"11 - John Carter of Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs Edgar Rice)

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 Taking the as-yet unpublished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