The Warlord of Mars
core novel 1919 Barsoom
Record
| First published | 1919 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.86 (12,448 ratings, collected 2026-09-06) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780345324535 |
| Internal chronology | 3 |
Synopsis
The Warlord of Mars picks up directly from the previous novel, with Carter's wife, the princess Dejah Thoris, still held captive in the Temple of the Sun following the collapse of the Therns' domain. Carter sets out in pursuit of the villains who have carried her northward, tracking them across unfamiliar reaches of Barsoom he has never before explored. His chase leads him to the planet's polar region and into contact with the nearly forgotten Yellow Martians, a race with its own advanced civilization hidden beneath the ice of the north pole, ruled by a jeddak with designs of his own on Dejah Thoris. As Carter and his allies press northward through increasingly hostile territory and encounter new Barsoomian societies and dangers, his singular determination to rescue his wife drives the novel's escalating conflicts toward a confrontation with the Yellow Martian throne.
Where it sits
- Universe: Barsoom
- Series: Barsoom core; position 3 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 3 of 11: previous The Gods of Mars (1918) · next Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920)
Sources
- Wikipedia: Barsoom
- Wikipedia: Edgar Rice Burroughs bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warlord_of_Mars
- Author Wars (Descriptive Bibliography of Ace and Ballantine / Del Rey Paperback Books)
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