Introduction

There is a particular kind of magic that occurs when a story refuses to let its reader rest. From the very first page, certain adventures seize the imagination and pull it forward, page after breathless page, until the final word arrives and the reader looks up, blinking, surprised to find themselves still seated in a familiar room rather than standing beneath the twin moons of a distant, dying world. The book you now hold belongs firmly to this category. It is a tale of relentless momentum, of one obstacle giving way only to reveal another, of a hero whose courage is tested not once but a hundred times across landscapes that no human eye has ever truly seen. To open these pages is to step onto a planet of crimson deserts and forgotten cities, of strange peoples and stranger beasts, of love so fierce it can drive a man across an entire world in pursuit of it.

This volume represents the culmination of a journey that began two books earlier, and it is worth understanding from the outset that you are entering the third movement of a single, sweeping symphony. The story arcs that were set in motion in the earlier adventures reach their crescendo here. Threads that seemed loose and dangling are gathered, tightened, and finally tied. The chase that has consumed our protagonist’s heart and stretched his endurance to its very limits comes, at last, toward its destined resolution. For this reason, while the present introduction will prepare you thoroughly for the experience ahead, it will take great care never to spoil the surprises, reversals, and triumphs that the author has so carefully arranged. The pleasure of discovery is sacred, and nothing in these opening pages will diminish it.

To appreciate what you are about to read, it helps to know something of the remarkable man who created it. Edgar Rice Burroughs was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most unlikely literary phenomenons of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago in 1875, he spent the first thirty-five years of his life failing at nearly everything he attempted. He tried his hand at soldiering with the United States Cavalry, only to be discharged for a heart condition. He worked as a cowboy, a gold miner, a railroad policeman, a door-to-door salesman, and a manager of a pencil-sharpener wholesaler. He drifted from one disappointment to the next, accumulating debt and frustration in roughly equal measure, a husband and father with little to show for his efforts and a growing sense that life had passed him by.

Then, in 1911, while peddling pencil sharpeners and reading the cheap pulp fiction magazines of the day to pass the long, empty hours, Burroughs had a thought that would change his life and the course of popular literature forever. He looked at the stories filling those magazines and concluded, with a mixture of arrogance and desperation, that he could write something at least as entertaining. “If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines,” he later recalled, “I could write stories just as rotten.” He was wrong about the rottenness. What he produced instead was something extraordinary.

His first effort became the tale of a Civil War veteran named John Carter who, through circumstances both mysterious and unexplained, finds himself transported across the void of space to the planet Mars—a world its native inhabitants call Barsoom. That initial story, serialized in 1912, struck the reading public like a thunderbolt. Here was adventure of a kind that no one had quite seen before: a fully realized alien world, complete with its own geography, its own warring civilizations, its own creatures and customs and codes of honor, all rendered with such vivid, confident detail that readers felt they could reach out and touch the red dust of the dead sea bottoms.

Burroughs did not stop there. He created Tarzan, the ape-man whose name would become one of the most recognizable in the world. He wrote of lost civilizations at the Earth’s core, of voyages to Venus, of pellucid jungles and pirate-haunted oceans. But it was to Mars that he returned again and again, and it is to Mars that this particular tale belongs. The world of Barsoom became his most ambitious and beloved creation, a setting so richly imagined that it would inspire generations of writers, filmmakers, and dreamers who came after. Without the red sands of Barsoom, there would be no galaxy far, far away, no sweeping space operas, no countless tales of Earthmen finding adventure on alien shores. The fingerprints of this dreaming pencil-sharpener salesman are pressed into the very foundations of modern science fiction and fantasy.

What made his work endure was not scientific accuracy—even by the standards of his own time, his Mars was a romantic invention rather than a plausible planet. What made his work endure was the sheer, undiluted joy of storytelling. Burroughs understood, perhaps better than any writer of his generation, that the reader wants to be swept away. He wanted to feel the wind, to smell the fear, to thrill at the clash of swords and the impossible odds. He gave them heroes worth admiring and villains worth hating, and he never, ever let the pace flag. To read Burroughs is to surrender to a master of momentum, a man who never met a cliffhanger he did not love.

This adventure, the third in his Martian sequence, finds him at the height of his storytelling powers. The world has been thoroughly established in the previous two books, freeing him to do what he does best: hurl his hero into one extraordinary situation after another, across regions of the planet never before glimpsed, toward a destiny that has been promised since the saga began. If you have read the earlier installments, you will feel the satisfaction of seeing a grand design completed. If this is your first journey to Barsoom, do not be alarmed—the narrative drive is so powerful, and the storytelling so generous, that you will find yourself caught up in it regardless, and you may well finish this volume eager to return and discover how it all began.

A World of Crimson Sands and Endless Wonder

Let us speak, then, of Barsoom itself, for the setting is very nearly a character in its own right, and understanding it will deepen your enjoyment immeasurably. The Mars of these stories is an ancient and dying world. Its great oceans have long since receded, leaving behind vast bottoms of ochre moss where once mighty seas rolled. Its civilizations have risen and fallen across countless millennia, and the survivors cling to existence with a fierce, proud determination. The atmosphere itself is maintained only by an enormous artificial plant, a fact that lends the entire planet a sense of fragility, of glory faded but not yet extinguished. There is melancholy woven into the very air of Barsoom, a sense that this is a world living out the twilight of its long history—and yet life here burns all the more brightly for its impermanence.

The peoples of this world are many and varied. There are the red men, who most closely resemble humanity and who have built the great walled cities that dot the dead sea bottoms. There are the fearsome green men, towering four-armed warriors who roam the wastes in nomadic hordes, possessed of a culture in which sentiment is despised and combat is a way of life. As the saga has progressed, Burroughs has introduced still other races, each with their own strange customs and hidden territories, and in this final volume the reader will encounter peoples and places more exotic and astonishing than any yet seen. Burroughs takes evident delight in expanding his world, in showing us corners of the planet that earlier travelers never reached, in revealing that Barsoom holds secrets even its own inhabitants do not suspect.

The creatures of Mars are no less marvelous. There are the great thoats, the eight-legged steeds that the warriors ride into battle. There are the calots, fierce and faithful beasts that serve as guardians and companions. There are monstrous predators lurking in shadowed places, and beasts of burden and beasts of war, each described with the loving specificity that makes Burroughs’s world feel so tangible. One companion creature in particular, introduced in earlier adventures, has become a beloved fixture of these tales, and readers who have grown fond of such loyal beasts will find much to delight them here.

The codes and customs of Barsoom deserve special mention, for they govern the behavior of nearly every character and drive much of the story’s tension. This is a world of honor, of personal courage, of fierce loyalty and implacable enmity. A Barsoomian warrior would sooner die than break his word. Combat is conducted according to elaborate rules, and the measure of a person is taken in the quality of their swordsmanship and the steadfastness of their character. Into this world of warriors and honor, our hero fits as though born to it—indeed, his readiness to fight, his unbending sense of justice, and his refusal to abandon those he loves make him, in many ways, the truest Barsoomian of them all, despite his origins on a distant planet.

And here we should pause to consider that hero. He is a man of action above all else, decisive, fearless, and utterly devoted. His love for the woman at the center of this saga is the great engine of the entire narrative, a love so absolute that it has driven him to perform feats of almost superhuman endurance and to face dangers that would shatter a lesser spirit. He is not a complicated man in the modern psychological sense—he does not brood or second-guess or wallow in doubt. When confronted with an obstacle, he overcomes it. When confronted with an injustice, he sets it right. When confronted with an enemy, he draws his sword. There is something deeply refreshing about such a protagonist, particularly in an age when so many heroes are paralyzed by ambivalence. Here is a man who knows what he wants and pursues it with every fiber of his being, across deserts and through hidden kingdoms, against impossible odds, never faltering, never surrendering. To follow him is to be reminded of the pure, uncomplicated pleasure of rooting for someone who simply will not give up.

The pacing of this particular adventure deserves a final word in this section, because it is, even by Burroughs’s own standards, remarkable. From the opening chapter, our hero is in motion, and he scarcely stops to catch his breath until the very end. The structure is essentially that of a great chase—a pursuit that carries him from one end of the planet to the other, through regions of ice and regions of fire, into the strongholds of enemies and the courts of unknown rulers. Each new location brings new perils, new allies, and new revelations. Just when one crisis is resolved, another erupts. The reader is given no opportunity to grow restless, no slack moment in which attention might wander. This is storytelling stripped to its most essential and exhilarating form, a roller-coaster ride across an alien world, and it is precisely this quality that has kept these tales in print for more than a century.

A word is in order about the nature of this edition and how best to approach it. The text you are about to read has been thoughtfully adapted for the contemporary reader. The original was written in the literary idiom of the early twentieth century, a style that, while possessing its own considerable charm, can occasionally present obstacles to modern readers unaccustomed to its rhythms and conventions. Sentences that once flowed naturally may now feel ornate or convoluted; vocabulary that was current in 1914 may now seem archaic or obscure; certain constructions that delighted readers of the pulp era may now slow the modern eye. This adaptation seeks to preserve everything that makes the original wonderful—its propulsive energy, its vivid imagery, its sense of wonder and adventure—while smoothing the path for readers of today. The aim throughout has been to keep faith with the spirit of the work, to honor the author’s vision, and to ensure that nothing stands between you and the pure pleasure of the story.