Start with A Princess of Mars, first serialised in 1912. There is no competing order to argue about: Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the eleven Barsoom books in internal chronological sequence, and the first one is also the shortest, fastest and least encumbered. A Virginian ex-cavalryman finds himself on Mars, weighs almost nothing there, and starts fighting. Ninety minutes later you know whether the series is for you.
The one thing worth knowing before you begin: books one to three are a single continuous story with hard cliffhangers between them. A Princess of Mars does not resolve. If you want a complete arc, plan on reading through The Warlord of Mars and treat that as the natural stopping point — many readers do, and lose nothing.
The Carter trilogy
A Princess of Mars introduces the dying planet, the four-armed green Tharks, the red Martian princess Dejah Thoris, and the atmosphere plant the whole world depends on. The Gods of Mars is the sharper book of the three: Carter returns to find Barsoom's religion is a racket, and the ending is one of the more brutal cliffhangers in early pulp. The Warlord of Mars resolves it and closes the story properly.
The next generation
Thuvia, Maid of Mars hands the lead to Carter's son Carthoris and is slight. The Chessmen of Mars is the one later book people still argue is the best in the series: his daughter Tara, a genuinely strange episode with the disembodied-head kaldanes, and a chapter built around jetan, the Martian chess game whose full rules Burroughs appended. Read it even if you skip the rest.
The standalones
The Master Mind of Mars is a brain-transplant novel narrated by an Earthman named Ulysses Paxton and is the most inventive of the late books. A Fighting Man Of Mars — the odd capitalisation is our catalogue record, not the published title — is a competent adventure with a new narrator. Swords of Mars brings John Carter back as narrator and adds an assassins' guild and a spaceship to Thuria. Synthetic Men of Mars is grimmer, built on a mad biologist growing malformed men in vats, and Llana of Gathol is four linked novellas rather than a novel, written late and openly recycling.
The last book
John Carter of Mars is a posthumous 1964 collection of two novellas, and it is not really the eleventh novel. The second of them, Skeleton Men of Jupiter, is Burroughs; the first, John Carter and the Giant of Mars, is generally attributed to his son John Coleman Burroughs, who wrote it as a juvenile serial. Some editions still print it as pure Burroughs. Read it only for completeness.
Which edition to buy, and this matters more than usual
Most of these books are old enough to be out of copyright in the United States, which means the market is flooded with print-on-demand reprints assembled from raw scans. The tell is a stock photo or an AI-looking cover, no named editor or introduction, and a publisher you have never heard of. Inside you get uncorrected OCR: broken hyphenation, dropped lines, garbled proper nouns. Buy from an actual publisher instead — Penguin Classics, Del Rey, Dover and Bison Books have all done real editions with proper texts and introductions — or read the early titles free from Project Gutenberg, whose transcriptions are proofread. The copyright status of the later books is more contested than the 1912 to 1928 run, so a cheap unbranded reprint of those is doubly worth avoiding.
Content, stated plainly
These are 1912 to 1948 pulp adventures and they carry the assumptions of that market. Barsoom's peoples are colour-coded races with fixed characteristics, and the plot of The Gods of Mars turns on a hierarchy among them that a modern reader will find hard to read as anything other than what it is. Women are prizes, abducted and rescued on a schedule. The prose is competent and repetitive. None of that is a reason not to read them — Burroughs invented a large part of the planetary-romance genre here, and the influence on later science fiction is direct — but it is what you are picking up.
More adventure and science fiction reading lives on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: The Barsoom Books Reading Order: Where to Start with John Carter of Mars.
