The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I have a wonderful job.  Because I'm able to spend most of my day isolated from humanity, I get to listen to hours and hours of podcasts and audiobooks every week, which is much better than engaging in fascinating conversations about politics, the weather or the local sportsball teams.  The latest book I finished listening to was The Chessmen of Mars, the fifth in Edgar Burroughs' Barsoom series.

Burroughs is better known for creating Tarzan, but his Barsoom books are much superior.  The first few in the series focus on John Carter, a former Confederate soldier who finds himself transported to Mars, and gradually works his way up to ruling the whole planet.  The series was the originator of the planetary romance genre, and a direct progenitor of things like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  The recent Disney adaptation was decent, but you might have missed it; given the box office, it seemed most people did.

By the fifth book, the story is focused on the daughter of Carter and Dejah Thoris, the princess whom he married in book three.  Princess Tara finds herself stranded in alien civilisations far from home, and with the help of her love interest Gahan of Gathol fights her way back to her family.  As is usual with Burroughs it's action-packed, and a hell of a lot of fun.  As is also usual with Burroughs, it has severe structural problems.

In researching the background of the book, I'm not surprised that it was originally serialised.  The constant stream of cliffhangers lends itself to that, as does the abrupt change of setting halfway through.  For the first half, Tara is a captive of the Kaldanes, a strange race of spider-like beings that ride around on headless humanoid bodies.  After about ten chapters of that, Tara and her crew escape, only to fall into the clutches of the Manatorians, a people whose justice system consists of chess games - to the death!

Now, let's get this straight: both of those premises are rad.  Either one could have sustained a whole novel.  Burroughs could even have combined the two with little difficulty.  Instead they're cobbled together, joined only by the presence of a friendly Kaldane named Ghek in the second half, and the Tara/Gahan romance that runs throughout.  The result is a book with a lot of creativity and imagination, but a real lack of focus.  As I said, it's not surprising that this was a serial; it probably worked really well in that form.

This is a structural issue that's popped up in more than a few Burroughs books that I've read, and I sometimes wonder if he's just too creative.  Make no mistake, he is undoubtedly one of the most vividly imaginative writers of his era.  Very few writers can construct a weird, alien civilisation as efficiently as he can, let alone multiple such civilisations per book.  But sometimes that tendency to include all of his ideas can work to a book's detriment, as it does here.  The Kaldanes were a fascinating creation, and Burroughs abandoned them too quickly to move on to the next cool thing.

The result is that The Chessmen of Mars is ultimately an unsatisfying book that barely hangs together.  It's fun to read, it's highly creative, but it's ultimately unsatisfying.