Drew and Princess Thalia conclusively defeat the evil warlord Lexas, foiling his plan to transfer his brain into her body. In the grand tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Goddess of Mars is the final volume of the Clayton Drew Quartet.
Release date:
June 30, 2015
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
127
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For more than seven decades, successive generations of American readers—and indeed readers all over the world—have thrilled to the adventure novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the cold light of science and astronomical discoveries, we now know that there are no wild banths and beautiful princesses on Mars. No teeming jungles on Venus. But Edgar Rice Burroughs remains in print, touching the hearts and minds of each new generation of fantasy fans. The answer to this contradiction is that what was once read as science fiction can now be enjoyed as fantasy…always provided that the original author had imagination and talent.
Back in 1949, the British publisher W.H. Allen struck gold when he began reissuing Edgar Rice Burroughs novels in paperback. Their appearance paved the way for the British science fiction boom which took off in 1950, fuelled by the launch of the “Vargo Statten” paperback science fiction novels written by John Russell Fearn. Fearn was an English author who had learned his craft in the American pulp magazines, many of his stories appearing alongside the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the pages of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures.
These two strands came together in the Fall of 1950, when U.K. publishers Hamilton & Co. (Stafford) Ltd. hit upon the idea of commissioning Fearn to write a series of books inspired by the success of ERB’s John Carter of Mars sf novels. Fearn’s brief was to create an up-to-date modern series: EMPEROR OF MARS, WARRIOR OF MARS, RED MEN OF MARS, and GODDESS OF MARS. Other Burroughsian elements included both green Martians, and a ‘superior’ race of red Martians, underground cities, lost races, monstrous life forms, a beautiful princess, and plot intrigues involving brain and body transplants. But the Fearn novels were not merely pastiches of ERB: Fearn brought to them his own canon of classic science fiction themes and plots which he himself had pioneered in the American pulp magazines.
The result of this combination of influences was a dynamic series that became a best-seller in the U.K. But the series was cut short when Hamilton’s main publishing rival, Scion Ltd., offered Fearn a 5 year contract to write for them exclusively as Vargo Statten. Thus the Clay Drew of Mars series came to a premature end after four novels, and was never reprinted. Now rare, these books have become legendary collectors’ items.
It is against this background that Gryphon Publications and myself are making them available to a new generation of ERB and fantasy adventure fans, with the added bonus of specially commissioned new artwork by Ron Turner. Turner was the original cover artist for most of the dozens of Fearn ‘Vargo Statten’ novels in the 1950s, and has long been recognized as the greatest sf paperback artist of that exciting period. For more details of these works and other contemporary British science fiction, interested readers are referred to my two books (with Stephen Holland) VULTURES OF THE VOID and BRITISH SF PAPERBACKS AND MAGAZINES, currently in print from Borgo Press in the U.S.A. and also available from Gryphon Publications. Just as J. Allen St. John captured the magic of ERB, so Ron Turner brilliantly portrays the sense of wonder and sf vision underlying Fearn’s stories.
Fearn, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, was a born storyteller, with talent and imagination. Like John Carter, Clay Drew’s adventures can now be enjoyed as fantasy adventure. This new Gryphon Books series is sure to become a collector’s item, and is one no ERB and fantasy fan will want to miss!
Philip Harbottle, Wallsend, England, Jan. 1995
Mars, the planet of endless deserts, gasping for water from skies which never clouded, its arid surface broken only here and there by roughly designed cities or the canal-like lines of valves leading to the underworld, was no more. Scientific genius had changed it into a thriving planet. It possessed clouds, regular rainfall, and its savage bareness had been replaced by fertile fields and pastures. There were two cities—the one set close to a new-born ocean and inhabited by descendants of Earth’s Atlantis, and the other known as Redopolis, city of the red men of Mars, true intellectual inhabitants of the planet.
In both cities there were scatterings of green Martians, tall, bald, ungainly beings, servants of the red men or the Atlanteans having neither the wish nor the intelligence to revolt against their lowly lot. By common consent the planet was ruled by the Emperor and Empress of Atlantis—Clayton Drew, an Earthman, and his Atlantean wife, Thalia. They had achieved their position as supreme rulers not entirely by accession but by a combination of extraordinary circumstances, and had certainly proved their courage and resource in defeating Lexas of Mars, the swaggering, cunning green Martian who had all but brought Mars under his domination.
Now that was over. Lexas had been slain in the midst of his career of villainy. His body lay rotting in the torrid jungles of Venus, a body without a brain. He had been in the midst of a brain transference when he had been overwhelmed with the result that his brain had remained separated from his body.
That had been over a year ago. In the intervening time, their battle with the Martian over, Clay and Thalia had returned to Mars to take over their normal ruling positions in Atlantis, and were now deep in plans for furthering the planet’s prosperity and its trade association with Earth.
“Just the same,” Thalia commented, as she and Clay stood one evening on the balcony outside their suite in the Governing Edifice of Atlantis, “there are times when I wonder if all is really as quiet as it seems to be.”
Clay glanced at her in surprise. He was a lean-faced man youngish, blue-eyed, with the manner and speech of a man of action.
“Meaning what, Thay?” he asked.
“I don’t know … really.” The girl looked absently into the calm of the Martian evening. The sun had set, etching the great bulk of Atlantic against the amethyst glow in the west. “It’s just that it’s hard to believe, after all we went through, that Lexas can be really silenced at last.”
“A year has gone,” Clay reminded her, shrugging. “And apart from that it isn’t common for a body without a brain to get up and walk.”
“No, I suppose not.”
Clay looked at the girl in some concern. He knew how quickly her delicately balanced mind could detect danger, often long before he himself was aware of it. However, he did not comment, and the girl remained looking at the stars—and one star in particular. Venus. It shone with its intense lustre low down over the sunset.
“Lexas’s graveyard,” she murmured. “I know it’s silly, but I have the oddest feeling that there’s something wrong somewhere. I—I can’t quite explain it.”
“I should think you can’t,” Clay chided her; then his powerful arm went gently about her shoulders. “For heaven’s sake, Thay, don’t start worrying about something which does not exist. We have enough on our hands as it is—turning this new-born civilization of ours into something worthwhile.”
Thalia was silent again. The twilight gave her undoubted beauty even finer lines. Her green eyes seemed more transparent; her golden hair darker. Her slim, strong young body remained motionless in Clay’s grip.
“This ‘something’ does exist,” she said after a while, and when he realised what she had said Clay released his hold on her and tried to see her expression in the dying light. It was troubled, her mouth set.
“What are you talking about?” he asked bluntly.
“I don’t know how much of this you’ll believe,” she replied, “but I keep having a queer emotion taking possession of me. In fact it is more than an emotion: it’s mental conviction. I—I keep feeling a terrible hatred for you.”
Clay broke into an incredulous laugh. “Well, that’s a good one! I doubt if two people could love each other more than we do.”
“I know, but——now and again I——” Thalia did not finish her sentence. It appeared that she found it too much of a struggle to make sense. Her eyes travelled back again to the steadily glowing point of Venus. One by one the hosts of heaven were appearing. The throb of the great city was the only sound in the gentle dusk.
Thalia turned suddenly and walked away across the balcony and into the brightly lighted room beyond. Clay looked after her for a moment and then followed. He found that the girl had seated herself and was frowning hard as if trying to reconcile something.
“What’s all this nonsense about hating me?” he asked quietly. “It’s too utterly absurd, Thay. Why, the very existence of this Martian civilization depends on you and I being absolutely in accord with each other.”
“I know.” Her face was serious as she looked up. “But there is something else too which worries and mystifies me. Why should I, the daughter of a highborn Atlantean dignitary, be slowly coming to believe that I ought to unify the Atlantean race with the green men?”
“Unify them? In what way?”
“Every way. Allow them to live on the same terms as ourselves, even permit intermarriage and the creation of part Martian-part Atlantean offspring——”
Clay’s expression changed from bewilderment to one of genuine concern. He sat down beside the girl and grasped her arm compellingly.
“Thay, do you realise what you’re saying? The green men of Mars are the scum of the planet—workers and nothing more. They have no scientific knowledge, no breeding, no heritage. They’re simply the throw-outs of the red race. I could better understand you thinking of unification with the red men rather than the green, but even that would be unthinkable.”
“It’s all unthinkable,” Thalia said, baffled. “And it frightens me. All through my life I have been the absolute mistress of my own desires and thoughts—. Yet here I find myself being swayed by complex mental suggestions which are quite contrary to my wishes. It’s like … hypnotism.”
Clay gave a little start. “But you’re surely not tying it up with Lexas?”
“He tried hypnotism once,” Thalia reminded him.
“Surely, but the conditions were very different to what they are now. He had amplifiers; the distance was only short—and he possessed a body and a brain. Now he has neither. He’s dead, Thay. If hypnotism is being used to plant crazy suggestions in your head then somebody on this world, and maybe in this city, is responsible.”
The girl shook her head moodily. “I’d thought of that. If an amplifier of that nature were at work it would betray itself to detectors—but the detectors remain at zero. I tried it out myself when I last felt this queer, overpowering hatred for you. It’s … impossible to understand,” she finished.
“Probably the outcome of too much work recently,” Clay smiled. “I’d suggest you see the First in Psychology and see if he can explain it … And it occurs to me that we have some plans to work out for the new laboratory sector. We’d better get busy on them.”
Thalia nodded absently and led the way to the door which gave on to the huge contiguous controlling office. It was plain t. . .
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