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The Wizard of Venus
A Science Fiction Novel by Burroughs, Edgar R - 5th in the series Venus
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The Wizard of Venus is one of the manuscripts found among Edgar Rice Burroughs' unpublished papers years after his death. A novelette, it continues the saga of Carson Napier on the planet Venus, or Amtor, as its inhabitants call it.
Following the tradition of Burroughs' four earlier Venus novels, it was apparently intended as the opening segment of a new series of interconnected novelettes, which would eventually have become the fifth novel in the Carson saga.
Yet The Wizard of Venus constitutes a complete adventure itself. In it the reader is introduced — or reintroduced — to the daring but light-hearted adventurer from Earth, Carson Napier. Carson is indeed a character, not only in the literary but in the personal sense of the word. Things happen to him. Where you or I would go through a normal day in quiet fashion, Carson would stumble improbably into wild adventure. Even when he sets out to perform feats of derring-do, they never quite come out as planned.
Take for instance his advent upon Venus. Carson was not content to let NASA handle interplanetary exploration, but instead, backed by an immense fortune, ordered a spaceship built to his personal specifications. Upon its completion, he climbed in, set his course, and took off for Mars.
How did he wind up on Venus instead? Well, that's another story and one fully chronicled by Burroughs in Pirates of Venus. But it is typical of Carson Napier. Even he himself comments upon his curious faculty for getting into trouble, in his own introductory note to The Wizard of Venus.
But whether Carson is a great adventurer or a mere incompetent, he does manage to bungle and barge his way into some of the most entertaining scrapes in all imaginative literature. The one he faces in The Wizard of Venus is superb! [edit] | |
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