The Chessmen of Mars
1922
The Chessmen of Mars
1922
The daughter of John Carter wants only to escape the palace walls and the suitors her father has chosen. Tara of Helium is a princess who would rather fly free across the dying plains of Mars than contemplate marriage to men she has never loved. When she finally steals away on her thoat, chasing adventure beyond the borders of Helium, a violent storm sweeps her into a world where no human has set foot in centuries. She finds herself captive in a civilization of chess players, where every move on the board determines life and death, and where monstrous creatures with no heads hunt through the mist. To return home, she must master the deadly game, outthink cruel nobles, and find a courage she never knew she possessed. Burroughs delivers pulse-pounding adventure with the swagger of a man who invented the pulp hero. The Chessmen of Mars is pure escapism at its finest: exotic locales, beautiful warriors, beasts that defy imagination, and a heroine who refuses to be saved by any man. It is the Barsoom series at its most playful, blending sword-and-planet action with a clever central conceit that turns chess into a matter of life and death. For readers who grew up dreaming of other worlds.
Editions
X-Ray
“The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“To me there always seems a way to gain the opposite side of an obstacle. If one cannot pass over it, or below it, or around it, why then there is but a single alternative left, and that is to pass through it.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“The things which the Stygian darkness hid from my objective eye could not have been half so wonderful as the pictures which my imagination wrought as it conjured to life again the ancient peoples of this dying world and set them once more to the labours, the intrigues, the mysteries and the cruelties which they had practised to make their last stand against the swarming hordes of the dead sea bottoms that had driven them step by step to the uttermost pinnacle of the world where they were now intrenched behind an impenetrable barrier of superstition.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I verily believe that a man's way with women is in inverse ratio to his prowess among men. The weakling and the saphead have often great ability to charm the fair sex, while the fighting man who can face a thousand real dangers unafraid, sits hiding in the shadows like some frightened child.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“In absolute and general perfection lies stifling monotony and death. Nature must have contrasts; she must have shadows as well as highlights; sorrow with happiness; both wrong and right; and sin as well as virtue.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“I do not mean that the adult Martians are unnecessarily or intentionally cruel to the young, but theirs is a hard and pitiless struggle for existence upon a dying planet, the natural resources of which have dwindled to a point where the support of each additional life means an added tax upon the community into which it is thrown.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Nearly all the vessels we saw were war craft.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“Only thus may we carry the truth to those without, and though the likelihood of our narrative being given credence is, I grant you, remote, so wedded are mortals to their stupid infatuation for impossible superstitions, we should be craven cowards indeed were we to shirk the plain duty which confronts us.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
“sentimentalists have words: love, loyalty, friendship, enmity, jealousy, hate, a thousand others; a waste of words – one word defines them all: self-interest.””
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
