A Princess of Mars
1912
In 1912, a one-armed Confederate veteran named John Carter dies in an Arizona cave and wakes up on Mars. What follows is pure, reckless imagination: a dying world of ancient cities and airships, where six-limbed green giants wage endless war and red-skinned princesses rule over floating kingdoms. Carter finds his Earth muscles give him godlike strength in Mars's lower gravity, and his Victorian code of honor makes him an unstoppable force in a society that runs on swordplay and bold declarations. He battles Apache raiders in the desert, is captured by the Tharks, falls impossibly in love with Dejah Thoris of Helium, and must rescue her from a fate worse than death. Burroughs wrote this with zero scientific training, drawing on Percival Lowell's maps of Martian canals, and created the blueprint for every planetary romance that followed. This is pulp fiction that invented a universe, the book that made Carl Sagan believe in space exploration and inspired half the science fiction canon. It moves fast, it hits hard, and it never stops believing that a gentleman with a sword can save the galaxy.
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“In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people, they have no lawyers.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“A warrior may change his metal, but not his heart.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Yes, I was a fool, but I was in love, and though I was suffering the greatest misery I had ever known I would not have had it otherwise for all the riches of Barsoom. Such is love, and such are lovers wherever love is known.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I shall have to believe even though I cannot understand.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Mine own people do not care for me, John Carter; I am too unlike them. It is a sad fate, since I must live my life amongst them.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“And so, in silence, we walked the surface of a dying world, but in the breast of one of us at least had been born that which is ever oldest, yet ever new.I loved Dejah Thoris. The touch of my arm upon her naked shoulder had spoken to me in words I would not mistake, and I knew that I had loved her since the first moment my eyes had met hers that first time in the plaza of the dead city of Korad.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“There was one slight, desperate chance, and that I decided I must take--it was for Dejah Thoris, and no man has lived who would not risk a thousand deaths for such as she.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I understand that you belittle all sentiments of generosity and kindness, but I do not, and I can convince your most doughty warrior that these characteristics are not incompatible with an ability to fight.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
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Burroughs, Edgar Rice. A Princess of Mars. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-princess-of-mars-5e429924-91be-4f8a-9778-dd2037fbfe13.Burroughs, E. R. (1912). A Princess of Mars. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-princess-of-mars-5e429924-91be-4f8a-9778-dd2037fbfe13Burroughs, Edgar Rice. A Princess of Mars. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-princess-of-mars-5e429924-91be-4f8a-9778-dd2037fbfe13.
