Fantasy/SF Micro-Essay #7: Edgar Rice Burroughs

[robinturner]

[Another essay whipped off quickly because I was also doing an assignment for the Gamification course, plus working on preparing my own course on fantasy literature! Given those constraints, I'm pretty pleased with it, though I suspect my peer graders will point to the need for more of a conclusion.]

Burroughs' Barsoom books are held up as paradigms of science fantasy [1], that genre which employs the tropes of science fiction but the attitudes of fantasy. Even ignoring the famously bad science of these books, a strong fantasy element is apparent in the opening of A Princess of Mars. In hard science fiction of the day, a hero visiting Mars would start by building a spaceship (described in minute detail) but John Carter is transported there in a manner more akin to fairy stories.

Burroughs starts in "travellers' tale" style, with a description of how the author met the narrator "just prior to the opening of the civil war."[2] There is already some whimsy here; the Foreword is signed "Edgar Rice Burroughs", but the actual author was born well after these events. Like other travellers, John Carter stands out, "a splendid specimen of manhood" who has, nevertheless, "a look of wistful longing and hopeless misery." [3] Like the Ancient Mariner, he has been changed by his experiences, but like heroes who enter Fairyland, they have not aged him; on the contrary he remains preternaturally youthful.

Carter's journey to Mars makes the transition from travellers' tale (Wild West variety) to fantasy. We are given a long account of his encounter with the Indians which serves no purpose for the main story (except perhaps to emphasise Carter's rugged manliness) but allows a further distancing from our own, modern world. In an unusual concession to common sense, Carter hides from his enemies and takes refuge in a cave. Here he falls asleep, wakes up paralysed, then has an out-of-body experience, after which he is transported to Mars simply by looking at it.[4] This combines the enchanted cave of fairy stories with magical flight, but relates them in the language of pseudo-science. This cavalier attitude to genre is part of what makes the books enjoyable.

[1] Attebury, Brian, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

[2] Burroughs, Edgar Rice, A Princess of Mars, Project Gutenberg, June 2008, 2, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62.

[3] ibid.

[4] "it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron" ibid 13.