by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875)
We recommend books we believe in. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Picture this: you’re John Carter, a dusty Civil War veteran mysteriously yanked from an Arizona cave into the thin, crimson air of dying Mars—Barsoom to its people. Your earthly muscles propel you in gravity-defying leaps over jagged craters, but four-armed, green-skinned Tharks on eight legs thunder toward you, radium rifles blazing. One wrong move, and you’re radium-bullet fodder. That raw jolt of terror and exhilaration hits you from page one, and it never lets up.
Burroughs throws you straight into the fray. John Carter crashes among the savage Tharks, masters their brutal ways, and soon he’s dodging airships over the spires of Helium, the red planet’s jewel city. He rescues the fierce, radiant Dejah Thoris, princess of Helium, from white Martian slavers, then battles in blood-soaked arenas against thoats and banths, all while unraveling Barsoom’s ancient canals and warring city-states. The action surges like a radium pistol’s recoil—Carter’s sword clashes against tusked jaws, he outwits the Holy Therns’ cannibal cults, and every narrow escape leaves your pulse hammering. It’s not just fights; it’s the sheer wonder of it: crimson deserts stretching to twin moons, massive air fleets blotting the sky, a world where radium powers everything from fliers to eggs that hatch warriors.
What sets A Princess of Mars apart? In a genre bloated with brooding antiheroes and intricate politics, this is unfiltered rocket fuel—pure, propulsive adventure without a whiff of subtlety. Burroughs doesn’t waste ink on philosophy; he blasts you across a vividly alien world at breakneck speed, inventing planetary romance from whole cloth. No one else captures that volcanic sense of discovery, where every horizon hides tusked horrors or lost civilizations. It’s the blueprint for Leigh Brackett’s Leigh Brackett’s Venus tales, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion, even the swagger of Han Solo—yet it stands alone in its joyous pulp ferocity.
If you devoured the sword-clanging epics of Robert E. Howard’s Conan or crave the high-octane alien brawls of old Flash Gordon serials, this is your holy grail—the origin of it all, dialed to eleven.
Grab A Princess of Mars tonight, and you’ll leap from your chair into Barsoom’s endless red dawn before dawn breaks.
Browse all book recommendations • Epic Fantasy Novels — Adventure-first. Keeping the door open.
