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Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe #3
John Carter of Mars: Gods of the Forgotten
News of the passing of a dear friend spurs John Carter, Warlord of Mars, to investigate a series of perplexing mysteries in the forbidding icy northern reaches of Barsoom. The enigmas only deepen as he embarks upon a journey to the far-flung treasure city of Gathol with his spirited daughter Tara and an unexpected stowaway. Ensnared in an insidious conspiracy that reaches from his early years on the Red Planet back into the dim recesses of the ancient past, John Carter and his trusted longsword are now all that stand in the way of a dread menace that threatens the existence of all life on Barsoom.
Also includes the bonus novelette "Victory Stormwinds of Va-nah" by Ann Tonsor Zeddies
Continuing her wayward journey upon the currents of spacetime, Victory Harben arrives in the strange hollow interior world of Va-nah from Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic The Moon Maid. Thrust into an uneasy alliance with a renegade Va-gas warrior and her young son, Victory must turn all her wits and skills toward survival-for she and her companions have been marked for death by the brutal the Kalkar soldiers under the reign of the vile tyrant Orthis.
THE FIRST UNIVERSE OF ITS KIND
A century before the term "crossover" became a buzzword in popular culture, Edgar Rice Burroughs created the first expansive, fully cohesive literary universe. Coexisting in this vast cosmos was a pantheon of immortal heroes and heroines--Tarzan of the Apes, Jane Clayton, John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Carson Napier, and David Innes being only the best known among them. In Burroughs' 80-plus novels, their epic adventures transported them to the strange and exotic worlds of Barsoom, Amtor, Pellucidar, Caspak, and Va-nah, as well as the lost civilizations of Earth and even realms beyond the farthest star. Now the Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe expands in an all-new series of canonical novels written by today's talented authors!
SWORDS OF ETERNITY SUPER-ARC
When an unknown force catapults inventors Jason Gridley and Victory Harben from their home in Pellucidar, separating them from each other and flinging them across space and time, they embark on a grand tour of strange, wondrous worlds. As their search for one another leads them to the realms of Amtor, Barsoom, and other worlds even more distant and outlandish, Jason and Victory will meet heroes and heroines of unparalleled courage and Carson Napier, Tarzan, John Carter, and more. With the help of their intrepid allies, Jason and Victory will uncover a plot both insidious and unthinkable--one that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of the universe...
The Swords of Eternity super-arc comes to our universe in a series of four interconnected
Carson of The Edge of All Worlds by Matt Betts
Battle for Pellucidar by Win Scott Eckert
John Carter of Gods of the Forgotten by Geary Gravel
Victory Fires of Halos by Christopher Paul Carey
(c) ERB, Inc. All rights reserved. All logos, characters, names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of ERB, Inc.
Also includes the bonus novelette "Victory Stormwinds of Va-nah" by Ann Tonsor Zeddies
Continuing her wayward journey upon the currents of spacetime, Victory Harben arrives in the strange hollow interior world of Va-nah from Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic The Moon Maid. Thrust into an uneasy alliance with a renegade Va-gas warrior and her young son, Victory must turn all her wits and skills toward survival-for she and her companions have been marked for death by the brutal the Kalkar soldiers under the reign of the vile tyrant Orthis.
THE FIRST UNIVERSE OF ITS KIND
A century before the term "crossover" became a buzzword in popular culture, Edgar Rice Burroughs created the first expansive, fully cohesive literary universe. Coexisting in this vast cosmos was a pantheon of immortal heroes and heroines--Tarzan of the Apes, Jane Clayton, John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Carson Napier, and David Innes being only the best known among them. In Burroughs' 80-plus novels, their epic adventures transported them to the strange and exotic worlds of Barsoom, Amtor, Pellucidar, Caspak, and Va-nah, as well as the lost civilizations of Earth and even realms beyond the farthest star. Now the Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe expands in an all-new series of canonical novels written by today's talented authors!
SWORDS OF ETERNITY SUPER-ARC
When an unknown force catapults inventors Jason Gridley and Victory Harben from their home in Pellucidar, separating them from each other and flinging them across space and time, they embark on a grand tour of strange, wondrous worlds. As their search for one another leads them to the realms of Amtor, Barsoom, and other worlds even more distant and outlandish, Jason and Victory will meet heroes and heroines of unparalleled courage and Carson Napier, Tarzan, John Carter, and more. With the help of their intrepid allies, Jason and Victory will uncover a plot both insidious and unthinkable--one that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of the universe...
The Swords of Eternity super-arc comes to our universe in a series of four interconnected
Carson of The Edge of All Worlds by Matt Betts
Battle for Pellucidar by Win Scott Eckert
John Carter of Gods of the Forgotten by Geary Gravel
Victory Fires of Halos by Christopher Paul Carey
(c) ERB, Inc. All rights reserved. All logos, characters, names, and the distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks or registered trademarks of ERB, Inc.
339 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 1, 2021
33 people are currently reading
54 people want to read
About the author
Geary Gravel
25 books10 followersGeary Gravel is an American science fiction author and professional sign language interpreter. He lives in western Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 2, 2023
WOw what a great addition to the ERB John Carter series. Alot of the small loose ends and plot mysteries left open in the main series get resolved in this book. Well written so that it fells like a natural addition to the Pulp SiFi originals. Very recommended
December 17, 2025
It's a great adventure story and a special treat for fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), such as myself. Gravel even writes in the style of ERB and he succeeds wonderfully in bringing John Carter the Virginian and the world of Mars/Barsoom back to life. ERB fans can appreciate how this story ties in with the earlier stories of ERB's Mars series. But I think you don't need to be a Burroughs fan to be able to follow the story and enjoy it. If you haven't read any of the eleven John Carter books, this could be a good introduction to, not only John Carter, but to Burroughs. But be sure to also read books that are by the Master of Adventure himself, Edgar Rice Burroughs!
As an added bonus, there's a novelette featuring Victory Harben in the world of Va-nah ( the inner Moon). Both the John Carter story and the much shorter one with Victory are part of an arc of stories which conclude in the book following this one and it is "Victory Harben: Fires of Halos" by Christopher Paul Carey.
As an added bonus, there's a novelette featuring Victory Harben in the world of Va-nah ( the inner Moon). Both the John Carter story and the much shorter one with Victory are part of an arc of stories which conclude in the book following this one and it is "Victory Harben: Fires of Halos" by Christopher Paul Carey.
December 23, 2021
I gave this three stars for "normal readers" and five stars for ERB fans. It was fun visiting Barsoom again! I also enjoyed the Va-nah short story.
January 30, 2022
Gravel does a good job capturing the feel of ERB and drawing upon events and locales from earlier John Carter books. He also takes the time to explain some of the head-scratching improbabilities from previous books. However, about 2/3rds of the way through the book Jason Gridley, a character we did not see in the book prior to that, suddenly pops into the story (literally). There really wasn't any prior hint that this could happen unless you happened to read some of the other recently released ERB-inspired novels in which Gridley and Victory Von Harben (a fringe ERB character) will suddenly appear and then disappear without any explanation.
Apparently, Gridley and Von Harben are affected by some temporal and spatial vortex that makes them pop in and out of existence into various of ERB's locales. In fact, there is a Von Harben novelette at the rear of the novel. Just about the time you are becoming invested in the story Von Harben is snatched away to another locale.
Overall, I enjoyed the novel enough that I would read another Carter novel by Gravel.
Apparently, Gridley and Von Harben are affected by some temporal and spatial vortex that makes them pop in and out of existence into various of ERB's locales. In fact, there is a Von Harben novelette at the rear of the novel. Just about the time you are becoming invested in the story Von Harben is snatched away to another locale.
Overall, I enjoyed the novel enough that I would read another Carter novel by Gravel.
September 4, 2021
Good story.
Almost like it was written by ERB himself! Very close to the original books. This book is the best I have seen of attempts to recreate the style of writing of ERB.
Almost like it was written by ERB himself! Very close to the original books. This book is the best I have seen of attempts to recreate the style of writing of ERB.
January 31, 2023
I know Geary Gravel personally. We exchanged books over lunch one day.
I was skeptical about anybody writing into someone else's canon. Let me state that going in. I've read modern authors' additions to Holmes, Shelley, and the forays into Bram Stoker's Dracula could fill a library in themselves.
And they all leave me wanting...
But Geary Gravel's Gods of the Forgotten was a riotous good read. It took me by surprise. Gravel captured Burroughs tone, style, language, ... I laughed at how adept his pen was. What a pleasant surprise!
The book itself reads like a tour of the entire Burroughs canon. Characters from various series and various books in different series show up. Some were rightly placed, some seemed like pointers to future novels by other authors writing into the Burroughs canon. I found myself wondering more than once if Gravel had an encyclopedic memory of it or the Burroughs estate provided an online or printed one.
The novel itself is an easy and enjoyable read. I did notice two places where recognizably modern styles or writing techniques appeared. I doubt most readers would notice.
And one heck of a fun ride. Well worth a read, especially for seniors who enjoyed the Burroughs books but want something new on their shelf.
I was skeptical about anybody writing into someone else's canon. Let me state that going in. I've read modern authors' additions to Holmes, Shelley, and the forays into Bram Stoker's Dracula could fill a library in themselves.
And they all leave me wanting...
But Geary Gravel's Gods of the Forgotten was a riotous good read. It took me by surprise. Gravel captured Burroughs tone, style, language, ... I laughed at how adept his pen was. What a pleasant surprise!
The book itself reads like a tour of the entire Burroughs canon. Characters from various series and various books in different series show up. Some were rightly placed, some seemed like pointers to future novels by other authors writing into the Burroughs canon. I found myself wondering more than once if Gravel had an encyclopedic memory of it or the Burroughs estate provided an online or printed one.
The novel itself is an easy and enjoyable read. I did notice two places where recognizably modern styles or writing techniques appeared. I doubt most readers would notice.
And one heck of a fun ride. Well worth a read, especially for seniors who enjoyed the Burroughs books but want something new on their shelf.
January 20, 2022
Upper class John Carter gets bored hanging out with the most beautiful woman on two worlds and flies away in his personal flier, looking for adventure with his dog.
When I was twelve this might have worked. You've got nostalgia working for you, but 8% into the book and really, there is nothing going on that looks like a plot and I don't care that much, because Mars had been made boring. Which really describes this whole series. I'll see it through to the end because the fourth book looks like it goes in a new direction, but 8% is all this John Carter gets from me.
When I was twelve this might have worked. You've got nostalgia working for you, but 8% into the book and really, there is nothing going on that looks like a plot and I don't care that much, because Mars had been made boring. Which really describes this whole series. I'll see it through to the end because the fourth book looks like it goes in a new direction, but 8% is all this John Carter gets from me.
February 19, 2022
Geary Gravel's 2021 John Carter of Mars: Gods of the Forgotten, a Barsoom novel authorized by the Burroughs publishing estate, is an entertaining follow-on to the original Edgar Rice Burroughs series begun with A Princess of Mars. At the same time that it centers on John Carter, clean-limbed fighting man of Virginia displaced via astral projection to the slowly dying Red Planet, it also pulls in threads from Burroughs's Pellucidar and Venus series...and of course invites the reader into the continuingly developing "ERB Universe."
John Carter, Warlord of Mars, appears to be immortal, we will recall. Early on in the original series, we are told that even before his inexplicable transport to Mars after the fateful encounter with hostile "Red Indians" in that Arizona cave, Carter cannot remember any childhood, instead seeming always to have been a grown man in his trim, active thirties. As he visits his Terran relative, the fictionalized Edgard Rice Burroughs who as a child used to idolize the infrequently appearing "Uncle Jack" and who as an adult chronicles the adventures related to him, John Carter stays always the same, whereas the writer slowly grows older and older. During Gods of the Forgotten the Warlord at last receives word that his beloved old friend has died.
As we have seen in a number of previous books, "there is no surer way for [John Carter] to lift the shadows from [his] heart or clear the cobwebs from [his] brain than to take [his] swiftest one-man flier from the royal hangar and range as far afield from the haunts of Martian civilization as possible" (2021 ERB paperback, page 11). Plot-wise, this is handy, too, because the drying red world, once so hospitable and populous, now has a helluva lot of crazy, remote wilds. There is plenty of space, therefore, for weird carnivorous animals, lost cities, and villains designing huge mechanisms or forming huge armies for the conquest of the planet. And John Carter... Well, he has a habit of running across such oddities, does he not?
This time on his sojourn far from the gleaming spires of noble Helium, he encounters a series of perfectly circular areas mashed strangely flat, as if by an invisible force. After stumbling into the usual nest of savage, gigantic Martian beasts, then bouncing straight into a fight with a heavily armed patrol of unpleasant baddies, he drops into a huge crevasse in the ice...whereupon he encounters an insubstantial underground city of illusions that by passage of time he cannot quite measure grows ever more solid and, eventually, somehow inescapable.
Oh, but this is hardly even the beginning. John Carter will get back to Helium, of course, and then--after, that is, further underground hijinks in the dark old dungeons he has ordered cleaned out but which still seem to contain some very odd mysteries--the real adventure can begin... Avoiding plot-spoilers, I simply will comment that "the greatest swordsman of two worlds" (page 321) will find himself up against some very repulsive, world-threatening creatures in a set-up where escape seems impossible. But John Carter can not have gotten through all the earlier novels without being not only brave but determined and resourceful, so perhaps--even though the immediate death of all oxygen-dependent life on Mars seems imminent--there may be hope yet.
Geary Gravel's John Carter of Mars: The God's of the Forgotten is, for any aficionados of the old Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, enjoyable and entertaining. Written in the style and with the tale-within-tale nested plotting of the classic originals, this book casts a very wide net, bringing in references to characters and events not just from the earlier Barsoom tales but also from other Burroughs series such as those of hollow-Earth Pellucidar, Tarzan, and Venus adventures, all the while with expected cliffhangers and reversals and wild coincidence and heroism. I am not quite sure how readers unaccustomed to Edgar Rice Burroughs would take this piece--I'm afraid I cannot quite reconstruct myself as such anymore--but for readers who have enjoyed the Barsoomian tales, Gods of the Forgotten will be a 5-star read, very possibly encouraging further exploration in the old stories and also in the new ones still being written.
John Carter, Warlord of Mars, appears to be immortal, we will recall. Early on in the original series, we are told that even before his inexplicable transport to Mars after the fateful encounter with hostile "Red Indians" in that Arizona cave, Carter cannot remember any childhood, instead seeming always to have been a grown man in his trim, active thirties. As he visits his Terran relative, the fictionalized Edgard Rice Burroughs who as a child used to idolize the infrequently appearing "Uncle Jack" and who as an adult chronicles the adventures related to him, John Carter stays always the same, whereas the writer slowly grows older and older. During Gods of the Forgotten the Warlord at last receives word that his beloved old friend has died.
As we have seen in a number of previous books, "there is no surer way for [John Carter] to lift the shadows from [his] heart or clear the cobwebs from [his] brain than to take [his] swiftest one-man flier from the royal hangar and range as far afield from the haunts of Martian civilization as possible" (2021 ERB paperback, page 11). Plot-wise, this is handy, too, because the drying red world, once so hospitable and populous, now has a helluva lot of crazy, remote wilds. There is plenty of space, therefore, for weird carnivorous animals, lost cities, and villains designing huge mechanisms or forming huge armies for the conquest of the planet. And John Carter... Well, he has a habit of running across such oddities, does he not?
This time on his sojourn far from the gleaming spires of noble Helium, he encounters a series of perfectly circular areas mashed strangely flat, as if by an invisible force. After stumbling into the usual nest of savage, gigantic Martian beasts, then bouncing straight into a fight with a heavily armed patrol of unpleasant baddies, he drops into a huge crevasse in the ice...whereupon he encounters an insubstantial underground city of illusions that by passage of time he cannot quite measure grows ever more solid and, eventually, somehow inescapable.
Oh, but this is hardly even the beginning. John Carter will get back to Helium, of course, and then--after, that is, further underground hijinks in the dark old dungeons he has ordered cleaned out but which still seem to contain some very odd mysteries--the real adventure can begin... Avoiding plot-spoilers, I simply will comment that "the greatest swordsman of two worlds" (page 321) will find himself up against some very repulsive, world-threatening creatures in a set-up where escape seems impossible. But John Carter can not have gotten through all the earlier novels without being not only brave but determined and resourceful, so perhaps--even though the immediate death of all oxygen-dependent life on Mars seems imminent--there may be hope yet.
Geary Gravel's John Carter of Mars: The God's of the Forgotten is, for any aficionados of the old Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, enjoyable and entertaining. Written in the style and with the tale-within-tale nested plotting of the classic originals, this book casts a very wide net, bringing in references to characters and events not just from the earlier Barsoom tales but also from other Burroughs series such as those of hollow-Earth Pellucidar, Tarzan, and Venus adventures, all the while with expected cliffhangers and reversals and wild coincidence and heroism. I am not quite sure how readers unaccustomed to Edgar Rice Burroughs would take this piece--I'm afraid I cannot quite reconstruct myself as such anymore--but for readers who have enjoyed the Barsoomian tales, Gods of the Forgotten will be a 5-star read, very possibly encouraging further exploration in the old stories and also in the new ones still being written.
July 23, 2022
Brilliant return to Barsoom!!
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2022
This book took me to unexpected new locations on Edgar Rice Burrough's imaginative version of Mars, Barsoom.
Since childhood, Barsoom has been my favorite place for other-worldly swashbuckling adventure.
Geary Gravel took me back there, but with brilliant new lost cities and strange creatures.
I'm hoping he writes more adventures about John Carter, the greatest swordsman of two worlds and his family and friends.
The Victory Harben short story by Ann Tonsor Zeddies in the back of the book is a great bonus, furthering the connecting threads, bringing us to an Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe crossover in a future novel.
ERB is bringing the best in classic, high adventure!!!!!
Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2022
This book took me to unexpected new locations on Edgar Rice Burrough's imaginative version of Mars, Barsoom.
Since childhood, Barsoom has been my favorite place for other-worldly swashbuckling adventure.
Geary Gravel took me back there, but with brilliant new lost cities and strange creatures.
I'm hoping he writes more adventures about John Carter, the greatest swordsman of two worlds and his family and friends.
The Victory Harben short story by Ann Tonsor Zeddies in the back of the book is a great bonus, furthering the connecting threads, bringing us to an Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe crossover in a future novel.
ERB is bringing the best in classic, high adventure!!!!!
May 7, 2022
An exciting trip back to Barsoom. Pulling threads from throughout Burroughs' tales of the red planet this new adventure takes John Carter and his daughter, Tara, below the surface of Mars. There we discover that the history of Barsoom may not be what we thought it was.
Geary Gravel definitely knows the Burroughs material and tells an exciting adventure worthy of the Warlord. His Burroughsian coincidences (often my favorite parts of ERB's stories) give the effect of reading an untold ERB story. Recommended for fans of John Carter, and doubly recommended for fans of the larger ERB Universe.
Geary Gravel definitely knows the Burroughs material and tells an exciting adventure worthy of the Warlord. His Burroughsian coincidences (often my favorite parts of ERB's stories) give the effect of reading an untold ERB story. Recommended for fans of John Carter, and doubly recommended for fans of the larger ERB Universe.
February 10, 2024
As I’ve read through the Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe (ERBU) novels one thing that has stood out to me is that each of these authors gets Burroughs. John Carter: Gods of the Forgotten reads like it was written 80 years ago by the hand of the Master of Adventure himself.
Geary Gravel's novel possesses all the elements of a great, pulp-style adventure yarn, possessing also the required ingredients to make it a slam-dunk of a Barsoom novel.
One important aspect of writing a novel set on a world invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) is to observe the manner in which ERB himself fashioned his stories. Each Mars novel sees his hero or heroine discovering new places, people, and things . . . here Geary succeeds in spades as he takes us to strange, visionary locales on Barsoom where we meet interesting characters, some of whom are making a comeback from older appearances in the original tales.
But it isn't only characters from the original Barsoom novels that make appearances—don’t forget, this is an ERBU novel. These stories go out of their way to bind ALL of ERB’s works into a single universe where they all exist (IOW Tarzan could run into Billy Byrne on the streets of Chicago.) Expect to see unexpected namedrops and cameos by characters from various of ERB’s works; one in particular I was especially delighted with (I won't spoil it.)
It was satisfying to see one element of which some might not consciously consider to be a required ingredient of a John Carter story, that being a note of horror. In many an ERB novel we find our hero on the cusp of being eaten alive, or tortured, or imprisoned without hope of escape while creepy, deadly things approach our adventurer from out of the pitch darkness of pits and dungeons. The villains in Gods of the Forgotten make facing a banth barehanded look like child’s play.
Another element of the ERBU novels is that each that I’ve read to-date has included a short story by a different author, further tying the novel to the ERBU series as a homogenous whole, and also what Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (ERBI) calls a "Quantum Interlude."
In John Carter: Gods of the Forgotten we are treated to Victory Harben: Stormwinds of Va-nah by Ann Tonsor Zeddies. This was such a fun short story! Not since Christopher Paul Carey’s Swords Against the Moon Men have we seen a new, authorized tale set on ERB’s vision of our inner moon, known as Va-nah. Zeddies does a splendid job of carrying us along on a whirlwind adventure with Victory Harben across the upward curving landscape of the hollow moon where she encounters some of our familiar bad guys, and makes a couple of what become staunch friends before she again is whipped away by the strange force taking her to we know not what end . . . at least, I don’t know yet. I hope to soon.
The book is a fun return to some of my favorite of ERB's worlds . . . Barsoom and Va-nah. I enjoyed the stories and the interlude and was on multiple occasions impressed by the chops of the authors. In summary, well done, all.
Geary Gravel's novel possesses all the elements of a great, pulp-style adventure yarn, possessing also the required ingredients to make it a slam-dunk of a Barsoom novel.
One important aspect of writing a novel set on a world invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) is to observe the manner in which ERB himself fashioned his stories. Each Mars novel sees his hero or heroine discovering new places, people, and things . . . here Geary succeeds in spades as he takes us to strange, visionary locales on Barsoom where we meet interesting characters, some of whom are making a comeback from older appearances in the original tales.
But it isn't only characters from the original Barsoom novels that make appearances—don’t forget, this is an ERBU novel. These stories go out of their way to bind ALL of ERB’s works into a single universe where they all exist (IOW Tarzan could run into Billy Byrne on the streets of Chicago.) Expect to see unexpected namedrops and cameos by characters from various of ERB’s works; one in particular I was especially delighted with (I won't spoil it.)
It was satisfying to see one element of which some might not consciously consider to be a required ingredient of a John Carter story, that being a note of horror. In many an ERB novel we find our hero on the cusp of being eaten alive, or tortured, or imprisoned without hope of escape while creepy, deadly things approach our adventurer from out of the pitch darkness of pits and dungeons. The villains in Gods of the Forgotten make facing a banth barehanded look like child’s play.
Another element of the ERBU novels is that each that I’ve read to-date has included a short story by a different author, further tying the novel to the ERBU series as a homogenous whole, and also what Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (ERBI) calls a "Quantum Interlude."
In John Carter: Gods of the Forgotten we are treated to Victory Harben: Stormwinds of Va-nah by Ann Tonsor Zeddies. This was such a fun short story! Not since Christopher Paul Carey’s Swords Against the Moon Men have we seen a new, authorized tale set on ERB’s vision of our inner moon, known as Va-nah. Zeddies does a splendid job of carrying us along on a whirlwind adventure with Victory Harben across the upward curving landscape of the hollow moon where she encounters some of our familiar bad guys, and makes a couple of what become staunch friends before she again is whipped away by the strange force taking her to we know not what end . . . at least, I don’t know yet. I hope to soon.
The book is a fun return to some of my favorite of ERB's worlds . . . Barsoom and Va-nah. I enjoyed the stories and the interlude and was on multiple occasions impressed by the chops of the authors. In summary, well done, all.
October 5, 2023
It is tough to follow in the footsteps of one who is considered by many to be the greatest adventure writer of all time. Geary Gravel has made an admirable attempt, and comes out of the ordeal with his honour intact.
Gravel really knows his source material. I cannot find a single noteworthy factual flaw, nor any segments that feel out of place. The characters, their actions and dialogue also feel genuine. If anything, Gravel did his job too well, because there are somewhat too many references to the original books, and Gravel's many (and successful) attempts to explain Burroughs' discrepancies tend to slow the action down. Hence, this book is more for the die-hard fan, who will perhaps enjoy this over-abundance of characters and explanations.
I enjoyed the first half of the book very much, in fact I found it to be a page-turner. In the second half, the environments change from those we are used to seeing on Burroughs' Mars, into new grounds. Not that these new environments are unsuitable for sword-and-planet adventure, but there are so many new places and characters to describe, that the action almost comes to a halt, and when it finally picks up again towards the end, there is so much going on that I find it hard to keep up with all the twists and turns.
John Carter of Mars: Gods of the Forgotten is part of a so-called "super-arc" series titled Swords of Eternity. There are three other books in the series, and a number of short stories, none of which I have read. So while I cannot measure how well it blends in with the other parts, I can say that it can be read very well on its own merits, and for the most part, the arc elements that need to be included do not disturb the plot.
All in all, this is a good read if you enjoy the genre, and particularly if you are a Burroughs fan who longs for some new adventures. Much better than some other recent titles from ERB, Inc.
Gravel really knows his source material. I cannot find a single noteworthy factual flaw, nor any segments that feel out of place. The characters, their actions and dialogue also feel genuine. If anything, Gravel did his job too well, because there are somewhat too many references to the original books, and Gravel's many (and successful) attempts to explain Burroughs' discrepancies tend to slow the action down. Hence, this book is more for the die-hard fan, who will perhaps enjoy this over-abundance of characters and explanations.
I enjoyed the first half of the book very much, in fact I found it to be a page-turner. In the second half, the environments change from those we are used to seeing on Burroughs' Mars, into new grounds. Not that these new environments are unsuitable for sword-and-planet adventure, but there are so many new places and characters to describe, that the action almost comes to a halt, and when it finally picks up again towards the end, there is so much going on that I find it hard to keep up with all the twists and turns.
John Carter of Mars: Gods of the Forgotten is part of a so-called "super-arc" series titled Swords of Eternity. There are three other books in the series, and a number of short stories, none of which I have read. So while I cannot measure how well it blends in with the other parts, I can say that it can be read very well on its own merits, and for the most part, the arc elements that need to be included do not disturb the plot.
All in all, this is a good read if you enjoy the genre, and particularly if you are a Burroughs fan who longs for some new adventures. Much better than some other recent titles from ERB, Inc.
January 4, 2025
Audiobook, read by John McLain, at 1-1/2 speed.
Gravel captures the pulpy style of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with fast-paced action and hordes of bizarre aliens, and McLain's narration suits it very well. If you're not familiar with the ERB universe, I wouldn't recommend starting with this book which contains a lot of fan service, i.e., revisiting old characters and attempting to reconcile/retcon events from previous books. In fact, the so-called Swords of Eternity super-arc, of which this is Part 4, is really nothing more than an attempt to unify and modernize Burroughs's canon. Part 5, Victory Harben: Fires of Halos by Christopher Paul Carey (which I read out of order), gets even deeper into the multiversal nature of Burroughs's worlds and characters. This book concentrates on moving John Carter from place to place on Barsoom (Mars) in somewhat willy-nilly episodes that at first seem unrelated, but which you can bet will be intertwined by the end. He spends much of the book in a previously unknown underground dungeon fighting some worm creatures who are bent on conquering Barsoom (there seem to be an awful lot of hidden underground habitats on Barsoom). If you can muster up the high degree of suspension of disbelief needed for this book, it's a fun science fantasy in the finest pulp tradition.
Gravel captures the pulpy style of Edgar Rice Burroughs, with fast-paced action and hordes of bizarre aliens, and McLain's narration suits it very well. If you're not familiar with the ERB universe, I wouldn't recommend starting with this book which contains a lot of fan service, i.e., revisiting old characters and attempting to reconcile/retcon events from previous books. In fact, the so-called Swords of Eternity super-arc, of which this is Part 4, is really nothing more than an attempt to unify and modernize Burroughs's canon. Part 5, Victory Harben: Fires of Halos by Christopher Paul Carey (which I read out of order), gets even deeper into the multiversal nature of Burroughs's worlds and characters. This book concentrates on moving John Carter from place to place on Barsoom (Mars) in somewhat willy-nilly episodes that at first seem unrelated, but which you can bet will be intertwined by the end. He spends much of the book in a previously unknown underground dungeon fighting some worm creatures who are bent on conquering Barsoom (there seem to be an awful lot of hidden underground habitats on Barsoom). If you can muster up the high degree of suspension of disbelief needed for this book, it's a fun science fantasy in the finest pulp tradition.
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