The Blonde From Barsoom by Robert F. Young

For the most part, all Harold Worthington Smith’s Martian stories ever netted him were standard rejection slips, but every now and then one or another of the editors to whom he submitted them would pen him a brief note to the effect that his writing indicated an unusually vivid imagination. However, they invariably added, his dialogue was stilted, his heroines were dimensionally impossible, and his stories were wish-fulfillment reveries in a Burroughs vein—unredeemed, unfortunately, by Burroughs’ high-flown puritanical idealism.

Harold agreed with them wholeheartedly on point no. 1. Thanks to his ability to achieve total identification with his protagonists, he did have an unusually vivid imagination. Take this very minute, for instance: His main character—Thon Carther the Earthman—was standing on the ocher moss of the Martian dead-sea bottom beside the big-breasted blond princess whom he had rescued from Tarkia some two thousand words ago, fearlessly awaiting the oncoming horde of Tarks. But it wasn’t really Thon Carther who was standing there, it was Harold Worthington Smith—a tall, tanned and handsome Harold Worthington Smith, to be sure, but Harold Worthington Smith just the same.

On points no. 2 and 3, however—be it said forthwith—he did not agree. He had, moreover, written to the editors in question and said so. A Burroughs influence, he had said, was an essential ingredient in the makeup of any science-fiction writer, and he was reasonably certain that he didn’t exhibit one any more than half a dozen other scribes he could name.