Thakowsaizmu wrote:
I have to completely disagree with the last podcast. Although the movie was terrible, the Barsoom series is good. And whoever said John Carter was not interesting... well, clearly he understands not the Sword and Planet genre or the literature of the time.
Perhaps if I get to some of the later books I will change my mind, but I fully understand that many of the things I don't like about the books are tropes of the time. John Carter is a Mary Sue, and inexplicably not human as well (he is immortal, for reasons that have not been revealed in what I have read so far, though I suspect that will come). Deja Thoris is a very weak female character -- with Sola being somewhat better (I understand that there is a much more progressive female character later in the books, I have not read that far). This is all compounded by some things I find thoroughly annoying about the writing, like the fact that John reminds us far too often about how brave and duty-bound he is and about why he can jump so high on Mars. The world is cool, as long as I understand that much of it involves outdated theories about race.*
*Outdated theories about RACE, not about Mars. I don't care that ERB's Mars is fanciful by modern standards -- that's fine. But the whole idea of the greatest race in Martian history being fair-skinned and fair-haired, and the weird rigidity of Martian cultures, among other things, amounts to a great deal of values dissonance for me.
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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host,
Conlangery Podcast
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