A Princess of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, first serialized in 1912, launched one of the most influential adventure sagas in science fiction and helped define the "planetary romance" genre. It transported its Earthman hero to a Mars — called Barsoom by its inhabitants — that was a dying but still vibrant world of warring races, exotic creatures, and ancient civilizations.

Burroughs's Mars was pure imaginative invention, owing more to romance and myth than to astronomy. His Barsoom is a desert planet crisscrossed by the remnants of once-great seas, populated by fierce green warriors and beautiful red-skinned humanoids. The lower Martian gravity gives the transplanted hero extraordinary strength and leaping ability — a detail that, while dramatized, reflects the genuine physics of reduced gravity on Mars.

The saga's influence radiated across the entire field. Generations of scientists, writers, and filmmakers have credited Burroughs's Mars with sparking their fascination with space. Its DNA runs through decades of pulp adventure, comic books, and blockbuster cinema. Though its science is fantasy, A Princess of Mars matters as the work that made the Red Planet a stage for heroic imagination — a romantic counterweight to the menacing Mars of Wells.