A Princess of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars in 1912, after the story had been serialized the year before in The All-Story magazine under the title Under the Moons of Mars. The novel introduces John Carter, a Confederate Civil War veteran prospecting for gold in Arizona, who mysteriously projects across space to the dying world of Mars, called Barsoom by its inhabitants. He arrives with greatly increased physical strength because of the lower Martian gravity, and finds himself in the middle of an enormous interspecies war.

The green-skinned, four-armed Tharks capture him first. Then he meets Dejah Thoris, princess of the human-like red Martians, who has been taken hostage. The novel follows Carter’s adventures across Barsoom as he fights, escapes, falls in love, learns the customs of multiple Martian races, and gradually becomes a major political player in their world. Burroughs essentially invented planetary romance with this book. Everything from Flash Gordon to Star Wars to James Cameron’s Avatar borrows from it. The prose is breathless and the action is constant. A Princess of Mars is the place to start.