Good fortune—a remarkable gold strike—is swiftly followed by bad, as Apache warriors kill John Carter's friend and trap Carter in a cave. There, struck down by an unknown force, Carter finds himself standing, heart slamming, naked as a newborn babe, beside his own corpse. And the night's astonishing events are not over. Carter finds himself drawn to the red planet shining like a star in the night sky: Mars, planet of the god of war.

Arrival on Mars quickly brings new trouble. Carter has arrived on a dead sea bottom beside an immense incubator, which holds the hatching eggs of a native race, the Tharks: 15-foot green giants with long tusks, four arms and a ferocious love of combat that would please the war god. When the Tharks attempt to kill the unarmed Earthman, he leaps away. In the lighter gravity, he jumps right over the huge incubator, saving his life in a way he never anticipated: The amazed Martian chieftain, Tars Tarkas, makes Carter his prisoner.

Having no way to escape Barsoom (as the Martians call their world), Carter forges a life and a position for himself among the heartless semi-nomads. He makes a friend in Sola, his caretaker, a Thark female who exhibits the softer sensibilities despised by the green barbarians. He suspects Tars Tarkas might not be so unfeeling as Thark custom demands. He learns Sola's secret, which could get both herself and Tars Tarkas killed by their own people. He befriends Woola, the fierce calot who has been assigned to keep him a prisoner or kill him, and who proves as loyal to his kind new master as any hound of Earth.

But Carter remains uneasy with his brutal captors and reaches a crisis when the Tharks fire upon peaceful airships and kill everyone aboard, save for a beautiful young red woman who looks fully as human as John Carter himself. The woman is Dejah Thoris, princess of Helium, and she is now a prize for the sadistic, lustful jeddak of the Tharks. Carter, whose compassionate feelings for his fellow human are growing into something far more powerful, engineers their escape from the Tharks. But they are separated, and Carter finds himself alone on the alien planet while Dejah Thoris finds herself in Zodanga, city of a red people who are attacking Helium and who will grant peace only if she weds their prince.

Boys' adventure, yes—but girls like it, too

Early in the 20th century, a thirtysomething pencil-sharpener salesman whose life was marred by failure took up writing in reaction to the bad pulp fiction he'd read. When the resulting story seemed too wild to be taken as the work of a sane man, he bylined "Under the Moons of Mars" with the pseudonym "Normal Bean," i.e., "normal being." Someone at All-Story Magazine took the name as a typo, and the novel was serialized in 1912 under the byline Norman Bean. The tale proved so popular that, when it was reprinted in book form in 1917 under its new title, A Princess of Mars, it bore the author's real name, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

It was in his next work, the fantasy novel Tarzan of the Apes (All-Story Magazine, 1912; book, 1914), that Burroughs created the best-known character of the 20th century. However, it was his interplanetary romances, especially his John Carter of Mars series, that made him the most influential author of 20th-century SF. Scores (probably hundreds) of writers pastiched his interplanetary romances with their own tales of swashbuckling Earthmen on alien worlds, but Burroughs' influence spread beyond this subgenre to cover the entire SF field. A few of the many writers who have directly or indirectly acknowledged his influence are Terry Bisson, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, James P. Hogan and Michael Moorcock. And the new millennium brings a revival of the Burroughsian interplanetary romance, reimagined for the 21st century in works like Al Sarrantonio's Haydn of Mars (2005), Chris Roberson's Paragaea (2006) and S.M. Stirling's The Sky People (2006).

It's strange to think, at this late and literarily sophisticated date in SF history, that a turn-of-the-20th-century pulp writer could have penned anything other than a now-unreadable pile of purple-prose poop, especially in his first published fiction. However, A Princess of Mars is surprisingly good. The prose style, while clearly beholden to an earlier era, is generally smooth and clean, and, in defiance of the "glacially slow" image of Victorian fiction, the novel moves at a vigorous pace that many a modern SF author (or director) might do well to emulate. John Carter is more complex than pulp's typical cardboard character, mixing the expected bravery and love of combat with kindness and a strong sense of honor. And (whether it's because Burroughs couldn't imagine a romantic relationship between his protagonist and a four-armed green woman, or because he knew readers wouldn't like it) he portrayed, with John Carter and Sola, something very rare in fiction (then and now): a genuine non-romantic friendship between a man and a woman.

This brings up that sticky wicket of pulp fiction: the era's overt sexism and racism. It's not missing from A Princess of Mars. Dejah Thoris doesn't really transcend her damsel-in-distress role. The original dominant race of Barsoom was white. And the green Barsoomians are a cold, cruel people who seem partially drawn from the Western stereotype of the "Mongol hordes." On the other hand, the green Barsoomians are brave and honorable and do not lack the finer feelings, but suppress them in response to their subsistence-level existence on a dying planet. Burroughs describes the green women as better fighters than the men. And Dejah Thoris' admirable people are of mixed race.

Personal sensitivity to pulp-era attitudes will ultimately determine whether someone can read A Princess of Mars. Anyone disturbed by the above descriptions, or by the uncomplicated moral worldview of pulp fiction, may want to steer clear. And hardline hard-SF fans will despise the novel's fantastic superscience. But readers looking for pure adventure will enjoy A Princess of Mars. And, in this age of newbie-hostile SF about quantum physics and posthuman singularities, fans seeking an entry-level SF text for their children or cousins or friends might do worse than to present that person with a copy of A Princess of Mars, wrapped, perhaps, in a few caveats.