Forgotten Books: A Fighting Man of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs

Nostalgia is about to be wallowed in. Consider yourself warned.

In the summer of 1964, my sister’s boyfriend had been telling me about this science-fiction author he’d been reading named Edgar Rice Burroughs. The name was familiar to me, probably from the Tarzan movies that one of the local TV stations ran constantly on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, but I’d never read anything by him. I asked John to loan me one of the books, and so one Friday evening when he came over, he brought along a copy of A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the sixth book in Burroughs’ Martian series, in what was then a fairly new Ace Books edition with a cover by Roy G. Krenkel. (At the time, of course, I had no idea who Krenkel was, and Ace didn’t mean a whole lot to me, either. Those things were soon to change.)

According to John, these Mars books by Burroughs were a blend of science-fiction – they had flying machines and invisibility rays and four-armed green men in them, after all – and swashbuckling adventure. So I sat down on that Friday evening to read the book, expecting to be entertained. Let’s just say that A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS more than met my expectations. Most of Burroughs’ Mars novels feature his iconic hero John Carter, an Earthman transported to Mars, or Barsoom, as its inhabitants call it, where he fights monsters, mad scientists, evil cults, giant white apes, and assorted other villains, all the while romancing the beautiful princess Dejah Thoris, who loses her clothes more than any heroine short of a Spicy pulp. I discovered all that later, though, because this book, while it uses the same background, features a Martian hero, Hadron of Hastor. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall all that much about the plot. It’s been a lot of years since I last reread the book. But I recall vividly how I sat up late reading it that night, flipping the pages until I just couldn’t stay awake anymore. I finished it first thing the next morning and was hooked. I had to have more Burroughs, all the Burroughs I could get my hands on, as soon as possible.

So I read all the other Mars books, pretty much in order from that point, although I skipped around a little because I couldn’t find some of them right away. It doesn’t really matter all that much, anyway, except for the first three books of the series, which need to be read in order. I found a copy of TARZAN AND THE LOST EMPIRE at the library and read it. That was my first Tarzan novel, but over the next few years I read most of them, too, often in Ace editions with Krenkel covers. Those babies were everywhere back then. John loaned me some of the books from the Venus series. In the more than four decades since then, I’ve read probably three-fourths of Burroughs’ novels. Every now and then, I still pick up one that I haven’t read and go back to being eleven or twelve years old again for a while.

But it all started on that summer weekend in 1964 with A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, a book that, as it turns out, is really a fairly average entry in Burroughs’ canon. I love it anyway, and always will.