 The short version of this review is read this if you haven't read it already. It deserves every bit of its reputation as a classic. I had never read it until a little over a year ago and I wanted to read it before I saw a DVD of the movie that I borrowed from a friend of mine and I was completely hooked on page one. Page one. That's so unusual. This book was first published in six parts in a magazine in 1912 if you can believe it. The fact that it still stands up so well today is amazing. It is very well written. It is excellent adventure. It's good science fiction too. John Carter is an ex-Confederate soldier shortly after the American Civil War. He is out in Arizona doing some mining. He is running from some hostile apaches. He hides in a cave. There's some evil magic going on in the cave and he wakes up on Mars. There's no explanation for any of that but this is where the science fiction comes in. Being on Mars where gravity is lighter he's basically Superman. He can leap great distances. His muscles and bones are much denser than any native Martians. When Superman first appeared more than 20 years later that's exactly why he had superpowers here on Earth. There's a wide variety of native intelligent Martian life. The first he encounters are the Tharx, the famous green forearmed insect like men. And again Burroughs describes them in a very professional science fiction manner. They are not human at all. Their physiology is very alien. Their society is very alien. It's just an all-around entertaining book. It has the problems of the colonial racism and the sexism that you would expect from literature from that time but it's not as bad as I expected. I'll talk about that in a minute. My only real disappointment in the book was Dejah Thoris. She is one of the most famous female characters in science fiction and fantasy period. I was expecting her to be a strong female character but she wasn't. She was just a damsel in distress. I'll talk about that more in detail in a minute. Anyway that's the short review. Read this book if you haven't. I predict you'll like it. Now I'm gonna talk some more about the book and I'm gonna do it by way of comparing it to the recent movie. Like I said in the book the Tharx are very alien. Burroughs goes out of his way to describe that they have nothing that resembles any kind of human expression. Their faces are not human at all. Their eyes have no human expression of any kind. Their behaviors are very different. They don't laugh. They have this barking sound that they make sometimes but he assures us it is not a laugh. In the movie they gave them downright human eyes and these cartoonishly expressive faces and made their tusks come out of the sides of their head instead of their mouths where they should and they didn't make them big enough. These drawings by Brett Blevins will show you how tall the Tharx should actually have been. They were described as being three times John Carter's height. Deja Thoris is described in the book as being entirely naked except for some jewelry. The modern depictions of her that started to come along in the 1970s are actually very accurate. As cheese cakey as they are that's how she's described in the book. I said that there's the typical sexism that you would expect in there. I mean she's she's constantly kidnapped by one faction or another. I don't recall her ever being raped or beaten. She is royalty and she's treated with that royal respect by every faction that captures her and she acts as a politician as a mediator quite often. There were a couple times when she told John Carter hey look you know let things be let me take care of this. But still she was a disappointing damsel. She and her people are described as having red skin but Burroughs makes the point of saying red skin not like Native Americans. He describes them as having coppery skin which I took to mean that they were metallic but I've never seen anyone depict them that way. I'd like to see somebody do that. Burroughs does compare the Tharks to Native Americans. He has that noble barbarian racism to it. I remember at one point in the book I shook my head and and said could this be any more racist and I had to stop and and tell myself yeah it could. This is the guy who created Tarzan. He was writing the Tarzan stories at the same time he was writing the John Carter stories. John Carter and Tarzan were the first stories that he wrote and the first stories that he published. Isn't that amazing? Tarzan by the way being the archetypal story of white man going amongst the barbarians and conquering them doing everything better than they do just like John Carter. Except in Tarzan Burroughs does away with the metaphor altogether. The natives that he conquers are gorillas. He's not implying that they are barbaric apes. They are apes and they're not just conquered by a white man they're conquered by a white baby. So yeah John Carter could have been a lot more racist than it was. Lynn Collins in the movie was amazing. She was perfect. She was a beautiful Dejah Thoris and not the cheese cakey kind of Dejah Thoris that we see in the comics and and even in this book. The first time she appeared in the movie I kind of shook my head and thought okay they're trading one trope for another because they present her as the greatest scientist on Mars and then immediately established that really what she wants more than anything else is her father's approval and I was like oh come on but she came out better than that. The movie as a whole I I always heard people saying that the movie was very faithful to the book but no it is not. Dejah Thoris is very different. As I was saying the Tharks are portrayed very differently. The white apes are almost entirely left out. They're showed as a Colosseum fighting animals which they are not in the book. They are one of the other intelligent societies on Mars. In the movie this priesthood, this magical priesthood called the Therns who teleport themselves around and who are responsible for the machines that brought John Carter to Mars. They're not in the book at least not in this first book. I think they may appear in the later books. His travel to Mars and his return to earth in the book are entirely unexplained. The depiction of the Thark women in the movie is pretty accurate to the book. They are treated as objects. In the book the Thark women are beaten and savaged regularly very badly and the descriptions are sometimes graphic. The daughter of Thars Tarkas the leader of the Tharks and this is actually a pretty interesting wrinkle here that you wouldn't expect from a book of this time. She becomes one of the heroes that saves Mars from the villains along with John Carter and her success is so undeniable and so public that Thars Tarkas has to acknowledge her publicly as his daughter even though she's illegitimate which is completely against Thark societal norms. I strongly recommend that you read this book if you haven't already. I found it tremendously exciting like I said from page one and I couldn't put it down. I look forward to reading more in the series. The movie although it's very different from the book is surprisingly good although there is way too much CGI it looks like Roger Rabbit sometimes. Lynn Carter as Dejah Thoris will knock your socks off. Watch it for her if nothing else. Okay next I'm gonna do my December wrap-up and after that we'll start with the first review for 2016. See you later. You can support 30 Second Sci-Fi and my other projects by becoming a patron. There is a link in the description below. And visit the 30 Second Sci-Fi Tumblr. 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