He refuses and instead suggests that his friend and ally, Xodar, become Jeddak of the First Born. In The Gods of Mars, John Carter had overthrown the religion of the goddess Issus, "the false deity of Mars," after he had revealed her as "naught more than a wicked old woman." In the aftermath, the society of the First Born, who had worshiped and served Issus, was thrown into chaos and they turned first to Carter, asking him to become their new ruler. The story picks up after the events of The Gods of Mars, which ended on a cliffhanger – a literary device that Burroughs by no means invented but that he used to good effect in order to hold his audience's attention. The third of these is The Warlord of Mars, published in novel form in 1919, but having first appeared as a four-part serial in the pages of All-Story Magazine from December 1913 to March 1914. Over the course of three decades, Burroughs penned almost a dozen stories of Barsoom (not all of which focus on John Carter). (It's also quite likely that John Carter, with his increased strength and leaping ability was an influence on the creation of Siegel and Shuster's Superman – but that's a topic for another occasion).Īnother way in which Burroughs's Barsoom stories exercised an influence on later writers is by being a continuous narrative, with each tale building upon those that came before. So influential were these stories that not only were their general outlines imitated by later writers but so too were their specifics, with a fantastical version of Mars, filled with bizarre lifeforms and peril in equal measure, becoming a common setting of pulp fantasies. Tolkien, I'd argue forcefully that it was Burroughs who invented the literary genre of fantasy as we know it today. The Barsoom tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs hold a special place in my heart and, as I hope I've demonstrated, in the heart of Gary Gygax as well.
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