What do You think about Llana Of Gathol (1979)?
I should write a review of the plot in these reviews for my own memory. I had to check out the Barsoom wiki when Tan Hadron of Hastor shows up. He was the protagonist of "A Fighting Man of Mars". There were a lot of other cameos from characters in past books and I had to look up every one of them but I was happy to see them sho up in this one. Most of them are slaves of course that were captured after their flyer broke down over the remote and unknown city of ______. The book was great moving fast-paced from one creative yet predictable adventure to another. It ended really fast though and we never get to find out the fates of Tan Hadron, Gor-don and Fo-nar aboard the Dusar. I'm sure they were rescued and themselves then rescued and married beutiful women that were princesses who had somehow come into slavery.
—Scott Cook
Some of the old John Carter magic reappears in this late installment – the last complete novel – of the Barsoom series. Though it is more a quartet of related novelettes than a novel, perhaps.And that may be a good thing, as it speeds the action along. Each episode is neatly played out and then off to the next! It’s not unlike a modern television drama/adventure series in this respect, self-contained stories within a larger arc.‘Llana’ ends up being one of the more entertaining of Burroughs’s later Mars novels. That, however, is at the expense of his usual inventiveness — most of the ideas here are recycled from earlier books. They are nicely done and do manage to evoke the wonder of Barsoom occasionally.I could almost bring myself to give “Llana of Gathol” four stars. Three will have to do — let’s call it three-and-a-half, okay?
—Stephen Brooke
These were considered "planetary romances" according to one source back when this series from the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was written. This series of about 10 books started in 1912 and culminated around 1948. There's an odd mention of a book in 1964, but the other had been dead for 14 years by then. Plus there are a few shorts published in some pulp periodicals of the 1940s (where many of these stories appeared in years prior).Today we call this stuff sci-fi, but it's quite different. More like space opera, but it doesn't take place in space. It's a Virginian, John Carter, an immortal, who is able to pass back and forth between bodies: one on Earth, the other on Mars.I read these books because they were an inspiration to other authors, such as Conan creator, Robert E, Howard, who paid tribute to Burrough's in his novella, Almuric. And those author, in turn, inspired another generation. At the heart of today's popular sci-fi there are traces of Burroughs and John Carter of Mars.I was most interested in finding traces of George Lucas's Star Wars in these books; and traces abound. In some cases just a word, a name, a phrase, or a sentence conjures up a moment in Star Wars, and in other cases entire paragraphs connect with a setting from Star Wars.
—Robert Saunders
