What do you think?
Rate this book
Barsoom #6-7
The Mastermind of Mars / A fighting man of Mars
The Mastermind of Mars: The new hero in this book is the second to brave the red planet of Mars. American Ulysses Paxton becomes the chief assistant to the greatest scientist on Mars. Ras Thavas falls in love with Valla Dia, whose mind was transplanted to the ancient body of Xara. Vad Vara attempts to restore his love to her own body and faces a series of obstacles to save her.
A Fighting Man of Mars: Hadron of Hastor, native of Helium, and the warrior who is The Fighting Man of Mars, earns the enmity of Haj Osis, jed of Tjanath. Sentenced as a spy and condemned to suffer 'The Death', Hadron must prove that John Carter's warriors are not so easily destroyed.
Book club edition
A Fighting Man of Mars: Hadron of Hastor, native of Helium, and the warrior who is The Fighting Man of Mars, earns the enmity of Haj Osis, jed of Tjanath. Sentenced as a spy and condemned to suffer 'The Death', Hadron must prove that John Carter's warriors are not so easily destroyed.
Book club edition
348 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
9 people are currently reading
146 people want to read
About the author
Edgar Rice Burroughs
2,721 books2,714 followersEdgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
March 5, 2012
Edgar RIce Burroughs is back with these two! After reading "The Chessmen of Mars," which I found a bit of a slog, I wasn't really looking as forward to this book as I had the other ones in the series. But they both brought back the fun. "The Mastermind of Mars" was really fun, in "Thuvia" way - a little slower pacing, that let you see more of Mars, and an interesting plot (well, all these plots are "boy meets girl, boy loses girl" stories, but it's told in a fun way). "A Fighting Man of Mars" starts off well, though it didn't grab me at first. By the middle of the book, though, I couldn't put it down, like the earlier books in the series. So these two really revived the series for me, definitely two of my favorites so far.
April 2, 2024
The Master Mind of Mars does not involve John Carter, except in the sense that Helium exists in the background and war with Helium is one of the things that sets the backstory. While he does show up, it’s more as an epilogue than as part of the story.
The framing narrative is fascinating. Superficially it’s like a lot of other “true story” openings and closings, with a document arriving from a mysterious source and containing the story told as if it actually happened. But most such framing devices disappear within the story. Some, such as at least one of E. R. Eddison’s, don’t even return at the end, making them framing devices only in the sense that they look exactly like one but without the actual frame.
Here, however, Burroughs integrates the framing device brilliantly (and much better than he does in his Venus series) into not just this story but his entire pan-adventure universe. Ulysses Paxton is a fan of Burroughs, or at least of the John Carter series, so much a fan that he harbors a religious hope that Barsoom is real. That faith does not fail him in his most dire moment in the trenches of the Great War.
What Paxton finds on the other side of his belief is as weird and unique as anything elsewhere on Mars. What he finds is, in fact, a great premise for a roleplaying game, allowing the use of any creature found or potentially found on Mars to be used literally at will from a great storehouse of potential characters.
The villain is not so much a villain as a misguided and amoral in the technical sense scientist. Master Mind, like many of Burroughs’s works (especially many of his Tarzan sequels) is about religion. Unlike many of them, however, this is less about the excesses of religion than about the necessary balance between religion and science, as well as how that plays into morality and science. The people of Toonol…
“Unbalance” is key: there must be a balance between faith and reason. The Toonolians are contrasted with the Phundahlians…
The Toonolian semi-antagonist, Ras Thavas, is the embodiment of the evil of pure reason, almost, if not actually, a caricature of Ayn Rand’s heroes. I would not be at all surprised if he’s also a commentary on the use of what Churchill would later call “perverted science” that made the Great War such a dehumanizing and psychologically demoralizing experience. Ras Thavas isn’t evil; he just doesn’t care about other people, nor does he care about the uses of his discoveries.
This copy is copyright 1928 and 1955; I don’t know whether it was merely edited in 1955 or if more was added. Certainly, there are parts that look like they benefit from the added perspective of World War II, and Burroughs did live to 1950. When Paxton says about the Great War that “We fought for a great principle and for the peace and happiness of a world. I hope that we did not fight in vain” Toonolian nobleman Mu Tel replies:
However, this doesn’t have t be a comment on how the Great War led to the Second World War. It’s not a denigration of war at all, only war with misguidedly utopian intentions. Mu Tel goes on to voice an opinion that could have come neither from World War I nor World War II, but instead is very alien even in its invocation of overpopulation as an evil to be avoided:
This is a very short novel (only 135 of the 348 pages in this two-novel book) and so doesn’t have nearly as many twists and surprises as the longer books in the series, but it is filled with weirdness and adventure, and is a very credible installment in the Barsoomian chronicles.
I don’t know if it was originally there or added later—both novels in this collection have two copyright dates—but the framing device ties the narration of each of these books together. The protagonist of the previous story is the reason that Edgar Rice Burroughs has been given this story.
Another commonality is that both main characters are not the exceptional heroes of others in the series. Paxton mostly relies on the expertise of others. Hadron while perhaps moderately stronger than normal, was otherwise smack in the middle of his class, a member of the lesser and impoverished nobility of Barsoom.
Like most of the books in Burroughs’s Barsoom series, there is a hero and a princess. But Burroughs is very much like Louis L’Amour: he makes every story seriously different while still maintaining a common alien culture of the tribes of Mars.
There are, of course, monsters, ancient ruins, weird dictators, and mad scientists, all the stuff I’ve come to enjoy about this series.
Barsoom contains multitudes, and one of the multitudes is that it encompasses most styles of early D&D gameplay. Dungeon adventures, great battles (including, of course, aerial battles), arcane mysteries, it’s all here for the taking.
The framing narrative is fascinating. Superficially it’s like a lot of other “true story” openings and closings, with a document arriving from a mysterious source and containing the story told as if it actually happened. But most such framing devices disappear within the story. Some, such as at least one of E. R. Eddison’s, don’t even return at the end, making them framing devices only in the sense that they look exactly like one but without the actual frame.
Here, however, Burroughs integrates the framing device brilliantly (and much better than he does in his Venus series) into not just this story but his entire pan-adventure universe. Ulysses Paxton is a fan of Burroughs, or at least of the John Carter series, so much a fan that he harbors a religious hope that Barsoom is real. That faith does not fail him in his most dire moment in the trenches of the Great War.
What Paxton finds on the other side of his belief is as weird and unique as anything elsewhere on Mars. What he finds is, in fact, a great premise for a roleplaying game, allowing the use of any creature found or potentially found on Mars to be used literally at will from a great storehouse of potential characters.
The villain is not so much a villain as a misguided and amoral in the technical sense scientist. Master Mind, like many of Burroughs’s works (especially many of his Tarzan sequels) is about religion. Unlike many of them, however, this is less about the excesses of religion than about the necessary balance between religion and science, as well as how that plays into morality and science. The people of Toonol…
…denied deity, and in the same breath worshipped the fetish of science that they had permitted to obsess them quite as harmfully as do religious fanatics accept the unreasoning rule of their imaginary gods; and so, with all their vaunted knowledge, they were unintelligent because unbalanced.
“Unbalance” is key: there must be a balance between faith and reason. The Toonolians are contrasted with the Phundahlians…
…whose people are, I believe, the least advanced in civilization of any of the red nations upon Barsoom. Giving, as they do, all their best thought to religious matters, they have become ignorant, bigoted and narrow, going as far to one extreme as the Toonolians do to the other.
The Toonolian semi-antagonist, Ras Thavas, is the embodiment of the evil of pure reason, almost, if not actually, a caricature of Ayn Rand’s heroes. I would not be at all surprised if he’s also a commentary on the use of what Churchill would later call “perverted science” that made the Great War such a dehumanizing and psychologically demoralizing experience. Ras Thavas isn’t evil; he just doesn’t care about other people, nor does he care about the uses of his discoveries.
This copy is copyright 1928 and 1955; I don’t know whether it was merely edited in 1955 or if more was added. Certainly, there are parts that look like they benefit from the added perspective of World War II, and Burroughs did live to 1950. When Paxton says about the Great War that “We fought for a great principle and for the peace and happiness of a world. I hope that we did not fight in vain” Toonolian nobleman Mu Tel replies:
“If you mean that you hope that your principle will triumph because you fought and won, or that peace will come, your hopes are futile. War never brought peace—it but brings more and greater wars.”
However, this doesn’t have t be a comment on how the Great War led to the Second World War. It’s not a denigration of war at all, only war with misguidedly utopian intentions. Mu Tel goes on to voice an opinion that could have come neither from World War I nor World War II, but instead is very alien even in its invocation of overpopulation as an evil to be avoided:
“War is Nature’s natural state—it is folly to combat it. Peace should be considered only as a time for preparation for the principle business of man’s existence. Were it not for constant warring of one form of life upon another, and even upon itself, the planets would be so overrun with life that it would smother itself out. We found upon Barsoom that long periods of peace brought plagues and terrible diseases that killed more than the wars killed and in a much more hideous and painful way. There is neither pleasure nor thrill nor reward of any sort to be gained by dying in bed of a loathsome disease. We must all die—let us therefore go out and die in a great and exciting game, and make room for the millions who are to follow us.”
This is a very short novel (only 135 of the 348 pages in this two-novel book) and so doesn’t have nearly as many twists and surprises as the longer books in the series, but it is filled with weirdness and adventure, and is a very credible installment in the Barsoomian chronicles.
I don’t know if it was originally there or added later—both novels in this collection have two copyright dates—but the framing device ties the narration of each of these books together. The protagonist of the previous story is the reason that Edgar Rice Burroughs has been given this story.
Another commonality is that both main characters are not the exceptional heroes of others in the series. Paxton mostly relies on the expertise of others. Hadron while perhaps moderately stronger than normal, was otherwise smack in the middle of his class, a member of the lesser and impoverished nobility of Barsoom.
Like most of the books in Burroughs’s Barsoom series, there is a hero and a princess. But Burroughs is very much like Louis L’Amour: he makes every story seriously different while still maintaining a common alien culture of the tribes of Mars.
There are, of course, monsters, ancient ruins, weird dictators, and mad scientists, all the stuff I’ve come to enjoy about this series.
Barsoom contains multitudes, and one of the multitudes is that it encompasses most styles of early D&D gameplay. Dungeon adventures, great battles (including, of course, aerial battles), arcane mysteries, it’s all here for the taking.
“It is a mad plan,” said the girl, “but a brave one.”
January 10, 2024
Il volume contiene i romanzi "La Mente di Marte" e "Il Guerriero di Marte".
Sul primo non ho molto da dire, se non che l'incipit è praticamente identico al primo romanzo della serie: il soldato Ulysses Paxton viene trasportato in punto di morte sul pianeta rosso. Così, de botto, senza senso.
Questa premessa magica apre l'avventura del terrestre, che ricorda molto lo stesso John Carter. La sua storia ruota attorno alla lotta con il prototipo dello scienziato pazzo tanto in voga in quel periodo, ed è chiaramente infarcita di azione e romanticismo in perfetto stile Burroughs, in questo caso piacevole ma non memorabile.
Il secondo romanzo è di tutt'altra pasta. Qui il protagonista è un nativo di Marte, un soldato semplice, che nella sua ricerca dell'amore, e tra mille peripezie, si ritrova invischiato in un conflitto su scala planetaria.
E' di altra pasta, dico, perchè quì il protagonista non è un superuomo (se non teniamo in considerazione i suoi incredibili colpi di sfiga e gli alrettanto incredibili colpi di fortuna), ma un semplice barsoomiano che se la deve vedere con una serie interminabile di ostacoli che lo separano dal suo obiettivo, spesso goffo e maldestro, ma che riesce sempre in un modo o nell'altro a sfangarla. Una sequela infinita di pericoli lo attendono, e troverà quel che cerca, ma non come se lo aspetta.
Letteratura di evasione all'ennesima potenza: come per tutto il ciclo di Barsoom non aspettatevi profonde riflessioni o grandi introspezioni, ma iperboliche avventure scritte egregiamente.
Sul primo non ho molto da dire, se non che l'incipit è praticamente identico al primo romanzo della serie: il soldato Ulysses Paxton viene trasportato in punto di morte sul pianeta rosso. Così, de botto, senza senso.
Questa premessa magica apre l'avventura del terrestre, che ricorda molto lo stesso John Carter. La sua storia ruota attorno alla lotta con il prototipo dello scienziato pazzo tanto in voga in quel periodo, ed è chiaramente infarcita di azione e romanticismo in perfetto stile Burroughs, in questo caso piacevole ma non memorabile.
Il secondo romanzo è di tutt'altra pasta. Qui il protagonista è un nativo di Marte, un soldato semplice, che nella sua ricerca dell'amore, e tra mille peripezie, si ritrova invischiato in un conflitto su scala planetaria.
E' di altra pasta, dico, perchè quì il protagonista non è un superuomo (se non teniamo in considerazione i suoi incredibili colpi di sfiga e gli alrettanto incredibili colpi di fortuna), ma un semplice barsoomiano che se la deve vedere con una serie interminabile di ostacoli che lo separano dal suo obiettivo, spesso goffo e maldestro, ma che riesce sempre in un modo o nell'altro a sfangarla. Una sequela infinita di pericoli lo attendono, e troverà quel che cerca, ma non come se lo aspetta.
Letteratura di evasione all'ennesima potenza: come per tutto il ciclo di Barsoom non aspettatevi profonde riflessioni o grandi introspezioni, ma iperboliche avventure scritte egregiamente.
October 24, 2023
The 6th book in the series, former Earthman Ulysses Paxton served Barsoom's greatest scientist, until his master's ghoulish trade in living bodies drove him to rebellion. Then, to save the body of the woman he loved, he had to attack mighty Phundahl, and its evil, beautiful ruler Xaxa, who comes to an appropriate end back in her old, decrepit body by the of the book. Paxton, called Vad Varo by his captor (whom he had unwittingly rescued at the beginning of the tale), even uses the worship of Tur to his advantage, finding a holly statue in which he is able to communicate as Tur to the bewildered priests as well as Xaxa.
American Ulysses Paxton becomes the chief assistant to the greatest scientist on Mars, Ras Thavas. Paxton falls in love with Valla Dia, whose mind was transplanted to the ancient body of Xaxa. Vad Varo attempts to restore his love to her own body and faces a series of obstacles to save her. He uses his skills in reanimation to forge relationships with both Martians and a great Martian ape in which Ras Thavas had placed a human brain. The story ends happily, with each brain back in its appropriate body, as well as Ras Thavas being forced to use his “talents” for good instead of personal gain. The book ends with John Carter himself, along with Deja Thoris (the Princess of Mars) showing up.
American Ulysses Paxton becomes the chief assistant to the greatest scientist on Mars, Ras Thavas. Paxton falls in love with Valla Dia, whose mind was transplanted to the ancient body of Xaxa. Vad Varo attempts to restore his love to her own body and faces a series of obstacles to save her. He uses his skills in reanimation to forge relationships with both Martians and a great Martian ape in which Ras Thavas had placed a human brain. The story ends happily, with each brain back in its appropriate body, as well as Ras Thavas being forced to use his “talents” for good instead of personal gain. The book ends with John Carter himself, along with Deja Thoris (the Princess of Mars) showing up.
May 11, 2018
Autoguida, comunicazioni interplanetarie, trapianti di parti di corpo e di cervelli interi, i visibilità, disintegratori. Ma anche tantissimo coraggio e purezza di cuore. E alla fine non ci deve sorprendere se è l'amore a trionfare.
Vale sempre la pena leggere Burroughs, finirò di sicuro la saga di John Carter che trovo molto avvincente.
Vale sempre la pena leggere Burroughs, finirò di sicuro la saga di John Carter che trovo molto avvincente.
February 7, 2023
Gli albori della fantascienza. Commovente.
Read
June 21, 2009Science Fiction
June 7, 2010
Barsoom,ERB,John Carter
August 14, 2010
tur is tur and Burroughs is Burroughs.
July 12, 2011
With all the buzz about the new John Carter movie, I've been heading back to the collection and reading some of these. Still the perfect way to spend a summer evening!
May 4, 2013
Good solid ERB adventure yarn set on Barsoom(Mars)featuring Ulysses Paxton, another earthman teleported to Mars by who knows how, and a stand-in for John Carter.
Read
January 30, 2016Excellent, Awesome, Non-Stop Action, wish I own this book!
August 3, 2018
Finita la prima parte del libro (40%), che corrisponde proprio al romanzo "La mente di Marte": piacevole da leggere in spiaggia, anche se non compare John Carter, (3 stelle)
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews