A Princess of Mars

A couple of weeks ago I watched John Carter of Mars.  It wasn't a great movie, but it wasn't too bad.  Anyways one of the characters in the film was a young Edgar Rice Burroughs, and as I was watching I realized that I have never read anything by this titan of SF, so I found the first book of the Martian Tales, which the movie was based on, and found I liked it.  I'm not going to say the book was better, as the movie updated the "science" and changed some things from the original to add depth to the story and to explain the actual traveling of John to Mars, which wasn't explained at all in the book.  The movie also added these mysterious strangers who controlled everything, and again this was not in the book.  Maybe they are introduced in the sequels.  There are points to be commended on both versions.

One thing I do want to point out is that the book seemed to be an allegory of the Native Americans.  At first I thought the Native Americans were being represented by the green Martians, the Tharks, but this does not seem to be the case.  Anyways that representation would have been insulting in the very least, as that would have shown a great amount of ignorance and racism to compare the Tharks to Native Americans.  But as this was my first ERB book I did not know his sentiments.  Anyways his allegory is for the "red martians" to represent the "red rascals"(John Carter's words).  The allegory is strange in that it doesn't make much sense, and maybe it is an idealization more than anything.  But the comparisons are constantly brought up in the book to remind the reader that this Martian planet is like Arizona and the Red Martians are like Native Americans.  I'm not quite sure what his thought process was, but a casual glance does not seem to bear much fruit.  I will have to consider this more, maybe reading the following book will help.