The Master Mind of Mars: Extremely entertaining

The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Master Mind of Mars is book 6 of 11 JOHN CARTER adventures that Edgar Rice Burroughs gave to the world. It first appeared in the magazine Amazing Stories Annual in July 1927, and John Carter himself only puts in a cameo appearance near the book’s end. Instead, our hero is another Earthman, Ulysses Paxton, who mysteriously gets transported to Barsoom (Mars) after being critically wounded on the battlefields of WW1. Paxton becomes an apprentice of the eponymous mastermind Ras Thavas, and from him learns all manner of surgical miracles, including brain transplantation. Paxton falls in love with a young woman, Valla Dia, whose body has been sold to an old empress, so that that empress can now live on in her new hotty body. Paxton vows to travel across Mars, kidnap the empress, and restore his beloved’s body to her. He enlists the aid of some of Ras Thavas’ medical subjects: a Barsoomian white ape with a half-human mind; a professional assassin; and another Martian who has had his body bought/stolen by another.

This is a short but extremely entertaining and fast-moving fantasy novel. In it, Burroughs gives us some interesting philosophy on the correlation of mind and body (as he did with the kaldanes in The Chessmen of Mars), as well as some interesting speculations on the necessity of war in any culture. He also pokes fun at the mumbo-jumbo aspects of organized religion. So there is some actual food for thought, in addition to the fun. And that equilibrimotor chase and scene in the Temple of Tur ARE very much fun! The heart, lung and other assorted transplants that Ras Thavas is engaged in must have seemed like real sci-fi improbabilities back in 1927, although these things are fairly commonplace today. The brain transplants are another matter, of course. (Perhaps one day…)

The Master Mind of Mars seems to be slightly better written than some of the earlier Barsoomian novels; Burroughs DID improve with age, at least as far as technique is concerned. Still, there are the usual inconsistencies that crop up. For example, in one scene Thavas complains of the new young blood in his new young body, when it has been established that recipients of new bodies receive their old blood back. I was confused by this. In another scene, the 15-foot-tall ape/man puts on the leather harness of a regular-sized man. Does this seem possible? Clouds are said to obscure the moon in another scene, yet in earlier books, Burroughs has told us that clouds exist on Barsoom only at the poles. A body of a dozen Toonolian soldiers at one point mysteriously turns into 20, and the great scarlet tower of Lesser Helium, which was destroyed in The Chessmen of Mars, is inexplicably back again in this book. (I grant that it may have been rebuilt, but Burroughs might have said something to this effect.)

The surprise regarding Valla Dia at the book’s conclusion was one that was so obvious to me that I don’t even think it was really meant to be a surprise after all. And here’s another quibble: Paxton falls in love with Valla Dia only after he has seen what her actual body looks like. It might have been more effective had he fallen in love with her only AFTER she was trapped in the haggish body of the empress. A young, strapping American male falling in love with an old ugly woman, based solely on her gracious personality. Now THAT would have been a REAL fantasy!