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OCTOBER’S FEATURED TEXT

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A Princess of Mars is a science fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The story was first published in hardcover in October, 1917, although it previously had been serialized in a pulp magazine in 1912. The novel became the first of Burroughs' "Barsoom" series, relating the adventures of Captain John Carter on the planet Mars.

I AM a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.

And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the story of the interesting periods of my life and of my death. I cannot explain the phenomena; I can only set down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strange events that befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay undiscovered in an Arizona cave.

I have never told this story, nor shall mortal man see this manuscript until after I have passed over for eternity. I know that the average human mind will not believe what it cannot grasp, and so I do not purpose being pilloried by the public, the pulpit, and the press, and held up as a colossal liar when I am but telling the simple truths which some day science will substantiate. Possibly the suggestions which I gained upon Mars, and the knowledge which I can set down in this chronicle will aid in an earlier understanding of the mysteries of our sister planet; mysteries to you, but no longer mysteries to me.

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The current Community collaboration is collecting texts related to the Eminent Women Series Recent collaborations: Edward VII of the United Kingdom, Henry David Thoreau, WikiProject NARA, Tenth Anniversary Contest, Disney

The current Proofread of the Month is A Bid for Fortune  (1895) by Guy Newell Boothby. Recent collaborations: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Revised Edition, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore, The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe, The Maine Woods, The Story of Nell Gwyn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Earliest Lives of Dante, Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books, The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire, Savage Island, The Tourist's Maritime Provinces, The Book of Scottish Song

The current Maintenance of the Month task is Work index revision Recent collaborations: Orphans, Proposed policies and guidelines, Author page connection with Wikidata items, Help page improvement, Undated works

NEW TEXTS

An Unfinished Song (1913)

by Swarnakumari Ghosal, translated by self

A Bid for Fortune (1895)

by Guy Newell Boothby

The Masque of the Edwards of England (1902)

by Charles Robert Ashbee and Edith Harwood

The Stone in the Cock's Head (1850)

by Giambattista Basile, translated by John Edward Taylor

Modern Socialism (1886)

by Annie Besant

Calls to Action (2015)

by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

The Rover Boys in the Air (1912)

by Arthur M. Winfield

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