The Master Mind of Mars
core novel 1928 Barsoom
Record
| First published | 1928 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.85 (5,263 ratings, collected 2026-09-06) |
| Page count | 160 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345334244 |
| Internal chronology | 6 |
Synopsis
The Master Mind of Mars follows Ulysses Paxton, an American soldier from the First World War who is mysteriously transported to Barsoom and becomes the assistant of Ras Thavas, the renowned surgeon known as the Master Mind of Mars. Ras Thavas has perfected the technology of brain transplantation and profits from providing wealthy, aging Martians with youthful replacement bodies, a practice that has made him both celebrated and feared throughout the region. Paxton, given the Martian name Vad Varo, learns Ras Thavas's surgical arts and Barsoomian customs while assisting in this grim trade, until he falls in love with one of the young women whose body has been claimed for another's use. Torn between loyalty to his mentor and his feelings for the wronged woman, Paxton begins to plot a way to see her restored to her rightful form and freed from the transplant scheme.
Where it sits
- Universe: Barsoom
- Series: Barsoom core; position 6 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 6 of 11: previous The Chessmen of Mars (1922) · next A Fighting Man of Mars (1931)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Barsoom
- Wikipedia: Edgar Rice Burroughs bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Mind_of_Mars
- Author Wars (Descriptive Bibliography of Ace and Ballantine / Del Rey Paperback Books)
← Barsoom dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.