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Rating: 
Summary: one of burroughs' best!
Review: one of burroughs' best
Rating: 
Summary: Light-hearted escapism
Review: These books are great fun for kids and teenagers, even some adults. I suspect, however, that if you don't read Burroughs between 12 and 14, you'll miss out on 90% of the fun. None of his Mars books are to be taken seriously. In "The Mastermind of Mars," for example, before there is even any dialogue, the hero is blown up in WWI, astral-travels to Mars, immediately has a swordfight, then witnesses a brain transplant by an almost-blind, 1000-year-old Martian! Then he falls in love with an old hag with the brain of a beautiful, kind young woman. Later he recruits the help of a gigantic ape with a half-human, half-ape brain. The author isn't the greatest stylist that ever lived, but he knew how to tell a story.
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Summary: Old friends revisited - I sure enjoyed it
Review: These stories are as much a part of me as my beard. I first read them as a boy nearly fifty years ago, and they're as enjoyable today as then.When Amazon says a book is 'value-priced,' they ain't kidding. Not only do you get five for the price of one, but you also get to see the original illustrations from a time long past. That alone was worth the price of this book. Of course, younger readers won't get the nostalgia rush I did, but SF devotees should all read Burroughs; he was one of the giants who founded the genre.
Rating: 
Summary: I might, just might, be missing something
Review: Writers I admire (C.S. Lewis and Robert Sheckley, and I know that there are others as well) have kind words to say about Edgar Rice Burroughs, and claim to derive inspiration from him. I mention this because I have to. It means that perhaps there is something in the man's writing that I'm missing. I must be honest and allow this possibility. The more LIKELY possibility, though, is that writers make poor critics, and will allow their superior imaginations to do the work that Burroughs didn't. For one thing that has been said about Burroughs is that, while he could scarcely write, and was woefully ignorant, and inconsistent, he at least had a vivid imagination. Like hell he did. His imagination was the most pallid thing about him. This is clearer in the Mars books than anywhere else. Everywhere there are beasts exactly like terrestrial ones but bigger, fiercer, with more limbs and sharper teeth and brighter colours ... every forgettable sort of detail-enhancement that might substitute for true invention. Burroughs takes the standard view of an ancient, decadent, dying Mars and adds nothing, except damsels and stilted dialogue. These are the books of someone who spends valuable time working out new units of measurement to replace feet and inches, whiles away afternoons dreaming up pointless bigger-is-better variations on terrestrial chess, but makes up the details about character and social organisation as he goes along. Admittedly he has plenty of time, since the story is invariably a fight-after-fight-after-fight affair, the author doing little to disguise the fact that he's being paid by the word. (Never let anyone convince you otherwise: his prose is ghastly.) If you sense that Burroughs must have been reaching towards something worthwhile, you're right. If you want to know what it was, exactly, read someone by Jack Vance. Any reason there might be to read Burroughs is a reason to read Vance. But not vice versa.
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