On Jun 17, 9:05*pm, Quadibloc wrote:
On Jun 17, 4:34 pm, wrote:

then in the dreadful 11th novel it was suddenly 3-
legged.

Since the dreadful 11th novel was adapted from a Big Little Book by
one of Burroughs' sons,

Ah, I did not know that. The paperback edition I bought back around
1970 clearly assigned authorship to ERB, though in an intro it did
mention some questions about that.

that can't be taken as evidence of
inconsistency by Burroughs - although, yes, even in the good novels,
sadly, there was plenty of inconsistency too.

He needed Ghek the Kaldane for an editor.

writes:

It's been decades since I read much ERB, but as I recall,
inconsistency was not uncommon in the Barsoom series.

That is certainly correct, although in some cases ERB was more consistent
than you would expect (considering his many slip-ups, that is). He did
keep copious notes on many things, and words and names is one subject
where he can _mostly_ be trusted to be consistent. (Exact numeral
reference and measurement is one where he _cannot_.)

IIRC, the
aforementioned glossary named the dead city of Aaanthor as the Martian
equivalent of Greenwich, i.e. zero longitude, but in another novel
some place named Exum was so described.

Again, the glossary is just a tangled mess, full of errors and
inconsistencies. It cannot be used as any kind of useful reference.

The Martian rat, the ulsio,
was described as 6- or 8-legged (don't remember which) in the first 8
or 10 novels, then in the dreadful 11th novel it was suddenly 3-
legged.

As someone else pointed out, the three-legged variant was made up by
John Coleman Burroughs, ERB's son. This has recently been confirmed in
an issue of Burroughs Bulletin.

As far as the panthan's move is concerned, I would think a backwards
diagonal move was not to be allowed. The panthan could move sideways
or forward, but never back either diagonally or orthogonally.

I agree with this conclusion.

This
means of course that a panthan on the 10th rank can only shuffle back
and forth; no promotion is envisaged.

Correct, but this is not nearly as much of a problem as most critics of
jetan like to claim. To begin with, the jetan panthan will have to spend
at least eight moves to reach the final rank, whereas the chess pawn
can do so in five. Also, the panthan can prolong his journey by
side-stepping along the way. Either way, the bottom line is that the
panthan will take a different, more defensive, role than the pawn. Since
there is no promotion, there is no reason to race across the board and
there will be no horde of panthans "shuffling back and forth" along the
final rank.

Fredrik

Quadibloc writes:

Ah! I am somewhat surprised, though; given karad, haad, ad, and sofad,
one would have expected that sof- is a prefix meaning "one-hundredth",
and so safad sounds more reasonable.

You do mean "one-tenth", right? As it happens, I have been toying with
the same idea, but I have been forced to conclude otherwise.

Still, something _explicitly_ mentioned - that a tenth of a sofad is a
sof - does have to take precedence over speculation.

There is no such explicit comparison of one sof with one sofad, but
there is explicit reference to the sof compared with the inch. The
following is from Chapter 12 of Swords of Mars (not Llana, as I
incorrectly thought).

"if there were human beings on Thuria [...] they would be but about
nine-and-a-half inches tall"

and later

"an inhabitant of Thuria, [...] would be about eight sofs tall"

In other words, 8 sofs approximate 9.5 inches, so 1 sof is about 1.2
inches. This is reasonably consisten with the quote you mention from
Thuvia, saying that 1 sofad is 1.17 inches. So "sofad" in that quote
must be a typo meaning "sof".

Fredrik

Quadibloc writes:

For myself, I admit to being strongly tempted, but first I'm going to
dig out my copy of "The Chessmen of Mars" and see if there _is_ any
evidence present that might help in such a quest. I'm suspicious that
even the strict and chained rules give the pieces so much freedom of
movement as to make the game unplayable.

Actually, that is not the case. Only the Chief and Princess are
extremely powerful in terms of freedom of movement, and they are each
restricted by other rules. Compared with chess, most jetan pieces have
much less freedom of movement than, say, a Rook.

In at least one case, though, I agree that what you've done is
plausible.

The Panthan is actually the piece that I found was hardest to figure
out what ERB intended. In most cases, some careful reading of the
rules and of the game described in Chapter 17 of the book leaves
only one remaining possibility.

Fredrik

Quadibloc writes:

Upon returning to the site, I see that I had better not take too long
in doing so. Back issues may still be available, as you've said, but
if so, there are at most 11 of them in existence.

While that is technically correct, back issues tend to be sold off at a
slow rate. I happen to know that a few weeks ago, copies were available
of all issues from #87 on (although only a single copy in some cases).
The extremely low circulation (55 copies for each issue) together with
the copious content (typically around 200 pages) combine to make the
asking price of $25 worth considering, IMO.

Not everything in any given ERB-APA is good, of course, but if you
happen to enjoy ERB, there are always a number of really good articles
in each issue. One fellow member was kind enough to call my article in
#92 "the definite jetan article", an epithet I certainly hope will be
proven false by someone else in the future.

Fredrik

On Jun 18, 8:34*am, Fredrik Ekman wrote:
Quadibloc writes:

While that is technically correct, back issues tend to be sold off at a
slow rate. I happen to know that a few weeks ago, copies were available
of all issues from #87 on (although only a single copy in some cases).
The extremely low circulation (55 copies for each issue) together with
the copious content (typically around 200 pages) combine to make the
asking price of $25 worth considering, IMO.

I'm not complaining about the price - as such, but Internet users do
tend to be expecting, when given a link, to find the information there
immediately.

One fellow member was kind enough to call my article in
#92 "the definite jetan article", an epithet I certainly hope will be
proven false by someone else in the future.

I could desire that as well, but the limited activity on
alt.fantasy.er-burroughs (that ERB-APA is small might concievably just
be its own "fault" instead of indicating the same thing) tells me that
interest in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs appears to have subsided
from its past levels to an extent making hope unrealistic in this
area. This is a pity, and it is also surprising, so it may be that the
appearance is misleading.

John Savard

On Jun 18, 12:40*pm, Quadibloc wrote:

the limited activity on
alt.fantasy.er-burroughs (that ERB-APA is small might concievably just
be its own "fault" instead of indicating the same thing) tells me that
interest in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs appears to have subsided
from its past levels to an extent making hope unrealistic in this
area. This is a pity, and it is also surprising, so it may be that the
appearance is misleading.

I don't find it at all surprising that interest in Burroughs' works
would be subsiding. Scientific knowledge has advanced considerably
since his time, and his notions of conditions on Mars, Venus, the Moon
and inside the Earth are now known to be totally erroneous, even
ludicrous. His writing style is a sort of stilted, heavy Victorianese.
His plots are contrived and implausible, his characters wooden. The
occasional racism his work shows is offensive to today's readers.
When I first discovered Burrough's Barsoom novels, as a teenager
back in the 1960s, his notions about Mars still seemed at least
minimally plausible, and I was insensitive to or willing to overlook
all the other shortcomings. I avidly read all of them, plus the
Pellucidar, Venus, Moon and Land that Time Forgot series, and
miscellaneous others (Beyond 30, The Mad King, etc.) But picking up my
favorite of them all, The Warlord of Mars, 30 years later, I found it
almost unreadable.
I would imagine that many of the baby boomers who powered ERB's
1960s comeback came to feel the same way, and for later generations,
technological advances made ERB's sci-fi seem downright quaint and
irrelevant.

Taylor Kingston

On Jun 18, 11:14 am, wrote:

I don't find it at all surprising that interest in Burroughs' works
would be subsiding.

I don't really find it surprising, for the reasons you mention, that
it is lower than it once was.

That it has reached such a low level as it appears to have done,
however, is surprising to me simply because there doesn't seem to be
anyone who has supplanted him in the particular category of escapist
fiction which he dominates, and which would likely be popular.

Of course plenty of other people write fiction for entertainment.
There are authors like David Weber and John Ringo. There are the many
writers who are following in the path so gloriously blazed by J. R. R.
Tolkien. H. P. Lovecraft has a devoted following.

But the type of fantasy Burroughs produced belongs to a different
category, I would think. With H. Rider Haggard at one end, and Lin
Carter at the other, he still doesn't appear to have been displaced.

John Savard

On Jun 18, 8:16 am, Fredrik Ekman wrote:

In other words, 8 sofs approximate 9.5 inches, so 1 sof is about 1.2
inches. This is reasonably consisten with the quote you mention from
Thuvia, saying that 1 sofad is 1.17 inches. So "sofad" in that quote
must be a typo meaning "sof".

That makes sense - except, of course, that the glossary in Thuvia says
that a safad is the Martian inch, and a _typo_ of sofad for safad
makes more sense than one of sofad for sof.

However, Thuvia had _real_ mistakes, not just typos, since it was the
book in which the size of the haad was doubled. So I still have to
admit that sof is more strongly confirmed in the canon; probably in
this book, safad was the typo for sofad - and Burroughs made the sofad
a tenth as long, as well as making the haad twice as long, just for
that book.

John Savard

On Jun 17, 4:48 am, Fredrik Ekman wrote:

If you are interested in an attempt to resolve the ambiguities,

Although Burroughs didn't give the full details of the very short game
featured in The Chessmen of Mars, I do now see how it resolves some
ambiguities.

The fact that the two Chiefs are four spaces apart, the Panthan to one
side has been advanced one space, just before that Panthan is ordered
to battle Gahan to spare U-Dor a fight, and U-Dor has no escape, means
that the square one space diagonally away from the Chief's original
square, and a Knight's move away from Gahan, cannot be accessible to U-
Dor but not Gahan.

That eliminates the "Free Chief". If there was no reason to think that
the Panthan in front of U-Dor has moved away, we couldn't eliminate
the "Chained Civil Chief" by a similar argument. But, in fact, we know
this must have happened, because the Chief, unlike the Princess,
cannot jump over intervening pieces.

Also, the description of the Chief's move in the description of the
game, however, seems to eliminate any possibilities except the Chained
Wild Chief and the Free Wild Chief, because it is emphasized there
that "any combination of directions" is allowed.

We have an account, as well, of several Flier (or Odwar) moves.

The first one, three squares diagonally in a straight line doesn't
settle any arguments, although it demonstrates jumping over
intervening pieces. The same is true of the second move - but since
that move threatens the Princess, not three spaces diagonally away in
a straight line, we know that the piece can change direction during
the move.

But we are told that the move of Black's Chief's Odwar was the *only*
possible move that would capture the Orange Odwar, despite the advance
of the Chief's Panthan. A move of three squares, one orthogonal, and
two diagonal, by the Chief should also have brought him to the square
of the attacking Odwar!

So, instead of settling matters, it seems the game hopelessly
contradicts itself!

John Savard