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In 1911 Edgar Rice Burroughs, now best known as the creator of the character Tarzan, began his writing career with A Princess of Mars, a rousing tale of pulp Space opera adventure on the planet Barsoom or Mars. Several sequels followed.
John Carter
The novel tells of earthman John Carter who is mysteriously transported to the planet Barsoom (through a form of teleportation), and encounters both formidable alien creatures resembling the beasts of ancient myth and various humanoids.
Fauna
The humanoid "Red Martians", "White Martians" and "Black Martians" resemble Homo sapiens in almost every respect except that they are oviparous. The warlike "Green Martians" are four-armed, tusked, and approximately four meters tall.
Many Barsoomians are generally warlike and honor-bound. The technology of the tales runs the gamut from dueling sabers to ray guns and aircraft, with the discovery of powerful ancient devices or research into the development of new ones often a plot device. The natives also eschew clothing other than jewelry, providing a stimulating subject for illustrators of the stories.
Environment
Although loosely inspired by astronomical speculation of the time that pictured Mars as a formerly-Earthlike world now becoming more inhospitable to life, Burroughs' Barsoom tales never pretended to be anything other than exciting escapism.
Legacy
The tales seem somewhat dated today, but they were innovative when they were written, and the exciting stories caught the interest of many readers, helping to inspire serious interest in Mars and space exploration.
Many later science fiction works, from the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers films of the 1930s, to Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, to the Star Wars films, to the Mars Trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson can also be seen as a nod in Burroughs' direction. Barsoom is also directly referenced in Robert A Heinlein's novel The Number of the Beast.
The John Carter books enjoyed another wave of popularity in the 1970s, with Vietnam War veterans who said they could identify with Carter, fighting in a war on another planet.
The series
The five earliest novels are out of copyright and can be found on a number of free e-text sites.
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