John Carter of Mars

What It's About

This volume gathers two short novellas featuring John Carter, the Virginian soldier who finds himself on Mars, known to its people as Barsoom, and rises to become its Warlord. In the first, Dejah Thoris is kidnapped and Carter sets off in pursuit, only to face a towering synthetic giant and packs of great white apes that have been given human brains. In the second, Carter himself is abducted by the Morgors, a race of skeletal beings from Jupiter who are planning an invasion of Mars. He must escape his captors and search for Dejah Thoris on a world far larger and stranger than his own.

Key Concepts

Both stories belong to the "planetary romance" or "sword and planet" tradition, with swordplay, daring escapes and exotic alien civilisations. The Jupiter story is notable as the first John Carter tale set beyond Earth and Mars, and it imagines the physical conditions of a gas giant. Brain transplantation and synthetic life, themes found elsewhere in the Barsoom stories, run through the first tale. Critics generally treat this as the weakest volume in the series. The first novella is widely held to have been written largely by the author's son, John Coleman Burroughs, and has a juvenile tone. The second is regarded as the more characteristic of the two, but it was clearly meant as the first part of a longer run of linked novellas, and it ends without resolving its main plot.

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) was an American writer born in Chicago. He came to writing relatively late, after a restless early working life that included stints as a cowboy, a railroad policeman and a salesman. He became one of the most commercially successful popular fiction authors of the twentieth century, and his adventure stories helped shape the pulp fiction era and the science fiction and fantasy genres that followed.