The Master Mind of Mars

The Master Mind of Mars came out in 1928 and is another stand-alone novel in the Barsoom sequence, this time featuring a brand-new Earth protagonist. Ulysses Paxton, an American soldier mortally wounded in the trenches of the First World War, finds himself transported to Mars in much the same way John Carter did. He arrives in the laboratory of Ras Thavas, the legendary master mind of the title, a scientist who has perfected brain transplants.

Paxton works as Ras Thavas’s assistant for a period, learning Martian medicine and surgery, before becoming entangled with one of the laboratory’s victims: the beautiful Princess Valla Dia, whose youthful body has been swapped with that of an elderly hag who has paid Ras Thavas to do it. The novel becomes a quest to find Valla Dia’s original body and reverse the swap. The ethical dilemmas around the body-swap technology and the question of personal identity make this one of the more interesting Burroughs novels in conceptual terms. The race politics are uneven. The pulp pacing is excellent.