A Princess of Mars
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.]
Stats for nerds
5recommend
12mentions
12people
2012–2026years
42% recommend50% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 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 General Class License Study Guide
- 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.
- All valid points, and I did spend quite a bit of time finding the narrators I like.
If you 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.
- 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 of the Vampires of Mars" to my to-read list.
- 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.
- >Is this what young people want nowadays?
Yes, but it's not just young people.
>The genre seems to have crossed over from Asian culture, with many novels being translations of Chinese/Korean ones.
You can basically trace a lot of the web novel versions back to anime/manga/light novels. (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.
