Apart from Tarzan, Barsoom (Mars) is ERB's most famous creation. His wonderful portrayal of a dying planet of warring city-states, with all its detailed and colourful depiction of varied flora, fauna, races, cultures, religions and customs, has an unsurpassed ease of touch. Many authors have invented worlds with more realism, intelligence and consistency of detail, but none with such dreamy lightness of heart. It is as if it all poured from him in a trance.
His Venus, by contrast, is supposed to have much less "zap". Brian Aldiss in Trillion Year Spree wittily suggests that this is partly due to the cloud-wrapped nature of the planet, as though the author's imagination was likewise befogged. More seriously, one might also point out that whereas the Barsoom series runs to ten volumes, Amtor (Venus) has only four, so there wasn't room for so much development of that world.
Yet much is achieved in those four volumes set on cloudy, mysterious Amtor. If one were to do a statistical count of cultures and civilizations described, it might well become apparent that the Venus books are even richer than the Mars books in varied discoveries and adventure. And all the cultures are distinctive, colourful, unforgettable. The super-scientific people of Havatoo; the living dead of Kormor; the sinister castle of Skor; the fanatical monarchists of the tree city of Kooaad; the communistic Thorists; the fascistic Zanis; the Myposan fish-men and many more, provide the settings for a feast of Venusian adventure.
Paradoxically, in this variation lies the clue as to why Amtor is less popular or at any rate less renowned among readers, than Barsoom. For all this variation is a product of isolation. The cultures of Venus are all cut off from one another. Carson Napier himself, the man from Earth, is the only factor that links them, as he sails or flies from one adventurous mishap to thenext. Here we come to the main difference between the worlds: transportation.
Owing to the availability of transportation, Barsoom, unlike Amtor, has a world civilization of sorts. Its cities may mostly be hostile to one another (though there are some alliances), but, mostly, the red men of Barsoom do trade and communicate and know of each other. Exceptional cultures may exist in total isolation until they are stumbled across - such as the spider-like kaldanes in The Chessmen of Mars, or the white-skinned Orovars in Llana of Gathol. Or one of the red-man cultures may withdraw from the international community and plot its destruction, as did the evil Tul Axtar, ruler of Jahar in A Fighting Man of Mars. And of course the savage green men may get up to anything; they are beyond the pale. But by and large the civilized cities are linked.
They are linked because of the special Barsoomian invention, which occurs nowhere else in ERB's universe: the flier. On Barsoom you can run out your flier from its shed and climb onto it, to lie prone while you open the throttle and speed through the thin air of the dying planet, from city to city, empire to empire, taking your chances, perhaps as a wandering 'panthan' or soldier of fortune; or you can indulge your curiosity and simply explore,out over the dead sea bottoms and the deserted cities of an earlier epoch:
Upon the edges of plateaus that once had marked the shore-line of a noble continent I passed above the lonely monuments of that ancient prosperity, the sad, deserted cities of old Barsoom. Even in their ruins there is a grandeur and magnificence that still have power to awe a modern man. Down towards the lowerst sea bottoms other ruins mark the tragic trail that that ancient civilization had followed in pursuit of the receding waters of its ocean to where the last city finally succumbed, bereft of commerce, shorn of power, to fall at last an easy victim to the marauding hordes of fierce, green tribesmen....
-- A Fighting Man of Mars
The flier is a symbol of freedom that makes even more vivid the colourful invented sub-reality that is Barsoom. Amtor's isolated mysteries make it in a sense into several separate worlds; Barsoom is more united in a global mystery, with global themes.
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