Audiobook · read by volunteers
À Princess of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950)
Read by Stephan Möbius, Peter Yearsley, Tony Hightower, Steve Hartzog, Kymm Zuckert, Chris Peterson, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Chris Vee, Patrick McNeal, Sherry Crowther · 29 chapters · 7 h 10
About the book
John Carter is a Virginia gentleman and Civil War veteran prospecting for gold in Arizona when he is drawn, by means he cannot explain, to the planet Mars. There the lower gravity gives him astonishing strength, and he soon finds himself in a world of warring peoples: towering green warriors with four arms, red-skinned humans with ancient cities, strange beasts and flying ships. He falls into danger, makes friends and enemies, and meets a princess whose fate becomes bound with his own. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a swift, colourful adventure in the pulp tradition, full of swordplay, daring escapes and romance. It is not subtle, and it does not want to be. A foreword and twenty-eight short chapters, over seven hours, and the pleasure of a story that keeps moving from the first page to the last.
Introduction
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was an American author who created Tarzan and became one of the most prolific writers of adventure fiction in the twentieth century. He began writing fiction in his mid-thirties after a string of unsuccessful jobs, and A Princess of Mars was his first published novel. Serialised in a magazine in 1912, the novel was the first of his Mars stories, often called the Barsoom series, and one of the earliest planetary romances of modern popular fiction. The prose is fast and plain, with little description beyond what the action requires, and the chapter endings keep pulling the listener along. For readers of science fiction it is also a historical document, a glimpse of how a generation imagined another planet before space travel became real.
The novel is the first volume of that series. Its hero is transported to Mars and finds a world of warring peoples, strange creatures and curious machines, where the strongest survives. It is easy, swashbuckling pulp, and the surprise is that something so unashamedly formulaic can also be so imaginative and enthralling. That tension is part of the book's lasting appeal. Its influence has been wide. Later science-fiction and fantasy writers admitted their debt to it, and it has been adapted into comics and films. It reflects the tastes and attitudes of its time, including some assumptions that modern readers may question.
The recording has a foreword and 28 chapters, and it runs for about seven hours. Ten LibriVox volunteers share the reading.
It is a lively and nostalgic listen, perfect for anyone who wants to see where a great deal of science fiction began.
Public domain
Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text