Back in the 1960s, Lancer Books brought out a series of books that I instantly recognized were homages to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels. Blades of Mars, Warriors of Mars, and Barbarians of Mars (published under the Edward P. Bradbury pseudonym) told the adventures of Michael Kane, gifted swordsman and physicist, who finds himself transported to Mars in time and in space when an experiment in matter transmission goes awry. Kane finds himself on Mars, but a Mars thousands of years in the past. Of course, there’s plenty of action as Kane battles the invading Blue Giants and falls in love with the beautiful Princess Shizala. In all three books, Kane confronts man-sized spiders, ancient mutant races, and a genetically engineered plague. If you’re a fan of the Burroughs Mars books, you’ll enjoy these worthy pastiches. The Planet Stories editions of these entertaining books with Moorcock’s more colorful titles are still available.
I love these books and have both the Compact (UK) first editions and the Millenium hardback as part of the uniform Moorcock set.
I have the White Wolf omnibus edition, Scott. The Lancers are at SUNY at Buffalo.
Love the covers, especially the first one.
The covers are faux-Frazetta, but they catch your eye, Jeff.
I remember when these came out in their Lancer editions, and I bought them all at the time. But I was still reading Burroughs’ Mars books at the time, as I recall, so I put the Bradbury books aside until I’d finished the ERB ones. Which I never have, I have to admit, and so I’ve never even sampled one of these. My loss, apparently, as you make them sound quite terrific.
Question: Was it known at the time that Moorcock wrote them? My feeling is that it was not, but I could easily be wrong about that.
Moorcock wrote these Mars adventures early in his career, Steve. No one really knew who Michael Moorcock was in the U.S. So Moorcock came up with the “Edward P. Bradbury” pseudonym which got his books shelved alphabetically with Edgar Rice Burroughs. Pure marketing!
Ok I need a lot of Novels to read time and again.