The Ultimate Fantasy Series Ranking

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Cover of The Gods of Mars

The Gods of Mars

core novel 1918 Barsoom

Record

First published1918
Original language EN
Work typenovel
Canon statuscore
Reader rating3.89 (20,760 ratings, collected 2026-09-07)
First-edition ISBN9781951537265
Internal chronology2

Synopsis

The Gods of Mars opens ten years after John Carter was separated from his Martian wife Dejah Thoris and returned to Earth, and follows his long-awaited return to Barsoom, where he materializes not beside her but in the Valley Dor, the planet's fabled afterlife, a paradise from which pilgrims are supposedly never meant to leave. Carter quickly discovers the pilgrimage is a carefully maintained deception: the white-skinned Therns and the black-skinned First Born who inhabit the valley prey upon the elderly Martians who arrive there seeking peace, enslaving and killing them rather than granting them rest. Horrified by what he finds and separated once more from Dejah Thoris, Carter allies with unlikely companions, including the fierce green Martian Tars Tarkas, to expose the valley's false promise and fight his way toward reuniting with his wife and son.

Where it sits

Notes

  • ISBN recorded is the Edgar Rice Burroughs Authorized Library hardcover (Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., 2020s); 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.

Sources

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Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.