Llana of Gathol
core novel 1948 Barsoom
Record
| First published | 1948 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.79 (2,832 ratings, collected 2026-09-07) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345324436 |
| Internal chronology | 10 |
Synopsis
Llana of Gathol follows John Carter as he discovers his granddaughter Llana held captive in a deserted, ruined city and sets out to bring her safely home. Their journey back proves far from simple, complicated by the arrival of Pan Dan Chee, a young warrior smitten with Llana whom the pair pick up along the way, and by the series of dangers that repeatedly separate and reunite the group. Their travels take them through territories ruled by a hypnotist capable of preserving captives in suspended animation for millennia, past cities holding populations trapped by ancient enchantments, and into contact with beings rendered invisible by forgotten science, each encounter testing Carter's resourcefulness as he works to see his granddaughter safely returned despite Barsoom's ever-present perils.
Where it sits
- Universe: Barsoom
- Series: Barsoom core; position 10 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 10 of 11: previous Synthetic Men of Mars (1940) · next John Carter of Mars (1964)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Barsoom
- Wikipedia: Edgar Rice Burroughs bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llana_of_Gathol
- FictionDB (edition list, Del Rey 1985)
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