A Princess Of Mars Series

Reading the Barsoom Novels: A Practical Guide

The complete

A Princess Of Mars Series

is a collection of nine science fantasy novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, beginning with A Princess of Mars (1912) and running through the Sword of Mars (1941). Most readers approach it as pulp adventure, but the series has structural quirks that trip people up if you aren't expecting them.

The books are generally available in the public domain through Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks. I prefer the Standard Ebooks editions because the typography is consistent and the metadata is clean. The Project Gutenberg texts sometimes have corrupted special characters from old OCR, especially around the red-word dialogue sections where Martian languages appear in brackets. Here's what nobody tells you before you start: the timeline in the series is messy. Barsoom has roughly 7,000+ years of recorded history within the fiction, and Burroughs wasn't always consistent about which century events take place in. John Carter's two major cycles (the Red Martian cycle and the Black Martian cycle) are separated by decades within the narrative, but the books themselves were written 29 years apart. That gap shows in the prose style. The early books read like serialized adventure aimed at boys; the later books, particularly The Gods of Mars and Swords of Mars, have more introspective passages and darker tone. I ran into a specific issue when I was trying to track which book to read between The Warlord of Mars and The Gods of Mars. Some reading lists put them in publication order, some in chronology order. The publication order works fine for a first pass, but if you read chronologically you skip ahead in Carter's personal timeline and the emotional beats land wrong. The workaround is straightforward: read the four main Red Martian books in this order — A Princess of Mars, The Warlord of Mars, The Gods of Mars, Thou Art the Gladiator — then move to the Black Martian books. This isn't the only way to do it, but it preserves the character arc that Burroughs was building toward.

The prose itself is worth noting because it affects how you approach the material. Burroughs writes in long, compound sentences with minimal paragraph breaks. A single paragraph can run 6-8 sentences without a pause. Modern readers sometimes skim this too fast and miss the worldbuilding details embedded in the action. I found that slowing down on the first read, especially in The Gods of Mars where the underground city of Helium is described in detail, pays off. The second pass you'll appreciate the architecture of the plot more.

Where to Get the Texts

The Project Gutenberg page for Edgar Rice Burroughs has all nine Barsoom novels in multiple formats. Standard Ebooks also offers nicely formatted versions at standardebooks.org. For the most reliable single-volume omnibus, look for the Barnes & Noble Collector's Edition or the DAW Books paperback sets — both fix typos that persist in the raw public domain texts. There are also annotated editions from Del Rey and others that include maps and glossaries. The Del Rey version from the 1970s is widely considered the best annotated edition. It includes a map of Helium and a chronology that resolves most of the timeline confusion I mentioned above.

What Actually Works and What Doesn't

Reading the series straight through takes about 20-25 hours across all nine books. If you're doing it casually over a few weeks, that's fine. The series doesn't demand consecutive reading the way some modern sagas do. You can stop after any book and pick it back up without losing the thread, though you will miss some payoff from earlier setup. The main pitfall people hit is the gender politics. Burroughs wrote in a very different era, and his treatment of women on Barsoom ranges from forward-thinking for 1912 to problematic by contemporary standards. Dejah Thoris is powerful and central to the plot, which was unusual, but she also exists largely as an object of Carter's devotion rather than a fully realized interior life. Several later books introduce female characters who are more active, but the series never fully escapes its early-twentieth-century assumptions. Read with that in mind and don't pretend the worldbuilding is more progressive than it actually is. The environmental worldbuilding is the series' genuine strength. The dying planet of Barsoom, with its dried sea beds, crumbling canals, and multi-species civilizations, influenced everything from Star Wars to Doctor Who. If you're interested in that aspect, pay attention to how Burroughs describes the Therns and their white skin, the Zodangs and their green skin, the Heliumites and their red skin as adaptations to different ecological zones. It's not subtle, but it's consistent.

The books aren't perfect. The combat descriptions get repetitive after a while — sword fights follow the same pattern of parry, riposte, and dramatic reversal. The dialogue can be stiff. And Burroughs had a habit of resolving conflicts with deus ex machina escapes, especially in the later books where he wasn't bound by magazine length constraints. These aren't fatal flaws, but they're worth acknowledging so you don't go in expecting literary consistency on the level of something like Dune. If you want a similar experience with less dated sensibilities, Frank Herbert's Dune is the obvious descendant. For the pulp adventure feel without the 1912 gender dynamics, try Mike Resnick's Born of Fire trilogy, which directly continues Carter's story in a more modern voice. But if you want the original, the public domain texts are free and the journey is worth taking at least once.