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blchandler9000 's review for:
The Chessmen of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
When ERB lets his imagination run rampant, his books are a delight. When he focuses on more courtly matters, his books tend to lose me. This is one of his novels of his that does both.
The first half of the book features Tara of Helium (John Carter's daughter) lost in the weird community of kaldanes and rykors. Kaldanes are detachable, crab-like heads that ride the headless, human-like rykor bodies. Naturally, being almost all head, the kaldanes are emotionless beings driven by a desire to only think. The rykors just want to eat. There are shades of Baron Munchausen's moon folk here, though Raspe's head/bodies are played for laughs and ERB leans more towards horror.
Then the book shifts to another lost city—this one populated by humans—where deadly games of chess are played with living men and women being the pieces. The chess aspect is fun, but it only plays a small part of the book's second half, with more time spent on dungeon crawling and the selfish decrees of an antagonist king. The city's gladiatorial chess games are not its only curiosity. The dead are not buried here, but taxidermied and posed on balconies and public hallways. To my disappointment, ERB never really spends the time to explain this. He cites ancestor worship often while describing the superstitions of the city's residents, so maybe the preserved dead are part of that? The whole second half of the book seemed more of a jumble of cool ideas that ERB just pasted over the usual romance & heroics outline. On top of that, the ending comes way too fast.
I did like that Tara is given more than half of the book's POV. It was nice to have a woman be the main character for a while. Her personality starts as pretty much that of a brat, though she softens marginally as the book goes on. I suppose hanging out with beings of pure thought and wicked emperors will do that.
The first half of the book features Tara of Helium (John Carter's daughter) lost in the weird community of kaldanes and rykors. Kaldanes are detachable, crab-like heads that ride the headless, human-like rykor bodies. Naturally, being almost all head, the kaldanes are emotionless beings driven by a desire to only think. The rykors just want to eat. There are shades of Baron Munchausen's moon folk here, though Raspe's head/bodies are played for laughs and ERB leans more towards horror.
Then the book shifts to another lost city—this one populated by humans—where deadly games of chess are played with living men and women being the pieces. The chess aspect is fun, but it only plays a small part of the book's second half, with more time spent on dungeon crawling and the selfish decrees of an antagonist king. The city's gladiatorial chess games are not its only curiosity. The dead are not buried here, but taxidermied and posed on balconies and public hallways. To my disappointment, ERB never really spends the time to explain this. He cites ancestor worship often while describing the superstitions of the city's residents, so maybe the preserved dead are part of that? The whole second half of the book seemed more of a jumble of cool ideas that ERB just pasted over the usual romance & heroics outline. On top of that, the ending comes way too fast.
I did like that Tara is given more than half of the book's POV. It was nice to have a woman be the main character for a while. Her personality starts as pretty much that of a brat, though she softens marginally as the book goes on. I suppose hanging out with beings of pure thought and wicked emperors will do that.