The Martian Tales are wonderfully predictable; every story involves a skilled warrior rescuing a damsel in distress. He rescues her every time. The villains are despicable, the women are beautiful, and the heroes are honorable. Typos and grammar errors aren’t rare, and the writing is functional and repetitive… so why bother? Burroughs’ imagination is awe inspiring; what he lacks in original story format is made up for by memorable details. In fact, I would argue that the simple format of the story allows greater maneuverability for insane and invigorating ideas.
We know that a beautiful woman will be kidnapped, usually by a disreputable jeddak (that’s Martian or Barsoomian for emperor). The warrior (all men on Barsoom are warriors) will experience countless hardships as he is forced to fight, imprisoned in caves, and shipwrecked in vast wastelands. He’ll usually regain his princess several times only for her to be repeatedly wrenched from his grasp, and he’ll have to foil plans for world domination as part of the bargain. Burroughs makes his characters work hard for a happy ending, but the happy ending is always there. We know where we’re going, so we can enjoy the journey.
Every journey is punctuated by strange cultures and creatures: red men, yellow men, green men, white men, black men, plant men, thoats, calots, apts, banths, kaldanes, Great White Apes. Burroughs introduces us to Mars or Barsoom with John Carter, a fighting man from Earth. The only explanation for his presence on Barsoom is a sort of transmigration with a violent death on Earth implied; Burroughs just leaves it at that and gets on with the story. John Carter is captured by green men who are fifteen feet tall, have four arms, have tusks, and only find death and torture funny. Luckily, the gravity on Barsoom is weaker than Earth’s, so Carter can leap dozens of feet and has godly strength. He teaches a green man the meaning of friendship, acquires a faithful hound that resembles a cross between a Grizzly bear and alligator, and saves the entire planet’s atmosphere. Oh yeah, he also rescues a princess.
This is just the first book that sets off the Martian Tales, and subsequent adventures involve John Carter or a warrior from the race of red men. While Burroughs wrote some of the earlier and later tales in third person, the vast majority is written in first person. A warrior narrates his own travels, and the voice is seldom distinct; the warrior always values chivalry and bravery. The real distinctions come with the details of his predictable journey. He may have to battle strange creatures that can detach their heads from their bodies or track monsters with four legs, two arms, and tusks growing out of their many lidded eyes. He may work for a scientist who specializes in switching brains from body to body or fly around in an invisible ship (until he loses it). The point is each adventure doesn’t try to be anything more than an adventure, and Burroughs joyfully fills in the blanks along the way.
As science fiction, the Martian Tales plays with ideas that may have been censored in other genres during the early twentieth century. Burroughs treats men of all races the same; he grants them intelligence and emotions while Barsoomians are only prejudiced against cowards. Women are admired for their willingness to fight. Anything approaching a religion is treated with the utmost scorn by the narrator. Barsoom is a dying planet with receding waters and an artificial atmosphere. John Carter often sadly reflects that Earth will eventually share a similar fate before becoming distracted by his next adventure.
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