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Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Tara is the daughter of John Carter, the greatest swordsman on Mars, and she is just as brave and twice as stubborn. A storm blows her little flyer far from home. She meets a strange race of giant heads that ride headless bodies, then a city where chess is played with real people who fight on a giant board. Tara must be clever, quick, and brave to get home.
The novel is framed as another manuscript from John Carter, and its shape is a chain of captures and escapes. Tara's flyer is wrecked, the kaldanes seize her, a rescuer becomes a new captor, and the city of Manator closes around her, where the gladiator Ghek and the disguised swordsman Turan fight through the deadly games of jetan.
Two ideas carry the book. The kaldanes are brains without bodies who dream of pure thought, while the rykors are bodies without minds, and Burroughs uses the grotesque pair to ask what a person really is. Against them he sets loyalty, love, and Tara's refusal to be treated as a prize on anyone's board.
It lasts because the invention never flags: a whole sport is designed, rules and all, and the living chess game remains one of the great set pieces of pulp science fiction. Tara, who rescues herself as often as she is rescued, is among Burroughs's most appealing heroes, and the book is a favorite gateway into Barsoom.
Edgar Rice Burroughs published The Chessmen of Mars in 1922, the fifth of his Mars novels, and gave the hero's role to Tara, John Carter's headstrong daughter. Blown off course over Barsoom, she is captured by the kaldanes, brilliant heads that ride headless bodies, then carried to Manator, where jetan, the chess of Mars, is played with living men who duel to the death on a giant board. Burroughs even appends the full rules of the game.
Of all Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars novels, The Chessmen of Mars, published in 1922, may be the most ingeniously built. The hero is not John Carter but his daughter Tara, a singer and dancer with her father's sword arm and a will entirely her own, and the book follows her across a Barsoom stranger than any Carter saw. There are the kaldanes, a race of pure intellect: great heads that treat headless bodies as horses, feeding on them and dreaming of a future of thought alone. There is Manator, a city of stadium games, where disputes are settled by jetan, played on a board of a hundred squares with living pieces who fight for every move. Burroughs loved the invention so much that he closes the book with the complete rules, and readers have been playing jetan ever since. Around the set pieces runs a swift plot of escapes, disguises, duels, and a romance Tara does her best to resist, told in the breathless pulp style Burroughs perfected. Like its companions it carries the racial and colonial assumptions of its time. As a feat of world building and narrative energy, it earns its shelf place: this is the Mars book for readers who thought chess was a quiet game.
Edition: Text: Standard Ebooks edition.
The first chapter
John Carter Comes to Earth
Shea had just beaten me at chess, as usual, and, also as usual, I had gleaned what questionable satisfaction I might by twitting him with this indication of failing mentality by calling his attention for the nth time to that theory, propounded by certain scientists, which is based upon the assertion that phenomenal chess players are always found to be from the ranks of children under twelve, adults over seventy-two or the mentally defective—a theory that is lightly ignored upon those rare occasions that I win. Shea had gone to bed and I should have followed suit, for we are always in the saddle here before sunrise; but instead I sat there before the chess table in the library, idly blowing smoke at the dishonored head of my defeated king.
While thus profitably employed I heard the east door of the living-room open and someone enter. I thought it was Shea returning to speak with me on some matter of tomorrow’s work; but when I raised my eyes to the doorway that connects the two rooms I saw framed there the figure of a bronzed giant, his otherwise naked body trapped with a jewel-encrusted harness from which there hung at one side an ornate short-sword and at the other a pistol of strange pattern. The black hair, the steel-gray eyes, brave and smiling, the noble features—I recognized them at once, and leaping to my feet I advanced with outstretched hand.
“John Carter!” I cried. “You?”
“None other, my son,” he replied, taking my hand in one of his and placing the other upon my shoulder.
“And what are you doing here?” I asked. “It has been long years since you revisited Earth, and never before in the trappings of Mars. Lord! but it is good to see you—and not a day older in appearance than when you trotted me on your knee in my babyhood. How do you explain it, John Carter, Warlord of Mars, or do you try to explain it?”
“Why attempt to explain the inexplicable?” he replied. “As I have told you before, I am a very old man. I do not know how old I am. I recall no childhood; but recollect only having been always as you see me now and as you saw me first when you were five years old. You, yourself, have aged, though not as much as most men in a corresponding number of years, which may be accounted for by the fact that the same blood runs in our veins; but I have not aged at all. I have discussed the question with a noted Martian scientist, a friend of mine; but his theories are still only theories. However, I am content with the fact—I never age, and I love life and the vigor of youth.
“And now as to your natural question as to what brings me to Earth again and in this, to earthly eyes, strange habiliment. We may thank Kar Komak, the bowman of Lothar. It was he who gave me the idea upon which I have been experimenting until at last I have achieved success. As you know I have long possessed the power to cross the void in spirit, but never before have I been able to impart to inanimate things a similar power. Now, however, you see me for the first time precisely as my Martian fellows see me—you see the very short-sword that has tasted the blood of many a savage foeman; the harness with the devices of Helium and the insignia of my rank; the pistol that was presented to me by Tars Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark.
“Aside from seeing you, which is my principal reason for being here, and satisfying myself that I can transport inanimate things from Mars to Earth, and therefore animate things if I so desire, I have no purpose. Earth is not for me. My every interest is upon Barsoom—my wife, my children, my work; all are there. I will spend a quiet evening with you and then back to the world I love even better than I love life.”
As he spoke he dropped into the chair upon the opposite side of the chess table.
“You spoke of children,” I said. “Have you more than Carthoris?”
“A daughter,” he replied, “only a little younger than Carthoris, and, barring one, the fairest thing that ever breathed the thin air of dying Mars. Only Dejah Thoris, her mother, could be more beautiful than Tara of Helium.”
For a moment he fingered the chessmen idly. “We have a game on Mars similar to chess,” he said, “very similar. And there is a race there that plays it grimly with men and naked swords. We call the game jetan. It is played on a board like yours, except that there are a hundred squares and we use twenty pieces on each side. I never see it played without thinking of Tara of Helium and what befell her among the chessmen of Barsoom. Would you like to hear her story?”
I said that I would and so he told it to me, and now I shall try to retell it for you as nearly in the words of The Warlord of Mars as I can recall them, but in the third person. If there be inconsistencies and errors, let the blame fall not upon John Carter, but rather upon my faulty memory, where it belongs. It is a strange tale and utterly Barsoomian.
Source: Standard Ebooks. Published 1922. Author died 1950. Public domain. Share this book: WhatsApp
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