Review Tuesday: The Swords of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Book Eight in the Barsoom Series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, we FINALLY have another John Carter story. THE SWORDS OF MARS was published in 1936.

John Carter travels to Zodanga to break up a ring of assassins, but ends up with more than he bargained for in an adventure that takes him to one of the moons of Barsoom!

I have to hand it to Burroughs. His imagination was unlike anything else in his day. He imagined airships before air travel was commonplace. He predicted the extensive use of the radiation elements, even as weapons! He described auto-pilot, GPS, stealth and cloaking technology, guided missiles, remote control, and in this book, INTERPLANETARY TRAVEL! He described the issues with a moon landing back in the mid 1930s! Couple that with a assortment of interesting characters, and strange and wild new life forms and you have quite a book.

Deja Thoris also made an appearance in this novel. If not for this beautiful but otherwise useless woman, John Carter wouldn't have to be trekking all over the place. She's always dumb enough to get captured by evil villains to be used as their pawn. I was always told that she was a great warrior princess, but in eight novels I've only seen her need to be rescued by John Carter time and again. She's gotta be hot for the man to chase her down from one end of Mars to the other and even to on of the moons!

More on the Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_of_Mars

You can find a text version to view at Project Gutenberg:

 http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100221.txt

You can buy it on Amazon:

Swords of Mars