I’ve been making a concerted effort not to read bad reviews, and I’ve been doing a pretty good job of it.  I am just happy to know that good reviews greatly outweigh the bad ones.  But recently I read one of the very few negative reviews of Princess of Amathar and wanted to mention a few things brought up.

I won’t repeat the review or argue about the reviewer’s opinion of my writing.  He or she is entitled to his or her opinion.  I just want to talk about a couple of specifics.  Here is the passage in particular–

A little bit of Burroughs’ Princess of Mars, a kock-off of Larry Niven’s Ringworld, a few other sources are cannibalized for this book… our hero is transported to an alien world “for some reason”… he remains nonplussed at this teleportation and the nonsensical and random events that come afterward.

I have always said that this book was intended as a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs.  The fact that it is dedicated to him might hint at this.  I have read Ringworld and enjoyed it.  And two things in this book are ideas that I probably borrowed from Niven– the idea of a world built long ago by an unknown race and that it was populated by that race for some unknown purpose.  I would bet Larry Niven didn’t invent these concepts, but he really does a great job with them.  I didn’t invent the idea of a hollow world (a Dyson Sphere), and I didn’t get it from Ringworld.  I read about it as a kid and had already begun the story before I read Ringworld.  The two planet types really only superficially resemble one another.  The reason for the hollow world was another tribute to Burroughs– to his Pellucidar stories.  The idea of the hero not knowing or worrying about how he got to his new world comes right from Burroughs (though they changed that in the John Carter movie).  So does the idea of completely different alien races living seemingly next door to one another.  So does the fact that even though they have energy weapons, the characters fight with swords.  If those things seem nonsensical or random, you my friend are not a true Burroughs fan.

My goal was not to write Burroughs fan fiction although I did that in my younger days.  My goal was to write a book that was something like Burroughs would write today– a new book that would remind me of the things I loved reading as a kid.  I just reread Princess of Amathar the other day, and I am just full enough of myself to admit that I enjoyed reading it.