WARRIORS OF MARS

As part of my ongoing summer reading quest to read as many mass market genre fiction paperbacks as possible before Labor Day, I ripped through WARRIORS OF MARS over the last couple of days.

Behind a great Gray Morrow cover, is a weak pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs' far better novel, A PRINCESS OF MARS (1912). And don't let that "Edward P. Bradbury" byline fool you. WARRIORS is the first of the "Kane of Old Mars" trilogy written by British science fiction writer Michael Moorcock under the Bradbury pseudonym. The other two books in the series are BLADES OF MARS and BARBARIANS OF MARS and all three novels were written in 1965.

Moorcock sets up his "Bradbury" persona as a real person at the beginning of the book, a person to whom Michael Kane tells his fantastic story of interplanetary adventure and romance. Kane, a 20th century physicist and Vietnam veteran, is the victim of a matter transmitter device experiment gone horribly wrong. Think THE FLY ( 1958), except Kane doesn't end up with a giant fly head. Instead, he's somehow transported through space and time to Mars as it was thousands of years ago. He finds civilizations there, along with various races, a beautiful princess, palace intrigue, war with the giant Blue Men, swordplay aplenty (Kane's prowess with swords is explained in the early part of the book when he relates to Bradbury that he underwent fencing training as a youth by a master French swordsman), flying ships, immense underground cities, mammoth snakes, betrayal, capture, rescue, capture, rescue.....yawn.

WARRIORS OF MARS crams a lot of plot and story into a fast paced 159 pages but it's nowhere near as detailed and rich as Burroughs' novel. Call it the "Cliff's Notes" version. It's not a bad yarn taken on its' own merits but it falls far short of the source material to which it must inevitably be compared.

I have a copy of the third book, BARBARIANS on my shelf. Don't know that I'll bother reading it any time soon. And I don't think I'll make the effort to track down a copy of BLADES. One of these is surely enough when there are a dozen better John Carter books out there. I suspect that even the weakest Carter book is better than this one.