John Carter & Elwin Ransom

A Comparison of Mars

Recently, I finished my second reread of C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet and I had a great discussion of the book on I Might Believe in Faeries with Andrew Snyder from The Mythic Mind Legacy podcast. We are planning on discussing Lewis’ other books in The Ransom Trilogy, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, later this summer. Before we tackle Perelandra, however, I want to assess another famous account of The Red Planet, A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I have been wanting to compare A Princess of Mars with The Ransom Trilogy for a while now. This is my first time reading any of Burroughs’ John Carter stories, so my sense that Lewis may have been influenced by A Princess of Mars is only an intuition based on what I’ve heard about the story from other sources. Burroughs wrote A Princess of Mars in 1912, so it stands to reason, due to Burroughs’ immense popularity, that Lewis would at least have been aware of the John Carter stories.

My goal in this post is to highlight the similarities and differences between the first seven chapters of A Princess of Mars with scenes from Out of Silent Planet. I am not going to argue whether or not Lewis was influenced by Burroughs, but so far, I have seen a few similar themes. It is entirely possible that both men were pulling from the same mythic source material regarding the War planet and this is merely a case of “convergent storytelling”. This is not meant to be an exhaustive comparison, but me merely musing on some of the details.

The Framing Device

The first similarity begins at the Foreword of A Princess of Mars where the framing device for the narrative is provided. Both A Princess and Out of the Silent Planet were “found” manuscripts, or dictated in the case of Out of the Silent Planet, published by the authors themselves, who claimed to know the protagonists in real life.

The Forward to A Princess:

To the Reader of this Work:

In submitting Captain Carter’s strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of interest.

My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father’s home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the Civil War. I was a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack.

When Captain Carter’s body was eventually found, and he was presumed dead, the young boy, now a grown man, was given possession of Carter’s manuscript with instructions not to read it or divulge its contents for a certain period of time.

His property was left in such a way that I was to receive the entire income for twenty-five years, when the principal was to become mine. His further instructions related to this manuscript which I was to retain sealed and unread, just as I found it, for eleven years; nor was I to divulge its contents until twenty-one years after his death.

A strange feature about the tomb, where his body still lies, is that the massive door is equipped with a single, huge gold-plated spring lock which can be opened only from the inside.

Yours very sincerely,
Edgar Rice Burroughs

Now, let’s compare this to the end of Out of the Silent Planet:

It was Dr. Ransom who first saw that our only chance was to publish in the form of fiction what would certainly not be listened to as fact. He even thought — greatly overrating my literary powers — that this might have an incidental advantage of reaching a wider public, and that, certainly, it would reach a great many people sooner than “Weston”.

The author of the “fictionalized” accounts of Dr. Ransom is later revealed to be a character named Lewis. I should say that framing devices like this were more common when both the books were written, so this may just be a coincidence. There are not many modern authors who use framing devices at all with the exception of Gene Wolfe.

Gold/Sun’s Blood

One interesting point of connection is the desire for gold that finds it’s way into both books. John Carter, a Confederate soldier, decides to take up prospecting for gold after the Civil War.

At the close of the Civil War, I found myself possessed of several hundred thousand dollars (Confederate) and a captain’s commission in the calvary arm of an army which no longer existed; the servant of a state which had vanished with the hopes of the South. Masterless, penniless, and with my only means of livelihood, fighting, gone, I determined to work my way to the southwest and attempt to retrieve my fallen fortunes in a search for gold.

In my discussion with Andrew Synder, we talked about the fact that Lewis drew heavily from Medieval cosmology for The Ransom Trilogy. Lewis thought that while this Medieval Model might not be scientifically accurate, it still contained tremendous imaginative power for communicating spiritual truths.

The planets in the Medieval cosmology were the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each planet was connected to a god from the Roman/Greek pantheon and they influenced Earth, the center of the cosmos. In Out of the Silent Planet, gold is referred to as “sun’s blood”. It was believed to be produced by the Sun in the Medieval Model. It is linked to both greed and avarice as well as benevolence and generosity.

Gold is all Devine, one of the villains in Out of the Silent Planet, wants:

“No, no Oyarsa,” he shouted. “You no listen him. He very foolish man, he have dreams. We little people, only want pretty sun-bloods. You give us plenty sun-bloods, we go back into sky, you never see us no more. All done, see?”

Carter, at the beginning of A Princess, is a nearly broken man, like Devine. He is without purpose now that the Civil War is over and he can no longer fight. His only recourse is to pursue wealth in the form of gold. Ironically, it is this pursuit of sun’s blood that leads to the rest of his story.

The Myth of Mars

The strongest connection between A Princess and Out of the Silent Planet is Mars itself. Carter’s partner is attacked by Apaches while heading back to town for supplies and Carter tries to save him. Outgunned, he flees and hides out in a cave where he falls asleep. He wakes up and he realizes that somehow, he has been separated from his body (i.e. death). He also realizes that he is naked.

Interestingly, Burroughs is well aware of the connection with Mars to war and explicitly states that in the text.

As I stood thus meditating, I turned my gaze from the landscape to the heavens where the myriad stars formed a gorgeous and fitting canopy for the wonders of the earthly scene. My attention was quickly riveted by a large red star close to the distant horizon. As I gazed upon it I felt a spell of overpowering fascination — it was Mars, the god of war, and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment. As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron.

My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness.

The fighting soldier finds himself on Mars, the planet of war. Carter even mentions iron, which is the metal related to Mars from The Medieval Model. Iron is related to weaponry and warfare. Mars is also related to farming, so that will be interesting to see how that plays out in the rest of the novel, if at all.

One minor, yet possibly significant, difference between the two books is that Carter knows he is on Mars immediately upon arrival. This could be because as Carter says himself, Mars is the god of his vocation. Ransom, however, is not a natural warrior, even though he too was a soldier. It takes Ransom almost the entirety of the book to become something resembling a fighting man, which is necessary for the next book, Perelandra. He also does not figure out Malacandra is Mars until near the end of Out of the Silent Planet:

Now that his mind had grasped the design, he was astonished at the vividness of it all. He stood back and drew a deep breath preparatory to tackling some of the mysteries in which he was engulfed. Malacandra, then, was Mars.

Interestingly, Mars is depicted as a dying planet in both books, with the inhabitants of Out of the Silent Planet accepting their fate and those of A Princess succumbing to barbarism and desperate cruelty.

The Moon and Lunacy

One side note is the brief connection to the moon and insanity in A Princess. Before finding the band of Apaches that killed his friend, Carter needs to wait until the rising of the moon so he can see.

I followed rapidly until darkness shutting down, I was forced to wait the rising of the moon, and given an opportunity to speculate on the question of the wisdom of my chase.

The moon is frequently connected to insanity or lunacy in Out of the Silent Planet, so this side remark by Burroughs makes me think he was pulling from the same source material as Lewis. By the light of the moon, Carter questioned the sanity of his chase. As Carter admits later on, he frequently jumps into terrifying situations without much thought to alternatives.

Green Martians and the Hrossa

Shortly after both Carter and Ransom arrive on their different versions of Mars, they come across two distinct races of warriors, the Green Martians and the Hrossa, respectively. Both races value bravery and strength, but the Green Martians tend toward cruelty while the Hrossa are kind.

Burroughs and Lewis both have their protagonists gain favor with their Martian counterparts by killing their enemies. With his martian pet, Carter defeats two of the White Apes in front of some Green Martians and Ransom participates in a hunt for the Hrossa’s enemy, the aquatic hnakra.

Carter:

Leaping over his prostrate body, I seized the cudgel and finished the monster before he could regain his feet. As I delivered the blow a low laugh rang out behind me, and, turning, I beheld Tars Tarkas, Sola, and three or four warriors standing in the doorway of the chamber. As my eyes met theirs I was, for the second time, the recipient of their zealously guarded applause.

Ransom:

Then as he flung shaft after shaft into the great cavern of the gaping brute he saw Hyoi perched incredibly on its back — on its nose — bending forward and hurling from there. Almost at once the hross was dislodged and fell with a wide splash nearly ten yards away. But the hnakra was killed. It was wallowing on its side, bubbling out its black life. The water around him was dark and stank.

When he recollected himself they were all on the shore, wet, steaming, trembling with exertion and embracing one another. It did not now seem strange to him to be clasped to a breast of wet fur. The breath of the hrossa which, though sweet, was not human breath, did not offend him. He was one with them.

Finally, Lewis and Burroughs spend some time in each of their books describing how these species breed. Both the Green Martians and the Hrossa limit the number of children they produce but in entirely different ways and for different reasons.

The Green Martians rear their children in large incubation chambers and the children that hatch are fully developed, but smaller than adults. Burroughs describes them as common children of the community who don’t know their biological mother or father. Eggs are frequently killed if they are not perfect, reminding me of in vitro fertilization. Adult females are charged with raising the children as they emerge even if they did not have an egg in the incubation chamber.

I believe this horrible system which has been carried on for ages is the direct cause of the loss of all the finer feelings and higher humanitarian instincts among these poor creatures. From birth they know no father or mother love, they know not the meaning of the word home; they are taught that they are only suffered to live until they can demonstrate by their physique and ferocity that they are fit to live. Should they prove deformed or defective in any way they are promptly shot; nor do they see a tear shed for a single one of the many cruel hardships they pass through from earliest infancy.

Lewis’ description of the Hrossa mating ritual could not be more different from the Green Martians. It begins with Ransom trying to ask the hross Hyoi about warfare on Malacandra and ends with a meditation on pleasure. Other than potentially being an unfallen race, the Hrossa’s penchant for poetry seems to be what keeps their martial instincts from becoming tyrannical.

“Hyoi, if you had more and more young, would Maleldil broaden the handramit and make enough plants for them all?”

“The seroni know that sort of thing. But why should we have more young?”

Ransom found this difficult, at last he said:

“Is the begetting of young not a pleasure among the hrossa?”

“A very great one, Hman. This is what we call love.”

“If a thing is a pleasure, a hman wants it again. He might want the pleasure more often than the number of young that could be fed.”

It took Hyoi a long time to get the point.

“You mean,” he said slowly, “that he might do it not only in one or two years of his life but again?”

“Yes.”

“But why? Would he want his dinner all day or want to sleep after he had slept? I do not understand.”

“But a dinner comes every day. This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?”

“But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.”

“But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?”

“That is like saying, “My food I must be content to eat.”

“I do not understand.”

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.

The Hrossa a species that is naturally monogamous and their potentially unfallen nature helps prevent them from twisting their sexuality into something perverse. The Green Martians on the other hand, decided long ago to breed and raise their young as a community, which Carter muses might be why there are so barbarous. In both books, the planet Mars is dying, but both species have very different ways of dealing with that.

That is all I have for now. If anything else comes up to compare A Princess of Mars with Out of the Silent Planet, then I will try to write about it here.

God Bless