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

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 "singles" as THE MOON MEN, THE
MUCKER, THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, and I AM A BARBARIAN.
Still, for eleven volumes, the adventures of Captain John Carter of Virginia,
upon the planet Barsoom, and the comparable deeds of heroism performed by
Burroughs' other Martian heroes, represent a series of tales unmatched in their
author's works, and, for that matter, unequalled in the annals of
science-fiction adventure writing
The first three volumes in the series, originally appearing between 1912 and
1914, actually constitute a single super-epic. In them, John Carter, a
Confederate officer mustered out of service at the close of the Civil War, is
miraculously transported to the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as
Barsoom. He arrives in the middle of a desert, naked and unarmed, wholly
ignorant of local customs and conditions, unable to speak the language of the
natives (in fact, knowing nothing about the natives, or even that there are
any). Shortly encountering a group of barbarian nomads, John Carter is taken
prisoner, and would seem to face a life of degraded slavery ending in early and
ignominious death.
Instead, through the display of courage and skill, Captain Carter rises to the
position of Warlord of Mars, having along the way fought his way from pole to
pole of the red planet, returned to Earth for a period of several years and then
travelled again to Barsoom, encountered a variety of strange races of men and
beasts, weird nations and weirder peoples. He has, in addition, gained the
lesser title of Prince of Helium (not the inert gas, but the leading city-empire
of Barsoom), and has won the hand of the incomparable Dejah Thoris, Princess of
Helium.
The volumes in this trilogy are A PRINCESS OF MARS, THE GODS OF MARS, and THE
WARLORD OF MARS. Their enduring qualities have led to their translation into
many languages, including even an Esperanto edition of PRINCESS. Further, the
same book has been issued by Oxford University Press in its "Stories Told and
Retold" series, as a "teaching novel" for school use. Other authors in the
"Stories Told and Retold" series include Dickens' Doyle, Shakespeare, Stevenson,
Defoe, Wells, Sabatini, Anthony Hope, and Nordoff and Hall.
A mixed roll, these, and yet all have in common the characteristic of a literary