ERBzine 1405: Apocryphal Barsooms I by Den Valdron -
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Published on: 12/8/2007
Last Visited: 12/16/2008
The novel begins with our protagonist Frederick Hamilton, a Lieutenant in the US Navy, serving on the USS Albatross in the Antarctic seas when it wrecks.Hamilton and a Maori seaman (a comic relief racist stereotype, unfortunately) are cast up on a barren rocky island, although at the ends of his strength, he manages to rescue a weird looking stranger and then passes out.
When he wakes up three weeks later, he's on his way to Mars.Hamilton has encountered an expedition of red, yellow and blue Martians, who use telepathy to communicate with him, and who travel space by riding the magnetic lines between the two planets' poles.
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This is why Hamilton meets his Martians at their base at Earth's south pole, and why he winds up in the sea around the pole.
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Interestingly, Hamilton at first does not realize these people are Martians.Why would he?His first theory is that they are inhabitants of Pellucidar, or at least, of a hollow inner earth, and have come into the surface through the polar opening.It's a weird little overlap with Burroughs, notable because, as I said, I believe Hamilton also wrote an inner world novel, which further identifies us with Burroughs universe.
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Hamilton finds that the Martians, like John Carter's Barsoom, combine a feudal society and swordsmanship with high technology.
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I'm not too concerned with differences in names and terminology, after all, both Hamilton and Carter are translating their respective Martians into English, so its quite possible that they might take the same terms in the same language and render it differently in English.
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Diavojahr then conspires to have Hamilton accused of treason and condemned to death in order to blackmail Suhlamia into marrying him.
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So off Hamilton goes to Earth to look for a tidy place to pack eight billion Martians.
While he's gone, disaster strikes, but not in the form of asteroids.Rather, Prince Diavojahr has instigated a palace revolution and is trying to take over Princess Suhlamia's nation.He threatens to shut down the magnetic transmitting station to make it impossible to return to Mars.The novel ends with Hamilton passing on the manuscript he has written, preparing to return to Mars.
But things must have worked out all right because when next we see Hamilton in Journey to Venus he's with his Princess Suhlavia, time has passed and they're heading off to Venus.I can only assume that the Phobos and Deimos, or the asteroids and meteors missed Mars after all.
Anyway, that's as much as I've been able to glean from internet researches.The book is described as slower paced than Burroughs' book.Critics have noted that it's often dragged down by expository travelogue stuff, or Jules Verne technobabble.Hamilton, as a protagonist, is too perfect and therefore dull.
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Is Frederick Hamilton's Mars really John Carter's Barsoom?
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The seas Hamilton describes, the eight billion Martians he reports, Diavojahr's half-plutonian ancestry, the heavily populated canal regions and so forth?
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So, in Journey to Mars, consider our protagonist, Frederick Hamilton.Is he unreliable?Fallible?Consider this: On a planet with only 40% gravity, Hamilton concludes or accepts that his strength has apparently doubled because the oxygen content in the atmosphere is slightly richer in oxygen....
Hello?Duh!But let's be gentle with poor Hamilton, he's not a scientist, he's a 19th century naval man transported to another planet.Sure, he got it wrong, but he made an honest mistake.So the question is: Is it possible he really is on Barsoom and that the discrepancies we see are merely mistakes or misinformation on his part.
Here's another.The Martians believe, and thus Hamilton believes, that Phobos and Deimos, Thuria and Cluros, are about to fall from orbit. (Which might explain the participation of blue haired/skinned Thurians on the Earth expedition).But, obviously, both in Hamilton's succeeding novel, on Burroughs Barsoom, and in real life Mars, this doesn't happen.Thuria and Cluros remain happily in place.Hamilton's Martians, and therefore Hamilton himself, have simply gotten it wrong.Or Hamilton may have misunderstood the time frame by twenty million years or so.
Does Hamilton's Mars really sport eight billion people, or did he make a mistake transliterating Martian numerical terms into earth ones?
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Has Hamilton simply misinterpreted what he saw, taking Korus or the Opal Sea for far larger bodies of water?
Hamilton believes that Martian cities are built up along the canals.Perhaps he really did see a few instances of this, and generalized it to the whole planet.If he really does believe that there are eight billion people, well they've got to go somewhere.So, a few limited observations and some wrong information could build up some erroneous pictures of the planet for him.
Diavojahr is described as half plutonian.Given the difficulties Hamilton may have translating Martian into English, perhaps he's misunderstood Instead of being from Pluto, perhaps his parentage is really partly from an a 'plutonian underworld'.... Omean?
Unfortunately, without being able to read the novel itself and analyze it in detail, it's hard to really make a firm argument that Frederick Hamilton is on Barsoom.
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