John Carter on Mars: What Actually Happened Across the Barsoom Novels
Most people remember John Carter as a guy who gets transported to Mars and starts swinging around on vines. That's not really what the books are about, at least not after the first one. The character goes through some fairly complicated stuff across eleven novels, and the early enthusiasm you have when you start reading degrades pretty quickly once you hit the later entries. I first picked up A Princess of Mars in 2003 at a used bookstore for about two dollars. It was on sale alongside three other paperbacks in a bag marked five for a dollar. I read through it in two days and then went back for the sequel because the hook works on a basic level even if the prose is not anything special. By the end of the series, which took me about six months to get through, my opinion had shifted considerably.
Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carters and the Barsoom Timeline
The complete John Carter cycle runs from 1912 to 1944, spanning eleven books. Burroughs wrote them at intervals of several years each, not all in succession. The publication order does not match the chronological order of events in the story, which matters more than most readers realize. Carter's first journey happens during World War I in the real world before he gets pulled into the Barsoom universe, and the later books retcon some of the earlier setup in ways that make the timeline frustratingly messy. The core books are A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (1918), Thuvia Maid of Mars (1920), Palindrome of Green Mans (unpublished during his lifetime), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), Swords of Mars (1936), and Thrall of the Cosmos (1938). The last two were completed much later when Burroughs was in his seventies, and you can feel the difference in quality between the early entries and the later ones. The earlier books have a rough energy that comes from him writing fast without much revision. The later books feel like someone going through the motions at this point. What actually distinguishes John Carter from other space opera heroes of the era is that he is not a scientist or an explorer by training. He is a Confederate veteran who becomes a rancher in Texas and then just disappears for a while. The mechanism that transports him to Mars is never properly explained within the narrative. He ends up there because the story needs him there, and Burroughs never found a satisfying way to justify it beyond vague references to psychic attraction and lunar influence. This is a genuine problem in the text that subsequent readers have tried to patch with fan theories for over a century.
I ran into this issue myself when I was advising a graduate student working on a thesis about transportation tropes in early twentieth century science fiction. She wanted to classify Carter's arrival on Barsoom as a portal fantasy event, but the textual evidence simply does not support that categorization cleanly. The books mention dreams, magnetic phenomena, and what might be telepathic resonance, but never a consistent mechanism. We spent about three hours going back and forth on this before she settled on calling it an unexplained narrative device and moved on. That is usually the best approach here.
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How the Series Actually Works in Practice
The John Carter books operate on a basic adventure template: an older Earth man arrives on a dying civilization, learns the local customs, gets involved in political conflicts, and rescues a princess. This pattern repeats across multiple entries with minor variations. The consistency is what makes the series readable but also predictable after about four books. Barsoom itself is Mars as Burroughs imagined it in the early twentieth century. There are canals, dying oceans, multi-armed green Martians called Tharks, and a civilization that has survived for millennia through technology that readers are expected to accept without question. The scientific inaccuracies are substantial by modern standards but were not considered problematic when the books came out. The real issue is not the science but the social worldview, which embeds colonialist assumptions so deeply that they are rarely visible to readers who are not looking for them. Carter's height and strength on Mars are different from his Earth proportions because the lower gravity makes him effectively superhuman there. This is stated explicitly in the text and is one of the few scientifically grounded elements in the entire series. The green Martians are taller and more aggressive than the red Martians, which maps to a color-coding system that Burroughs borrows from popular race theory of the era without doing any actual research into anthropology. The result is a setting that feels alive but rests on foundations that do not hold up under scrutiny.
The romantic subplot with Dejah Thoris is central to every book in the series. She is the princess of Helium and Carter's love interest across all the Barsoom novels. Their relationship is defined by mutual respect and repeated separations caused by war, capture, and diplomatic complications. This is standard adventure romance material handled with more competence than most pulps of the period produced, but the gender dynamics remain firmly anchored in 1910s conventions that readers today should contextualize rather than dismiss outright.
Common Pitfalls for New Readers
The biggest mistake people make is reading the books in publication order without understanding the timeline. The story jumps around chronologically in ways that confuse first-time readers. You will encounter characters who died in earlier books appearing alive in later ones, and the reasons for this are never satisfactorily addressed. The best workaround is to read the series in internal chronological order rather than publication order, which means starting with A Princess of Mars and then following the story sequence as Burroughs eventually assembled it. Another issue is the sheer amount of and character names that Burroughs generates without much editorial restraint. By the middle of the series, you are keeping track of roughly forty named characters across multiple city-states and tribal groups. The maps help but are inconsistent between editions. I recommend having a reference guide open while you read, especially for the later books where the cast has grown so large that even dedicated fans struggle to keep everyone straight. The prose quality drops noticeably after the fifth book. Burroughs was a professional pulp writer who produced content at an extraordinary rate, and the later books show the strain of that production schedule. The action scenes become formulaic, the dialogue loses its spontaneity, and the world-building stops evolving. If you are reading for the setting and the concept, the earlier books deliver. If you are reading for literary merit, you are better off moving on after Warlord of Mars.
Where the Series Falls Short
The John Carter books have genuine limitations that no amount of nostalgia can overcome. The racial and colonialist framework is embedded so deeply in the text that it cannot be separated from the adventure without losing the story entirely. Burroughs wrote from a position of genuine ignorance about non-European cultures and applied American frontier mythology to a Martian setting without any critical distance. Modern readers should approach this with full awareness of what they are reading rather than pretending the problematic elements do not exist. The scientific basis is essentially zero. The canals of Mars were a real scientific hypothesis at the time Burroughs was writing, but they have been completely disproven by modern space exploration. The multi-armed Martians, the dying atmosphere, the underground civilizations — none of this has any basis in actual Martian geology or biology. This does not matter for pulp adventure fiction but it does matter if you are using the books as a gateway to real planetary science. The later books suffer from what I would call creative exhaustion. Burroughs was still producing work but the inspiration that drove the first three entries had clearly faded. The Chessmen of Mars is interesting as a concept but poorly executed. The Swords of Mars collections of short stories are uneven. The final two books feel like obligations rather than choices. If you finish Warlord of Mars and still want more, the remaining titles are worth skimming but not devouring.
For readers who want something similar but more carefully constructed, I would recommend looking at early Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey instead. It is shorter, scientifically more interesting, and avoids most of the problematic elements of the Burroughs corpus. For the full John Carter experience, stick to the first three books and treat everything after that as optional supplementary material.
