<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

A Princess of Mars was originally published under the title Under the Moons of Mars (serialized in six parts in the pulp fiction magazine All-Story, February to July, 1912). Princess was the first novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who went on to create Tarzan of the Apes. Burroughs was an unlikely author, a restless Chicagoan who had tried army life in the cavalry (chasing Apaches in Arizona), dredging for gold in Idaho, and various business careers and ventures, either failing or fleeing when success threatened. Written on the backs of envelopes and the stationery of dead businesses, Moons was identifiable to its readers as a scientific romance, but Burroughs himself was not a reader of pulp fiction magazines. Spottily but classically educated, he’d never read H. G. Wells, admired Kipling and Gibbon (as in Decline and Fall), and created a story that was more Arabian Nights than Jules Verne.

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When prospector John Carter tries to save his partner from Apaches, he ends up taking shelter in a cave where a mysterious atmosphere causes him to leave his body and transports him to Mars. Burroughs himself seemed surprised that this story had compelled him to write it, a feeling that would remain with him throughout his career. He had not evinced ambition as a writer, although he had and would continue to draw and write for children in his family. He had an irrepressible, tart, and often corny sense of humor, and asked that the story appear under the pseudonym "Normal Bean," punningly indicating the author was a normal human being. The typographer made it Norman Bean, and Burroughs used his own name after the magazine appearance of Princess. Although his own respected father was a Union veteran, Burroughs made John Carter a Confederate, a Virginia gentlemen, superior to the monstrous green and humanoid red races he found on Mars. Carter is ultimately more chivalric than supremacist, however, and becomes friend and comrade-in-arms with the green Tars Tarkas, and falls in love and marries red princess Dejah Thoris of the city of Helium. Detailed descriptions of the physiognomy of the green men; their multi-legged mounts, the thoats; and the cities and canals (as fantasized by astronomer Percival Lowell) of Mars are part of Burroughs’s appeal as a writer, as is the fast pace of battle, capture, and rescue, which are almost enough to make the reader overlook the endless coincidences necessary to carry the plot. Also charming was his decision to make the Martians oviparian, and the image of Carter and Dejah Thoris staring at their egg in an incubator is unforgettable. Burroughs brought his business acumen to his unexpectedly successful writing career, vigorously negotiating payments, and always ending his stories with a cliffhanger—as he does in Princess by snatching Carter back to Earth after ten years—to encourage reader demand for a sequel.

Although Burroughs projects a conventional, rather Victorian morality through his characters’ behavior and statements, his depictions of society, business, and religion often incorporate tart and pithy critiques, beginning in Princess with the famous quote: “In one respect, at least, the Martians are a happy people: they have no lawyers.” Although Tarzan has been a cinema perennial, Princess has been endlessly optioned but never produced. Bob Clampett (Beany and Cecil) worked with Burroughs himself to create a cartoon series in the mid-1930s, and Disney spent years preparing animated and live-action productions; currently a projected live-action John Carter series is in preproduction at Paramount.

Also see

Barsoom series. A Princess of Mars is the first of eleven titles in this classic series.