August 18, 2005

A Princess of Mars and The Jet Propelled Couch

I read A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burrough's tale of adventure on the red planet, when I was in junior high school. Dejah Thoris, the princess in the novel, may have been my first crush.

I remember being thrilled when I read the following passage, in which John Carter describes seeing Dejah Thoris for the first after she had been taken prisoner by the green Martians.

And the sight which met my eyes was that of a slender, girlish figure, similar in every detail to the earthly women of my past life. She did not see me at first, but just as she was disappearing through the portal of the building which was to be her prison she turned, and her eyes met mine. Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme, her every feature was finely chiseled and exquisite, her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair, caught loosely into a strange yet becoming coiffure. Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.
She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.

A few years later, I read The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales by Robert Lindner. It was a fascinating book, and the last chapter, called "The Jet Propelled Couch" was particularly interesting. It was about a Los Alamos physicist who had been sent to Lindner because he was acting strangely at work, often going into a trance-lie state. Because the physicist had a high level security clearance, his superiors were quite worried about his odd behavior.

Images P 1892746247.01. Sclzzzzzzz It turns out that the physicist believed himself to be John Carter, the protagonist in Burrough's Mars books. Indeed, the physicist was also named John Carter by coincidence. The physicist told Lindner that he was able to teleport himself to Mars and have the same kind of adventures that the fictional John Carter had. The physicist kept detailed maps and records of his adventures, accumulating 10,000 pages of notes! I won't spoil the rest for you. It's an incredible story.

I just re-read A Princess of Mars, prepared to be utterly disappointed. But I loved it just as much as I did when I was 12 years old. Burrough's description of the Martian animals and societies, particularly the hideous six-limbed green Martians', is a hoot, and the plot moves along at a fast clip. It unfolds much like a contemporary science fiction movie. It's fallen out of copyright, and you can download it for free from Project Gutenburg's site.

The Fifty Minute Hour A Princess of Mars /