From Medieval Travel Narratives to the Planetary Romance: Alien Encounters in Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of the most popular authors of early science fiction, has been credited with the invention of the science fictional subgenre of the planetary romance, consisting in escapist tales set on another planet among alien species. The planetary romance departs from traditional science fictional conventions in that it does not adhere to plausible scientific laws as science fictional stories generally do, often giving special attention to monsters, exotic settings, swordplay, supernatural powers, and romance as well as to the encounters between the main hero and alien beings whose society often resembles that of Earth’s premodern past. This kind of plotline was heavily influenced not only by frontier narratives describing the US expansion westward, but also by travelogues and what John Rieder has defined as “medievalist and imperial” stories about lost races and marvelous journeys of the late nineteenth century, in turn taking inspiration from medieval travel narratives. In this light, the paper aims to analyze the way Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, the first novel of his Barsoom series, depicts the encounter between self and Other articulated through the attitude of the main hero John Carter toward the alien species he encounter and interacts with during his travels on Mars. In particular, the paper argues that the novel’s attentive descriptions of the flora, fauna, and hybrid inhabitants on the planet, which show an indebtedness on the part of Burroughs to travelogues and ethnographic writing, reveals a similar anxiety, engendered by the alien Others’ hybridity and blurring of boundaries between human and nonhuman, to that expressed toward the monstrous beings populating medieval travel narratives, encyclopedias, mappae mundi, and chivarlic romances. Thus, the paper aims to demonstrate that, just as these medieval sources present journeying as a source of anxiety derived from the encounter with monstrous Others, so Burroughs's depiction of the uncivilized medieval-like monstrous creatures Carter encounters in the strange and hostile wilderness upon his arrival on Mars serves to reassert the boundaries of the human or, rather, of the normative exclusionary conception of the human as white, western male.