Just Finished Reading A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars was a serialized 1912 science fiction/fantasy pulp fiction novel by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Mars series...this story's hero is John Carter, an ex-Confederate soldier at the close of the American Civil War who has gone to the Southwest to search for gold with his friend.  Wary of the warlike Apaches, who claim the same ground on which they prospect, one day they discover their object...and his friend leaves to set up the gold's delivery and payment, only to be killed by pursuing Apaches.  Upon this tragic discovery, Carter finds himself pursued as well and hides in a cave...the enemy find him, though, and the life-or-death battle ensues.  But just before that happens, he has stood outside the cave and observed the planet Mars, musing upon it.  Back in the cave, Carter is now dying...but he wakes up mysteriously transported to the Red Planet, which as it turns out is populated by intelligent humanoids divided into different bellicose races, mainly the vicious greens with multiple appendages and the reds, who seem more to represent the original civilization.  They are at war with each other, and John Carter first encounters the aggressive greens, who are impressed by his superhuman strength, speed and jumping ability in the thinner Martian atmosphere.  They intercept a crashing ship of their red enemies and capture their princess...naturally, Carter protects her and falls in love.  Then all sorts of intrigues and bloodshed ensue...

This novel was said to inspire Carl Sagan as a kid to explore the field of astronomy...since I'm now 65 after first reading it I can make no such claim, but when I was seven my father introduced me to the night sky with its constellations and general principles of celestial motion, which I gleaned from the handbooks he gave me.  I read A Princess of Mars on my friend and former colleague Becky's recommendation as it was a childhood favorite of hers.  What impressed me the most about it was how the author got around the difficulties of space travel and, instead, made the protagonist have to die on Earth in order to be transported to Mars.  The ending had a kind of C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia feel to it...since Burroughs' work predates that of Lewis by decades, I wonder whether the latter got some of his ideas from the earlier writer. I understand that this story was made into a feature-length film a few years ago, but I'm a little hesitant to watch it since much of the book's charm derives from John Carter's first-person narration and his compelling introspection, which I fear may be a little bit too difficult to effectively transfer to the big screen...