John Carter of Mars
core collection 1964 Barsoom
Record
| First published | 1964 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | collection |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.83 (4,693 ratings, collected 2026-09-07) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345278449 |
| Internal chronology | 11 |
Synopsis
John Carter of Mars collects two shorter Barsoomian adventures. The first, "John Carter and the Giant of Mars," follows Carter as he investigates a mystery involving a colossal creature terrorizing a Martian city, drawing him into a scheme far stranger than it first appears. The second and better known piece, "Skeleton Men of Jupiter," sends Carter to confront a new threat originating from beyond Barsoom itself: agents of a militaristic civilization on Jupiter who have begun abducting Martians for their own purposes, drawing Carter into an interplanetary conflict that was intended to launch a continuing series of adventures beyond Mars. Together the two stories close out the published Barsoom saga, carrying John Carter's exploits into new corners of the solar system beyond the red planet that had defined his adventures until then.
Where it sits
- Universe: Barsoom
- Series: Barsoom core; position 11 of 11 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs
Notes
- ISBN recorded is a Del Rey / Ballantine mass-market paperback (the long-running uniform American edition of the Martian tales); the first book edition predates ISBNs.
- From the series record (Barsoom): Edgar Rice Burroughs' foundational planetary-romance saga of the fictional Mars ('Barsoom'), beginning with A Princess of Mars. All eleven books first appeared as magazine serials (1912-1943, Weird Tales/All-Story/Blue Book/Amazing Stories/Argosy) before their book-form publication years recorded here. Llana of Gathol (1948) is a fix-up of four linked novelettes; John Carter of Mars (1964) is a posthumous collection of two novellas. Genre-boundary transparency: the series is routinely classified as science fantasy / planetary romance, blending science-fiction trappings (interplanetary travel) with sword-and-sorcery adventure and magic-adjacent Barsoomian technology; critical and reference consensus (Wikipedia, genre reference works) treats it as fantasy-adjacent and foundational to the sword-and-planet subgenre, admitted here on that basis, the same transparency this project has applied to Pern and other genre-boundary cases. No awards could be confidently corroborated against a primary source at this pass; none are recorded.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Barsoom: position 11 of 11: previous Llana of Gathol (1948)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Barsoom
- Wikipedia: Edgar Rice Burroughs bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carter_of_Mars_(novel)
- Author Wars (Descriptive Bibliography of Ace and Ballantine / Del Rey Paperback Books)
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