial appeal. He may well have been right for the pulp magazine audience of a generation ago, but assuming the readers of books to have a slightly more serious and patient outlook on literature, I have restored the Foreword, obtaining its text from a photostat of ERB's original manuscript, kindly furnished by Hulbert Burroughs. If you are completely intolerant of forewords and wish, like the magazine audience of 1943, to plunge directly into the narration, you are welcome to skip the first 132 words of Skeleton Men of Jupiter. I personally find them a charming prelude and a minor but fascinating insight into the personality of Edgar Rice Burroughs, science-fictioneer. The Martian series, of which this book is the final volume, is regarded by many readers as Burroughs' greatest sustained performance as a writer. Of course his Tarzan stories are the more famous, due largely to the popularity of their motion-picture adaptations. And there are many moments of excellence in the Venus and Pellucidar series, as there are in such "sin...
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