Synthetic Men of Mars
core novel 1940 Barsoom
Record
| First published | 1940 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.80 (3,333 ratings, collected 2026-09-07) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345339300 |
| Internal chronology | 9 |
Synopsis
Synthetic Men of Mars follows John Carter and the warrior Vor Daj as they travel to consult the brilliant, ethically unmoored surgeon Ras Thavas about healing Carter's injured wife, only to discover that Ras Thavas has turned his talents to growing monstrous artificial beings called hormads at a hidden base in the ruined city of Morbus. The hormads, created in vats and existing largely without individual will, have begun to develop dangerous ambitions of their own, and when Carter's party is captured, Vor Daj finds himself trapped among them. To survive and search for a way out, Vor Daj undergoes a radical procedure that binds his consciousness to one of Ras Thavas's creations, forcing him to navigate Morbus from within the ranks of the very creatures threatening the base, all while working with the ethically compromised scientist toward an eventual escape.
Where it sits
- Universe: Barsoom
- Series: Barsoom core; position 9 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 9 of 11: previous Swords of Mars (1936) · next Llana of Gathol (1948)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Barsoom
- Wikipedia: Edgar Rice Burroughs bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Men_of_Mars
- Author Wars (Descriptive Bibliography of Ace and Ballantine / Del Rey Paperback Books)
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