Last year I decided to take writing fiction as a serious endeavour and my first story was based partially off of E.R. Burroughs concept for John Carter. I obviously modified what I had taken away from that to no longer be recognizable, but I still feel as though I owe the author some sort of credit for giving me inspiration. This is maybe why I have been reading Dejah Thoris so intently in the past year but it has also exposed me to a lot of the author's writings. Burroughs like Verne and Wells was a groundbreaker in terms of science fiction and he based a lot of his writing on the fantastical aspect of science fiction which thought that there might be human like beings on Mars. Thus the Tharks and the Red Martians were born. The Red Martians are a lot more like humans than the Tharks, and this is what Dejah Thoris is. The concept behind the race is a fairly simple one I think - that there needs to be a human like group on Mars, but that there has to be something to distinguish them, and thus they are given red skin. I wonder how much of this has become a part of popular culture though. The usual colour given to people from Mars seems to be green, and the term "green men from Mars" is a fairly common one. The default colour after that though seems to be Red, both for those from Lesser Helium and as the colour of the Martian Manhunter copy Jemm (he is actually from Saturn but was originally created after a series for J'onn was not greenlit and anyway the race are cousins of the Martians.) As I was reading through an old Mystery in Space comic yesterday I ran across this again, some Red Martians. It is not necessarily a very enduring legacy, or even one that is not obvious as there are a limited number of colours to choose from but it does seem that Burroughs has added his own twist to early science fiction, some of which has worked its way into modern fiction. Start the Conversation
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