And the I'm going to be. Welcome to Snuscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep.

On Snuscast, we read excerpts from Public Domain Works and Occasionally Original Stories.

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Tonight we'll be reading A Princess of Mars, the 1912 science fiction fantasy novel by American author Edgar Rice Burrows.

Full of sword play and daring feats, the novel is considered a classic example of 20th century Pulp Fiction and of planetary romance.

The story is set on Mars imagined as a dying planet with a harsh desert environment.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths. On the Arizona hills, 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've always been a man, a man of about 30.

I appear today as I did 40 years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever that

someday I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection I do not know why I should fear death. I have had 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

phenomenon. I can only set down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of

fortune, a chronicle of the strange events that

...