A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs · first published 1912
42% recommend50% neutral8% critical
Why HN recommends it
Fast, imaginative early pulp science fantasy with a swashbuckling adventure tone; readers recall it as fun and imaginative, a short read that suits fans of classic SF and anyone curious about the roots of the genre.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. [Adventures of John Carter in Mars -- from the author of the Tarzan series.]
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Some recommendations for people: Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper, known for his alternative time line stories. Beyond Lies the Wub, by Philip K Dick, a collection of his early short stories. A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The beginning of his Mars series about its civilization's decline.
on “Project Gutenberg's science fiction bookshelf” ↗On Audible, revisiting a childhood favorite: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. On my Kindle I have two ham radio books I'm reading, one is about grounding antennas, the other a General test prep. - Grounding and Bonding for the Radio Amateur - Ham Radio…
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗…want a place to start, I can recommend the recordings by Mark Nelson - https://librivox.org/reader/251 He recorded a lot of pulp classics - "The Cosmic Computer", "First Lensman", "Hour of the Dragon", "Princess of Mars", "Space Viking". Professional quality recording, great voice, charming books.
on “LibriVox: Free Public Domain Audiobooks” ↗Some classic proto-pulp. I got into "Princess of Mars" as a teenager, and they were hugely important to my understanding of SF&F, warts and all. So many weird ideas in that list that have not even become tropes. I'll have to add "Nyctalope of Mars" and "Prisoner…
on “Stories from Radium Age sci-fi, which ruled the early 20th century” ↗A shame, because A Princess of Mars itself is a decent short read. It’s obviously a product of its times, but it’s fun and imaginative. Available for free from the usual out-of-copyright sources.
on “The Untold Story of Disney’s $307M Bomb ‘John Carter'” ↗…Priceless ;) https://archive.org/details/78_house-of-the-rising-sun_josh-... I find myself on Internet Archive a lot during these dog days of summer. Delving into classic texts like Edgar Rice Burroughs A Princess of Mars or Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy. Discovering a forgotten H. P. Lovecraft story in the Weird Tales archive. Mining old time radio shows like Suspense for story inspiration. And using the Internet…
on “The Internet Archive has digitized 25,000 78rpm Gramophone records” ↗It's pretty common on old pulp sci-fi, like Edgar Rice Burroughs. (The Skylark books have a surprisingly large amount of nudity, as well.) The characters in Princess of Mars are basically naked, except for leather harnesses to carry weapons. It's plausible that ERB was drawing on pre-existing notions about Native Americans, though the commercial appeal of sexy nude aliens…
on “That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture” ↗…(Maybe the reason is that in Asia these are also web novel, eg Shousetsuka ni Narou.) However, this kind of a genre is and was popular in the west independently of that. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912. It hits onto most of the same ideas these more modern stories do.
on “A journey into Kindle AI slop hell” ↗"And the nights were very cold" -- Burroughs, "A Princess of Mars".
on “Mars helicopter “Ingenuity” has been dropped to the surface” ↗…the writer comes through despite these 1920's pulp idioms, so it was intensely enjoyable, but I would say that this style of writing definitely shows its age. (I also recently read John Carter and the Princess of Mars, which was written around the same era, and it's equally silly but for different reasons.)
on “C.S. Lewis on Writing” ↗…ago, I couldn't tell you anything about them other than "civil war era soldier" (I think), goes to Mars, does some stuff, saves the day, gets the girl (sort of). All I could think, after having read the Princess of Mars story was about were the plot holes for a few days post-reading. Ripping yarns. And then, after years, utterly forgotten. There was a few parts in the movie where I thought "Oh, I remember that from the…
on “On pretending to have read books” ↗I've listened to some LibriVox recordings of public domain works, notably A Princess of Mars. The price was right at the time, though the quality was, as you say, remarkably subpar. If I could have had a neural net read me the book instead of having to change with narrators changing every chapter,…
on “WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio” ↗