Ian Stewart asked Matt Ruff:

Fun Question: I absolutely love A Princess of Mars and was very happy to see it in your book, and that your main character can see through its flaws. How would you tell a modern interpretation of that book? I always took it as a confederate standing up for the sins of his past and saving people. Have a great day, and Congrats on all your success, you deserve that.

Matt Ruff I haven’t read Burroughs’ Mars series in years, so I may be missing some details here, but my basic take on John Carter is that he doesn’t really add up psychologically. He describes himself as an ageless man out of time: “I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty.” This is intriguing but it rules out the most common reason someone would choose to fight for the Confederacy: because they were born and indoctrinated into the culture.

Carter must had some other reason for defending slavery, but I don’t know what it would be. He likes fighting but hates cruelty, especially when it’s directed against the weak or helpless. At the start of Princess, he charges into an Apache encampment on his own to save a friend from being tortured, even though he knows the guy is almost surely dead already. Later, when one of the green Martians holding them captive backhands Dejah Thoris, he leaps to his feet and kills the guy without a thought for his own safety. (Fortunately, the other green Martians are impressed rather than angry.) He’s a fast learner—he picks up the Martian language in no time—and while he’s not above making sweeping generalizations about races of people, he’s perceptive enough to notice when individuals don’t fit the stereotype.

If I take all this at face value, I’d expect this guy to last about ten minutes in the South. He’d see an overseer abusing a slave, leap to the slave’s defense, and then—because he’s not superman on Earth—the other whites would kill him. The reason this doesn’t happen, of course, is that John Carter is saddled with the unexamined prejudices of his creator. Burroughs, who traced his ancestry to colonial Virginia, no doubt had a romanticized view of the Confederacy, and so Carter has it too—even though, realistically, he shouldn’t.

As for how I’d rewrite this, the simplest answer would be to have him switch sides: Make Carter a Union officer instead. That’s the revised version that would probably be closest in tone and spirit to the original Princess of Mars.

Another, maybe more interesting possibility would be to strip Carter of his ageless quality and make him a true son of the South, born and raised in slave-holding Virginia, who fights for the Confederacy because he believes in it. The big question here would be, do you give him a redemption arc, where he regrets his past and tries to make up for it on Mars? I gather you’d vote yes on this, but I’d be tempted to say no and make Carter a Lost Causer, the kind of Southerner whose only regret was that Lee surrendered. I’d drop him into the middle of another civil war on Mars, and have him see that as a chance to get things “right” this time—with disastrous consequences. That’d be a really interesting book to write—to create an honest portrait of what a diehard Confederate supporter was like—but I’m not sure who would want to read it.

Then there’s the wild-card option, which involves flipping the chase sequence that starts off the whole series. Instead of having John Carter get attacked by a band of angry Apaches, you could have an Apache brave, minding his own business, who gets attacked by a band of angry white prospectors. The brave takes shelter in a cave and ends being teleported to Mars... To do this right, the protagonist would need to be a real person, not just a Native American caricature, so it would involve an awful lot of research, but there are plenty of interesting places you could take the story.

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