A bit over a year ago I reported discovering a website devoted to an upcoming movie adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pirates of Venus. But then the website vanished for a while and I figured the project had fallen through. Now, though, I see that the website has risen again from the sea-foam, with the movie’s release date announced as 2010 (two years before the higher-profile John Carter of Mars is scheduled to appear).
As I’ve mentioned before, the Venus books were my first introduction to Burroughs, so they have a special nostalgia value for me and I’d really like to see this movie get made.
It’s not clear how closely the movie will follow the book(s), but the online synopsis, according to which the hero inherits a spaceship from his vanished grandfather, suggests that no great fidelity should be expected.
The original series was in large part a parody (partly on target, partly annoying) of Marxism and fascism; no word as to whether that aspect will be part of the movie.
Incidentally, back in the 70s Len Wein (creator of Swamp Thing) and Michael Kaluta did a pretty faithful graphic adaptation of the first two books in the series (under the title Carson of Venus, which is actually the name of the third book) in the back pages of Korak, Son of Tarzan:
Have you read the S.M. Stirling planetary romances yet? He wrote a Venusian one a year or so ago (can’t recall the name off the top of my head) and I’ve got the Martian one right here, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. They’re more scientifically plausible than the Burroughs books, based on the idea that the space race really heats up in an alternate version of our world in the 1950s when it becomes clear there is definitely life on both Mars and Venus. Apparently, life transplanted from or related to Earth life. I’m only 50 pages into Crimson Kings but it seems to be a fun setting.
I haven’t read them, but I’ve heard them recommended. Kevin Carson’s a fan of Stirling’s Nantucket/Emberverse series, but I haven’t read that either.