Swords of Mars
core novel 1936 Barsoom
Record
| First published | 1936 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.84 (3,678 ratings, collected 2026-09-07) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345329561 |
| Internal chronology | 8 |
Synopsis
Swords of Mars follows John Carter as he infiltrates the criminal underworld of Zodanga, disguised as a mercenary swordsman, in an effort to dismantle the Guild of Assassins, a shadowy organization whose killers have begun targeting Barsoom's nobility with impunity. His investigation draws him into contact with rival scientists competing to perfect advanced spacecraft capable of travel beyond Barsoom itself, a development with implications far beyond the immediate assassination plot. As Carter works his way deeper into the guild's operations while trying to keep his true identity hidden from both his enemies and the scientists he needs to understand, the novel's stakes widen from a single city's underworld into a race that, for the first time in the series, threatens to carry the action off Barsoom entirely.
Where it sits
- Universe: Barsoom
- Series: Barsoom core; position 8 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 8 of 11: previous A Fighting Man of Mars (1931) · next Synthetic Men of Mars (1940)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Barsoom
- Wikipedia: Edgar Rice Burroughs bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_of_Mars
- Mohave County Library catalogue (Del Rey edition)
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