The Gods of Mars is a 1918 Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction novel, the second of his famous Barsoom series.It can be said that the novel set the tone for much science fiction to come. Its influence can clearly be seen in franchises such as Star Trek and Farscape. While Burroughs no doubt borrowed liberally from the pulp fiction of his day, particularly westerns and swashbuckling tales, the pacing and themes set the tone for the soft science fiction genre. The protagonist, John Carter, with his proficiency in hand-to-hand combat and flirtations with beautiful alien women, could be said to have set the mold for later influential icons like Captain James T. Kirk and James Bond. At the end of the first book, A Princess of Mars, John Carter is unwillingly transported back to Earth. The Gods of Mars begins with his arrival back on Barsoom (Mars) after a ten year hiatus, separated from his wife Dejah Thoris, his unborn child, and the Red Martian people of the nation of Helium, whom he has adopted as his own. Unfortunately, John Carter materializes in the one place on Barsoom from which nobody is allowed to depart: the Valley Dor, which is the Barsoomian heaven.
About the Author: "Edgar Rice Burroughs was, and is, the most influential writer, bar none, of our century." Ray Bradbury His father had been a major in the Union army during the Civil War. Edgar Rice Burroughs attended the Brown School then, due to a diphtheria epidemic, Miss Coolie's Maplehurst School for Girls, then the Harvard School, Phillips Andover and the Michigan Military Academy. He was a mediocre student and flunked his examination for West Point. He worked a variety of jobs all over the country: a cowboy in Idaho, a gold miner in Oregon, a railroad policeman in Utah, a department manager for Sears Roebuck in Chicago. He published "A Princess of Mars" under the title "Under the Moons of Mars" in six parts between February and July of 1912. The same "All-Story Magazine" put out his immediately successful "Tarzan of the Apes" in October of that year. Two years later the hardback book appeared, and on January 27, 1918, the movie opened on Broadway starring Elmo Lincoln as Tarzan. It was one of the first movies to gross over $1,000,000. Burroughs was able to move his family to the San Fernando Valley in 1919, converting a huge estate into Tarzana Ranch. He was in Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 and remained in Hawaii as a war correspondent. Afterward he returned home with a heart condition. On March 19, 1950, alone in his home after reading the Sunday comics in bed, he died. By then he had written 91 novels, 26 of which were about Tarzan. The man whose books have sold hundreds of millions of copies in over thirty languages once said "I write to escape ... to escape poverty."