I did not like this book. I guess it was supposed to be a satire of Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books using a gritty realism take to get the satire across. It did not work. The style in which the book is written is irritating, the first-person narration by the motor-mouthed protagonist just annoyed me nonstop. The constant references to the Mars books made me want to read something more akin to those even though they rely on "false chivalry" as this book put it. The very long and detailed rape scene near the end of the first third of the book was a big negative but I read on.
Most of the book consists of long empty conversations that take a page and a half to say something that could have been communicated in a single sentence. There are a couple of fight scenes, not very exciting or even that impactful though it seems the author tried to make them shocking and bloody. It seemed to me that a large portion of the story uses descriptions of the bureaucracy of the city as world-building. I can see the satire in this as opposed to Sword & Planet tales but it was not executed at all very well. All it did was make me want to go read an actual Sword & Planet story. ( )

I am not sure anyone can be more surprised than I, but I have to judge this novel from 1973 the best Sword&Sorcery novel I have read.

I have set out to read the genre after a lag of many decades. I had immersed myself in high fantasy, and science fiction, and Literature, too — must keep that capitalized, you know — in my first decade or so of reading. Somehow I had skipped S&S, for the most part. Oh, I had read Vance, and tried Fritz Leiber (the Fafhrd/Grey Mouser stories being the only things of his I cared for), and done some basic duty with ERB. But Lin Carter was merely an enthusiast-cum-critic for me, Robert E. Howard a famous suicide, and de Camp the author of one terrific humorous poem, also from 1973, “The Ameba.”

But I have professional reasons to dip into the genre now. And I have, in this cause, finally read a few Carter adventures, Poul Anderson ventures, and taken a refresher course in ERB. It has all been very instructive.

I confess, however: this is the first of the S&S fictions to garner from me a highly positive appraisal.

I hadn’t read Offut before, not even, I think, in short form. And his reputation as a “pornographer” was . . . intriguing. I mean, as a Jack Woodford fan and James Branch Cabell devotee, I could hardly let rumor dissuade me.

I am glad I did not. This is an extremely clever book. It is meta-Sword&Sorcery. Sf/parodic, sure, but well written and the adventure is neither distracting nor poorly integrated into the story. It has twists. It is a twist — and with that in mind, perhaps that very word, “twist,” we can find justification for the serpentine cover illustration by (apparently? obviously?) Frank Frazetta.

Oh, and the fact that Frazetta is name-dropped early in the book.

And, as in Woodford and Cabell, not even the occasional frank sex talk, and a description of rape, strikes me as in the least bit pornographic.

It is all very "meta." I understand why most readers might not appreciate this. I did. ( )

Andrew Offutt seems to think that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a prude. For myself, I'm pretty confident that ERB consciously devised the myriads of implied sexual scenarios in his John Carter and Tarzan stories alike. He's the one who insisted that everyone on Mars be naked after all. In any case, come 1973, Offutt is ready to shuck the chivalric approach and let the barbarians barbarize.

Rather than simply telling his own more explicit riff on Barsoom and its savage excitements (as John Norman did in his Gor stories at roughly five times the total length of Burroughs' original series) Offutt tells us about telling it, in the chattily sardonic voice of his grad student protagonist. Hank Ardor -- oh, yes, the title is a pun -- has read Burroughs and does not fail to compare and contrast his adventures with those of John Carter each step of the way. Readers well-versed in the planetary romance sub-genre will find plenty of amusing allusions throughout.

One of the too-clever-by-half touches Offutt adds is to subject his protagonist to situs inversus as a function of his transport to Aros: he is anatomically reversed, left-to-right. My recent reading in Bateson's Mind and Nature highlights a problem with this detail, though: How would he know? As it happens, "left" and "right" are only definable relative to circumstance, and if his entire circumstance (including his physical body) has been changed, there would be no way of detecting the reversal. If he picked up a normal English book, it might seem printed backwards -- but he has no such cues for his orientation.

The title of the final chapter is "The answer that was true -- but STILL didn't satisfy," and while I'm not convinced of the "true" part (even within the hypothetical construct of the fiction), a little dissatisfaction seems to be a central theme of this book, which is a pretty quick piece of light entertainment, and one of the less profound items of metafiction you're likely to encounter.

P.S. This book (the Dell paperback and I think only edition) has what must be the ugliest, most irrelevant cover ever painted by Frank Frazetta!