{"id":1698,"date":"2003-08-27T07:53:58","date_gmt":"2003-08-27T12:53:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2003\/08\/27\/mars-or-barsoom\/"},"modified":"2023-10-12T15:03:17","modified_gmt":"2023-10-12T20:03:17","slug":"mars-or-barsoom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2003\/08\/27\/mars-or-barsoom\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars…or Barsoom?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wonder what Edgar Rice Burroughs would have made of the news that Mars is now violating our personal space<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Burroughs, who died in 1950, is best known as the creator of “Tarzan,” and, indeed, even his official domain name is tarzan.com<\/a>. But this prolific author first captured my attention as a mere yout’ with his sci-fi series set on the moon and on Mars, which its inhabitants called “Barsoom.”<\/a><\/p>\n

In fact, ERB achieved his first commercial success as a writer with a story published in 1911 entitled Under the Moons of Mars<\/em>, (later retitled to A Princess of Mars<\/em>) which he sold to a magazine for the huge sum of $400.<\/p>\n

I still can’t watch Noah Wylie’s<\/a> character on E.R.<\/em> without thinking about the swashbuckling hero of ERB’s Martian adventures, the original<\/strong> John Carter.<\/p>\n

And I can’t help lamenting a bit how our advances in science and technology come at a price to our imagination and daydreams. After all, the excitement of finding an ice crystal or two on a dead planet pales next to the idea of racing across the desert landscape on an 8-legged thoat. I think ERB would agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wonder what Edgar Rice Burroughs would have made of the news that Mars is now violating our personal space. Burroughs, who died in 1950, is best known as the creator of “Tarzan,” and, indeed, even his official domain name is tarzan.com. But this prolific author first captured my attention as a mere yout’ with… Continue reading Mars…or Barsoom?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-writing","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1698"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12754,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1698\/revisions\/12754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}