#and it was interesting to see the racist/orientalist associations of many sff tropes set out in open and unabashed terms

[romanceyourdemons]

edgar rice burroughs’ “a princess of mars” is so entrenched in the planetary romance and sword and sorcery genres that it forms a foundation stone of, as well as in the specific styles and bigotry of the first decades of the 20th century that there was little in it that i haven’t seen before, but there are two things that were noteworthy to me. firstly, the book clearly demonstrates that, in the fin de siecle white american literary imagination, the figure of the honorable southern gentleman of the confederate army was unquestioned as the latest link in a chain of chivalric heroes including cowboys, swashbucklers, and arthurian knights. secondly, the book follows much early-century science fiction into directly mapping the narrative of a method of white colonial expansion onto its protagonist’s interaction with an alien world—as a trip to the moon (1902) invokes direct colonial conquest and c.s. lewis’s space trilogy invokes missionary work, so this book invokes manifest destiny and “cowboys and indians” narratives—and it also follows the vast majority of science fiction in its orientalism, providing an almost textbook recreation of the narrative of an exotic, brutish people living in the ruins of greatness created by ancestors who have much more kinship to white people than they do to their own descendants. however, interestingly, this book frames the degeneration of the martians and particularly of the green men as the direct and explicit product of eugenics. i do not know enough about edgar rice burroughs to know his wider stance on the issue, but it does seem a striking stance to take in 1911, when eugenics was a darling of the scientific and popular community of europe and america. other than these two things, there wasn’t much of interest and import in the book, but it does contribute to several significant literary genealogies of modern science fiction and fantasy