“Kaor! I’m from Helium, Barsoom.” is a comment I made to a Facebook post. Then I got to wondering how well known “kaor” is. I didn’t expect it to be the first result, but kaor as a greeting is nowhere on Google that I could see.
Kaor is from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars books.
This might help a little:
I had no idea what “kaor” was, but seeing “Barsoom” I knew it was from Burroughs’ Mars books.
I’ve never read any Burroughs. I’ve been meaning to, if nothing else for the historical context.
I’ve read multiple Mars books, maybe all of them. It was decades ago. I don’t remember them particularly well but I found them pretty entertaining as a kid.
Same here. Read them all by the end of High School, nothing since.
I read them all by the end of college.
I think I read about everything ERB had in print back when I was in High School. It helped that I worked at Waldenbooks back then as my after school job. Tarzan, John Carter, Carson of Venus, Pellucidar, etc.
I only vaguely remember “Kaor”, though.
Anyone else remember this Barsoom poem by Charles R. Tanner?
Sample stanza:
“The green men came up fast so she fled upon a thoat. John Carter told her, “Go, I’ll stay behind and be the goat.” But when the Martians got up close, he saw they were no Tharks. These savage goons were all Warhoons, a damsite worse than sharks.”
ERB really packed the series with the craziness: brain transplants, synthetic people, invisible spaceships, and a strict adherence to sword fighting even though, as ERB points out, they always carried a “radium pistol”. The reader is rewarded with imaginative zaniness if suspension of disbelief can be achieved. ERB didn’t make it easy.
I’ve read one or two Pelucidar and Barsoom books- and a few silver age Marvel comics of Barsoom. I liked it but not enough to shell out a bunch of money.
I only know it tangentially from Heinlein.
I read them all before graduating high school. (They were on the bookmobile.) I enjoyed them.
I owned all of the Tarzan, Barsoom and Pellucidar books, all or most of the Amtor stories, and a lot of his other books when I was in jr high and high school.
I read all the Tarzan books, the Caspak books, the Mars books, the Moon Maid books, and several (but not all) of the Pellucidar and Carson of Venus novels. I’ve also read a lot of his stand-alone novels, like The Monster Men, Beyond the Farthest Star, and Beyond Thirty/Lost Continent. Burroughs had a prolific imagination, but he wasn’t really all that great a writer, as I realized when I read Tarzan and the Valley of Gold by Fritz Leiber (the first authorized Tarzan book since Burroughs’ death). Leiber simply blew Burroughs away.
To tell the truth, I’d forgotten “Kaor!”, but it was easy to figure out in context.
I just recently read the DC Pellucidar and John Carter series in collections. I’d started reading the issues, but not all of them were available at my newsstand, so I had significant gaps in my reading until I picked these up a few months ago.
I’ve read Burroughs’s Lensman series, and a couple Skylarks, but none of the Mars ones.
I did recognize “Kaor”, but that’s because I read The Number of the Beast.
ETA: Was ERB the writer who bet he couldn’t write a story so bad it wouldn’t be sold, and someone took him up on the bet, and he wrote the first Barsoom novel and not only did the story sell but he had to keep writing sequels?
Lensmen and Skylark were by the father of Space Opera; E E Doc Smith.
GAH! 
Those books I love and reread every 5-10 years.
No. ERB worked for his brother’s stationery company (like working for a real-life Dunder Mifflin) and wrote the first half of the novel on scratch pads made by the business. He had a wife and two kids and submitted the story to All-Story Magazine as a pulp serial, since he was desperate for money. He had previously failed in different business ventures, but had come to know a variety of different people in his endeavors (miners, cowboys, soldiers, various real-world adventurers). Their collective stories helped inspire the content of A Princess of Mars.
So essentially, the real story is the opposite of what you were thinking. It was his first break into the literary world and done when he badly needed income. Only later did his other stories come out, including Tarzan (also inspired by stories he’d heard from his travels and people he’d met).
Well, no. I don’t know who the writer is who bet he couldn’t write a story so bad it wouldn’t sell. It’s supposed to be a “well-known anecdote” in the SF community, but no one has ever told me who it was, and I’ve asked.