Before John Carter came to Barsoom, there was Gullivar Jones..
What They Say:
Before John Carter another earthman visited the Red planet: Lt. Gullivar Jones. Now these legendary warriors are brought together for the first time! When Lt. Guillivar Jones happens upon a mysterious old man with a beautiful carpet he soon finds himself transported through space and time to the planet Mars where he meets the beautiful Princess Hera and a ferocious tribe of Red Martians bent on capturing her!
The Review:
With the new theatrical movie just around the corner, it’s definitely a good time to launch a new book from the franchise. With the age of the novels and all that has come since, there’s certainly plenty to build on and work with, but I have to admit that other than reading some of the comics decades ago, I could never get into the whole thing. My attempts at the books ended in defeat as I simply found them unreadable. I like the concept and you definitely have to get into its mindset by putting it into context from the time it was created in order to be able to enjoy it. It’s a very different approach to science fiction but it plays to some fairly standard kinds of adventure styles of storytelling. That makes it accessible, even more so now that people are used to blue people in the movies, so red people should be a non-issue.
The narrative structure takes place in the present day of the franchise with John Carter talking with Princess Dejah about about her departed mother. That leads her to reveal a story from the past that she was sworn to secrecy about involving another Earthman that had come to Barsoom many years before Carter did. And it happened when her mother, Heru, had not yet met her father. It goes back several years on Earth as well as it deals with Gullivar Jones, a young blonde man in the Navy who was angling for a promotion with money and rank so that he could properly get engaged with his girlfriend, Polly. His luck doesn’t go well there, but it changes when out of the blue, an old man literally drops on him out of the sky with a carpet. While the old man is dead, the carpet eventually gives him unexpected access to another world as he’s transported to Barsoom. With a mindset of wishing for adventure in a way that can’t happen in his own modern day, and events have conspired to give him just that.
Gullivar’s arrival on Barsoom quickly leads him to a lot of trouble but also a fair number of positives. The language problem is quickly overcome, but it’s when he gets accidentally involved in an incident that he gets to meet Heru and her own father, which earns him a feast in his honor for what he did. Jones is quickly drawn into things even though he’s quite different as they’re all curious about him and he established himself well. It’s all prelude to things becoming more dire of course, as Heru finds herself subject to a kidnapping, and it has a bit of old style charm about it. The book sets the basics up easily and throws us right into the set pieces with ease, moving us quickly from one to the next and providing some basic characterization along the way so we know who they all are. It doesn’t delve heavily into what life on Barsoom is like, but we get a few hints to the culture and a definite brewing romance between Jones and Heru in true classic form.
In Summary:
Going back to the stories involving the first man to go to Barsoom is an interesting choice at this stage with the new feature coming out for John Carter, but it provides a bit more material beyond the expected stuff out there involving the title character. But working with Gullivar Jones, we get a different kind of character involved in the world of Barsoom with some different sensibilities than Carter has. And it makes its own ties to the present continuity that Carter inhabits by having Dejah relate the tale of a passion her mother once shared many years ago that has been kept secret. It’s hard to imagine his existence in general being kept secret, but that’s the kind of thing you overlook for the bigger storyline here and the general adventure. And that’s what this is, far more than an early science fiction story, as Jones makes it clear he’s craving adventure and that’s exactly what’s being set up for him.
Grade: B
Readers Rating: [ratings]
