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Carson Napier of Venus Edgar Rice Burroughs
I was shadow boxing near the right end of my veranda when I suddenly discovered the girl in the garden observing me. As our eyes met I halted in my tracks and smiled at her. A frightened look came into her eyes, and she turned and fled. I wondered why. Puzzled, I walked slowly back toward my apartment, my exercises forgotten. This time I had seen the girl's full face, looked her squarely in the eyes, and I had been absolutely dumfounded by her beauty. Every man and woman I had seen since I had come to Venus had been beautiful; I had come to expect that. But I had not expected to see in this or any other world such indescribable perfection of coloring and features, combined with character and intelligence, as that which I had just seen in the garden beyond my little fence. But why had she run away when I smiled? After the death of his parents and grandfather, stunt pilot Carson Napier had given up on life. But then, Carson inherits the vast fortune of his great-grandfather. Determined to find something worth living for, Carson builds a giant rocket and blasts off into space. A beautiful alien princess in need of his help gives him a new purpose in life within the dense jungles of the planet Venus. The Venus series by Edgar Rice Burroughs is a science fiction series consisting of four novels and one novelette. Most of the stories were first serialized in Argosy, an American pulp magazine. The Venus series is sometimes known as the Carson Napier of Venus series. The novels, part of the "Sword and Planet" subgenre of science fiction, follow earthman Napier's fantastic adventures after he crash-lands on Venus, called Amtor by its human-like inhabitants. Most of the events of the series take place on the island of Vepaja, the kingdom of Korva on the island of Anlap, and the city-states of Havatoo and Kormor on the tropical continent north of Vepaja. Edgar Rice Burroughs (September 1, 1875 -- March 19, 1950) was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan, although he produced works in many genres. Burroughs wrote popular science fiction stories involving Earthly adventurers transported to various planets, notably Barsoom, Burroughs' fictional name for Mars, and Amtor, his fictional name for Venus, as well as lost islands, and the interior of the earth in his Pellucidar stories. He also wrote westerns and historical romances. The first four novels are still protected by copyright in the U.S., but the internet has made a mockery of copyrights. Since the Venus copyrights have expired in Australia, the text of the novels are available via Project Gutenberg Australia: A fifth Venus novel, The Wizard of Venus, was published in 1964, fourteen years after Burroughs' death. The book consists of two stories written during the early 1940s that were discovered after Burroughs's death: "Wizard of Venus" and an unrelated pirate adventure story entitled "Pirate Blood." The story "Wizard of Venus" was first published in a 1964 anthology entitled Tales of Three Planets.If you want to read the novels the old-fashioned way, you can order from Amazon using the links below.
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