Interview: Joe R. Lansdale : Under the Moons of Mars

Interview: Joe R. Lansdale : Under the Moons of Mars.

Sample of interview…

Interview: Joe R. Lansdale

How did you first come to discover the Barsoom books by Edgar Rice Burroughs?

Actually, as a child when TV was beginning to look for things to fill the air waves, every Saturday they showed Tarzan movies, or Bomba movies, or Flash Gordon, or Buck Rogers, or a combination there of. The Tarzan movies got me interested in the name Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials got me interested in S.F. adventures, so when I was eleven, and came across a Princess of Mars, and a little later Tarzan of the apes, I was hooked through the gills. I had always wanted to be a writer, seemingly from birth, but when I found Edgar Rice Burroughs, I knew I had to be.

What do you find appealing about the characters and milieu?

It was so different from my life, and at that age I pretty much felt the stories were real. The first person narrative of so many of the John Carter tales was what worked for me, more than the Tarzan novels, or any of the series that were not first person. The framing device of Burroughs receiving the story was another one of the things that pulled me in. I think from that moment on my favorite form of storytelling, and writing, was first person. When I look at the thirty novels I’ve written, most of them are in first person, and I think Burroughs influenced that. I write things, normally, very different from what Burroughs wrote, but he is still my sentimental favorite, and the narrative drive he had in his stories has stayed with me to this day. Oh, and add to the fact that John Carter was a Southerner, could live forever, and could go to Mars by just spreading is arms wide was way cool. I did that, you know, as I’m sure a lot of young boys did back then. Spread my arms hoping, just hoping, those stories, were as I suspicioned then, true. Now I realize if I had been swept across that vast void to Mars, I’d have been killed in moments by most anything I encountered. Dang it.