City Of The Beast/Warriors Of Mars [Paperback]

City of Beasts/Warriors of Mars succeeds, admirably, at being a homage to the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. For anyone who is a fan of the genre of Planetary Romance, or who just enjoys well written action, this is a good book to read. Is it high literature? No. Does it make sense with what we know of science today? Not only no, but a resounding no! In the end will you understand the Human Condition better than before? Well, not really.

What it is, is a fairly simple straight forward story of adventure. In this book you will find all the derring do, vile villians and heroic... well, heroes that you would wish from a book of this type.

The writing in this novel only hints at the true depth of Michael Moorcock's gift for writing. Any fan of his who has read any of the later Eternal Champion series should see in this book the development of a truly gifted author. I am not sure when Michael Kane was added to the list of Eternal Champion's but so be it.

As a homage to the literary genre, though, it is a truly fun book. In the end, it is that word that makes me feel really happy about having taken the time to read a novel and why I am willing to give this one five stars (in spite of some minor flaws): That it is in the end a FUN read.

This is a very exciting book! I started reading it around 10:30 as some intending it as some before bed reading and finally finished it around 2:30am. I did not even notice the passing of time. I could not put the book down.

I am a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books, and this book definitely the same genre. There are two sequels to this book that will be released later in the Plaent Stories Line: Lord of the Spiders and Masters of the Pit.

I hope that you enjoy this story as much as I did.

On Grognardia, I've been reading a lot recently about Paizo's Planet Stories series, which is a line of classic fantasy and science-fiction novels (most from the 1950s to 1970s). The books come out bi-monthly and subscriptions are available, though so far I've just picked up several of the novels in used book stores.

The first one I read was Michael Moorcock's City of the Beast. Moorcock is a famous fantasy writer (especially with his Elric stories), but this is the first time I've ever actually read one of his books. City of the Beast (originally titled Warriors of Mars) has a refreshing simplicity to it, insofar as it is very much straight-up heroic adventure. Except for a framing sequence, it's told from the first-person point of view of a character named Michael Kane. A modern-day physicist (who just happens to be an expert swordsman and military tactician), Kane is transported by accident to the Mars of thousands of years ago--a world which is a lush, fantastic place full of strange creatures, civilizations, and quasi-scientific technology. Kane immediately falls in love with a native princess named Shizala and goes on an epic quest to rescue her when she's kidnapped by a race of blue-skinned giants named the Argzoon. In other words, this is the story of a guy fighting monsters to rescue a princess: it is Super Mario Bros: The Novel. I say that facetiously, as it's fun to read a fantasy novel that is straight-forward and fast-moving (it weighs in at just over 150 pages) and that doesn't carry with it dozens of subplots and hundreds of characters. As much as I like the layered myth-making and deep characterization in stories like The Wheel of Time, a book like City of the Beast offers a nice change of pace.