If you don’t count all the Tarzan movies I watched on TV as a kid, my introduction to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs was the novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS. My sister’s boyfriend loaned me the Ace shorty edition of that book sometime in the early Sixties. I loved it and became a lifelong Burroughs fan, especially the Mars series. Or Barsoom, to use the proper Martian name.
I haven’t been a fan of Chuck Dixon’s work for quite that long, but he’s still one of my favorite authors. So when I heard that Dixon was writing a novel set on Burroughs’ Mars, I was thrilled and looked forward to reading it.
GUNS OF MARS did not disappoint me. In the least.
This novel is set on Barsoom approximately a thousand years after the era of Burroughs’ hero John Carter. Mars, already a dying planet in Carter’s day, has become even more inhospitable. Water is scarce and the most valuable commodity on the planet. As the novel opens, Kal Keddaq, a fugitive Thark (the four-armed warrior race created by Burroughs), is trying to reach the northern pole where the ice still provides a source of water. But a human bounty hunter is on his trail, and so is a mysterious figure whose identity and motivation Dixon plays close to the vest for a while.
The bounty hunter captures Kal, who escapes but then is captured by the other member of our trio of main characters. In this back and forth, Kal and the bounty hunter discover a clue to the location of a hidden source of the best water on the planet, and that becomes the prize that everybody is after, including a number of other enemies and untrustworthy allies they encounter along the way.
If this is starting to sound familiar, it should, because GUNS OF MARS is very much a Spaghetti Western set on Burroughs’ Barsoom in its latter days. And it’s hugely entertaining, told in vivid, fast-paced prose that takes advantage of Burroughs’ creation while at the same time cleverly adding to it. The characters are all interesting, the action is plentiful and suitably gritty, and I just had a great time reading it. This is a Front Porch Book for sure, like so many of those other great adventure yarns I read back in those days.
GUNS OF MARS is available on Amazon in an e-book edition at the moment. I believe a print edition is in the works. I started my reading this year with Max Allan Collins’ RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON, a superb variation on another old favorite of mine, and now I’ve followed that up with Chuck Dixon’s visit to Barsoom. I don’t expect the rest of the year to live up to that, but it’s a spectacular beginning, for sure, with both books strong contenders to be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year.
I know Dixon mostly from Batman comics, but he always seemed a writer that if never brilliant is dependable in telling a good story.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed GUNS OF MARS, too, and gave it 5 stars in my Amazon review. I like your very apt description of it as “a Spaghetti Western set on Burroughs’ Barsoom in its latter days.”
ReplyDeleteI grew up on the ERB Ace paperbacks. Used to skip lunch and saved up lunch money for the latest on the 5&10 spin rack. Read all I had at least twice. Loved them all and revisit them occasionally nearly 60 years after purchase.
ReplyDeleteWill give this a try.
Dixon is certainly a good storyteller, but it sounds like he's deviating from Burroughs pretty hard, timeline-wise. According to various OTHER Burroughs novels, the John Carter/Barsoom stories took place during the same timeline here on Earth/Jasoom. That is, John Carter was transported through SPACE, not Time. I would've preferred Dixon to have written a Barsoom novel set 1000 (or 1000s) years before Carter. A similar story could've been told.
ReplyDeleteIsn't 1000 years roughly the average lifespan of a native Barsoomian? So this is like one generation in the future, maybe more depending on on how their longevity impacts child-rearing times (which seemed to be "not at all" in the ERB books, going by John & Dehah's children). It's only an eyeblink in terms of planetary ecological changes, but the first ERB books did establish that losing the atmosphere generators even briefly would be an extinction event.
ReplyDeleteOf curse, our own 2026 IRL geoscience is largely hypothetical and a collapse the wipes out the biosphere may be faster than we're all betting on. Probably find out in a few decades.