{"id":7,"date":"2011-06-21T10:02:58","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T10:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=7"},"modified":"2012-02-27T14:20:31","modified_gmt":"2012-02-27T14:20:31","slug":"june-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=7","title":{"rendered":"A Princess of Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>A Princess of Mars<\/em> by Edgar Rice Burroughs<\/h3>\n<p>The North Reading Group met on June 21st to discuss <em>A Princess of Mars<\/em>, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.\u00a0 Nine members attended and 8 had read it.\u00a0 The story was serialized in <em>All-Story<\/em> magazine, starting in 1912, as \u201cUnder the Moons of Mars,\u201d by \u201cNorman Bean.\u201d\u00a0 The stories were collected and <em>A Princess of Mars<\/em> was published in 1917.\u00a0 One member commented that she \u201dcould see how it  was pretty hot stuff in the old days,\u201d and \u201cBeats the hell out of <em>Little Women<\/em> and all that stuff!\u201d\u00a0 Another said that this was from the golden age of  SF and he had \u201cstrong memories of reading the whole pile.\u201d\u00a0 He owned  first editions.<\/p>\n<p>Other comments were generally complimentary, qualified by the  time since it was written- that the protagonist, John Carter, was a fun  adventurer; Burroughs was a<!--more--> natural story-teller; he was \u201cgood at making  up names;\u201d and that it was \u201cgood movie material\u2014things blow up a lot!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The main fault found by these SF fans was that, besides  being \u201chokie and so incredibly of the time period,\u201d that it actually  combined little or no science with the fiction.\u00a0 Burroughs moved the  story along with absolutely no attempt to explain how something like a  trip to Mars might have been accomplished.\u00a0 One had to suspend belief  and then enjoy the swashbuckling of the hero\u2014much like a western novel  of the period&#8211;A \u201cpenny dreadful.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Only one person really detested the story, and has since her  grandmother gave it to her at the age of 13.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t fit her  attitude then and even more so now.\u00a0 (Stories from that era involve many  attitudes and activities that wouldn\u2019t be considered politically  correct today, so readers beware.)<\/p>\n<p>In summary, it was an enormously successful series from an  extremely popular author, and spawned a lot of stories by other  authors.\u00a0 It\u2019s an adventure story that does not really involve science  but does take place on Mars with several alien species.\u00a0 But it\u2019s long  past its consumption date for some.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212; Tom Sciance<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs The North Reading Group met on June 21st to discuss A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.\u00a0 Nine members attended and 8 had read it.\u00a0 The story was serialized in All-Story magazine, starting in 1912, as \u201cUnder the Moons of Mars,\u201d by \u201cNorman Bean.\u201d\u00a0 The stories [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":508,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}