Better than Star Wars

It’s been a while, but I’ve been looking for good pulp fiction lately. And by “good,” I mean, page turners that keep you going with an adventurous story, but aren’t generally known for their beautiful use of the language. I’ve got to face it — I love authors like Salman Rushdie and Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Tobias Smollett — but to read and appreciate them takes time. It also takes being locked up in a room without distraction for at least as long as it takes to feel the flow of the entire story…which is a long time (for me, at least).

But I’m on a kick now. That’s why I walked into the library the other day (which, horror of horrors, is closed for renovation for the next couple of weeks), and randomly grabbed a Michael Crichton posthumous novel — found on his computer after he died — Pirate Latitudes. I’ll say right now, Crichton is OK, and I’ve enjoyed his stories. They’re interesting. But Pirate Latitudes was not. I read too much of C. S. Forrester’s Horatio Hornblower series and Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series. I love them both — Hornblower probably slightly more. And Crichton is no Forester or O’Brien.

But I love “old-timey” language in writing too, and the king of that would probably be Edgar Rice Burroughs. While I always knew Burroughs for his Tarzan novels — a great read, but apparently horrible for adaptation to any visual medium — I discovered his Barsoom series some time back, and I think they’re even better. And yeah, the disaster that was the 2012 movie John Carter is evidence that maybe pretty much all of the “old-timey” stuff that Burroughs wrote just doesn’t transfer. But that’s not for lack of a great story, filled with mystery and action (the 2012 disaster was probably more along the lines of Disney ruining it all by picking up Marvel and pouring its efforts into that franchise).

And so, my title. As I listen to the Barsoom series (it’s quite excellent in audiobook form), I’m thinking, “This is Star Wars-level stuff.” But it was written decades before Star Wars was even a dream in George Lucas’s mind. And there’s so much of it that looks like Lucas ripped off — or at least by which he was heavily inspired. Burroughs had “Jedaks” (sounds like “Jedi” to me) and “Sith,” albeit, quite a bit different from what we saw in Star Wars. And maybe these were nods to the Barsoom series.

Others were inspired by or borrowed from the series too. James Cameron said the hero in his movie Avatar was right out of Carter — an earth-soldier on another planet stuff. The Dune series is said to get some of its inspiration there too. And the famed scientist Carl Sagan was a fan.

Burroughs really pioneered great science fiction with the series. And the surprising thing to me is, although he wrote its first installment (A Princess of Mars) just over 110 years ago (published in May of 1912), it holds up beautifully in today’s age of special effects-laden action. Even more so. It’s better.