A Princess of Mars (Barsoom, #1) in Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy"

Jun 17, 2013 Jason Koivu rated it it was ok

Shelves: sci-fi, fiction

A Princess of Mars is a forerunner in the sci-fi genre and as such some of the science herein is off. On the other hand, one has to be impressed with the guesswork a fictional novelist made regarding living conditions on another planet, considering he was writing at a time prior to space exploration. Hell, this was written a mere nine years after the first flight by man.

The real reason this didn't resonate with me had to do with the story's hero, John Carter. He's just too good at everything to ...more

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Dec 09, 2015 Tor.com Publishing added it

Barsoom is one of the most vividly imagined worlds-- it's no wonder that modern science-fiction & science-fantasy steal so directly from it. A world with much more complex relationships than most people acknowledge, I'm a huge fan (& think the movie was judged unfairly, to boot). --MK ...more

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Aug 20, 2017 John rated it it was ok · review of another edition

For once I'm not going to prattle on for long, since this is a book that most people have read and that most of its readers love. Not, alas, me. I got perhaps halfway through it, perhaps less than that, when I was about 20 (an age at which I read anything that had "SF" on the cover), before throwing it at the wall because of its profound silliness, its supremely questionable ethics (massacres of the innocents? no problem with that), and its tracts of drearily hifalutin writing -- pulp-style hifa ...more

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Jan 18, 2012 Shawn rated it liked it

Shelves: sci-fi-fantasy-collection

I have to admit I was expecting a lot more from this going in. The style was refreshing at first---journal entries being read by the author, who actually 'knew' John Carter---but it soon became too simplistic. So many times did I come upon a great scene where I wished for more detail, only to see the segment drop into nothingness and another take it's place.

I love in-depth stories, but I do understand things were written a bit differently 100 years ago, so I'm not too perturbed about it.

The cen ...more

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Mar 20, 2025 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: appendix-n, science-fiction-fantasy, rpg, kindle-unlimited

Somehow, in all my decades of reading fantasy and science fiction, I never read this most seminal of texts. I loved it! What a great story, filled with monsters, sword fights, science fiction, and alien weirdness. I saw the much maligned (unfairly, in my opinion) big budget movie John Carter and liked it well enough...but as usual, I liked the book more. This book is the granddaddy of a sci-fi subgenre called 'sword and planet,' and is one of the books found in Gary Gygax's Appendix N reading li ...more

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