Negative John Carter review from 84 years ago

On the first submission—as was his wont with startlingly new ideas—Farnsworth Wright rejected “The Call of Cthulhu.” The following summer, however, he asked to see it again. Lovecraft sent it in with two other stories and one of his defeatist letters. He berated conventional interplanetary stories like Burroughs’s tales of John Carter (which he had loved as a youth), with its stalwart human hero in love with a beautiful extraterrestrial princess:

If I were writing an “interplanetary” tale it would deal with beings organized very differently form mundane mammalia, and obeying motives wholly alien to anything we know upon Earth—the exact degree of alienage depending, of course, on the scene of the tale; whether laid in the solar system, or the utterly unplumbed gulfs still farther out….All very well—but will readers stand for it? That’s all they’re likely to get from me in the future—except when I deal with definitely terrestrial scenes—and I am the last one to urge the acceptance of material of doubtful value to the magazine’s particular purpose.

Despite Lovecraft’s negative salesmanship, Wright bought the story for $165. It appeared in Weird Tales for February, 1928.

—L. Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft: A Biography

The Martian chronicles

It's unlikely I'll get to see John Carter (dubbed "Ishtar on Mars" by the NYT) before it leaves the theaters, so all I can do is read...

1. Here's Shadowplay, "The Face on the Barsoom Floor" (a pretty positive take on the film):

So, JOHN CARTER, a movie which is underperforming ENTIRELY, I submit, because some halfwit at Disney decided to omit the words “OF MARS” from their $250 million epic, thereby making it sound like MICHAEL CLAYTON or JACKIE BROWN. Low-key, in other words. The decision reeks of stupidity not just because it miss-sells the product (I guess the ads made most of us aware what kind of film this really was) but because it gave off a whiff of panic, and the press bloodhounds were all over that. So the movie emerged sheened in flop sweat, before a skeptical rather than an enthused populace.

2. Here's Geoff Ryman's excellent story "Film-makers of Mars," from his collection Paradise Tales (Small Beer Press) and now back up on the Tor site (where it originally appeared).

3. And here's Grognardia on one of the rarest TSR products—Warriors of Mars: The Warfare of Barsoom in Miniature:

If you've never heard of Warriors of Mars, let alone seen a copy, there's a good reason for that. There was, so far as I know, only one print run of the book before the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate contacted TSR about possible infringement of their rights. Rather than risk legal action, the book was never reprinted, making it today one of the rarest -- and most expensive -- TSR products. I've tried in vain to obtain a copy for myself at a reasonable (i.e. not multi-hundred dollar) price for several years now but to no avail. . . .