This vision of Mars was based on the work of the astronomer Percival Lowell, whose ideas were widely popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Barsoom series inspired a number of well-known 20th-century science fiction writers, including Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and John Norman.

The series was also inspirational for many scientists in the fields of space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life, including Carl Sagan, who read A Princess of Mars when he was a child.

Thanks to his strength and martial prowess, Carter rises to a high position in the tribe and earns the respect and eventually the friendship of Tars Tarkas, one of the Thark chieftains.

In a desperate attempt to save the planet's inhabitants, Carter uses a secret telepathic code to enter the factory, bringing an engineer along who can restore its functionality.

[6] He wrote most of the first half of the novel while working for his brother in a stationery company, penning the words on scratch pads produced by the business.

[7] He had been struggling for some time to establish himself as a businessman, so far with little success, and with a wife and two children to support, turned to writing in desperate need of income.

Despite failure in his business affairs, he had accumulated a wealth of unusual experiences from working in a variety of jobs which had brought him into contact with miners, soldiers, cowboys, and Native Americans.

At this point he had already decided to adopt the pen name of "Normal Bean", an attempt to suggest that despite the incredible nature of his story, he was still a sane, reliable character.

On November 4, 1911, Burroughs received an acceptance letter from Metcalf, offering US$400 for the serialization rights (equivalent to $13,080 in 2023), with the request to change the title and further edit the opening section of the novel.

[11] For the publication of the serial, Burroughs used the pen name "Normal Bean", which he selected as a pun to stress that he was in his right mind, as he feared ridicule for writing such a fantastic story.

[17] Planetary romances take place primarily on the surface of an alien world, and they often include sword-fighting and swashbuckling; monsters; supernatural elements such as telepathic abilities (as opposed to magic); and cultures that echo those of Earth in pre-industrial eras, especially with dynastic or theocratic social structures.

The novel also shares a number of elements of Westerns, such as desert settings, women taken captive, and a climactic life-or-death confrontation with the antagonist.

[20] In The Chessmen of Mars, Burroughs even includes a reference to the chess games he played with his real life assistant, John Shea, while writing the novel.

It is also a captivity narrative, involving a civilized hero being captured by an uncivilized culture and being forced to adapt to the primitive nature of the captors to survive.

[22] As is the case with the majority of the Barsoom novels to follow, it portrays a hero facing impossible odds and forced to fight a range of lurid creatures in order to win the love of the heroine.

[24] The novel's vision of Mars was inspired by astronomical speculations of the time, especially those of Percival Lowell, who saw the planet as a formerly Earth-like world now becoming inhospitable to life because of its advanced age.

[29] In 1895 Percival Lowell published a book entitled Mars which speculated about an arid, dying landscape, whose inhabitants had been forced to build canals thousands of miles long to bring water from the polar caps to irrigate the remaining arable land.

An 1897 novel by Kurd Lasswitz, Auf Zwei Planeten, dealt with benevolent Martians arriving on Earth, but as it was not translated until 1971 it is unlikely that Burroughs knew of it.

It depicted Mars as an ancient world, nearing the end of its life, home to a superior civilization capable of advanced feats of science and engineering.

[35] This book and its series are noted as early inspirations for many later science fiction authors, including Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury admired Burroughs' stimulating romantic tales, and they were an inspiration for his The Martian Chronicles (1950), which used some similar conceptions of a dying Mars.

Scientist Carl Sagan read the books as a young boy, and they continued to affect his imagination into his adult years; he remembered Barsoom as a "world of ruined cities, planet girding canals, immense pumping stations—a feudal technological society".

White, Yellow, Black, Red, and Green races appear in various novels of the series, each with ethnic qualities that often define their individual representatives.

Carter's unusual appearance and un-Barsoomian strength and agility make him a kind of mythic figure, capable of achievements that no Barsoomian could manage.

In Chapter 11, Dejah Thoris derides Earth men, who "almost without exception, cover their bodies with strange, unsightly pieces of cloth.

There was no hair on their bodies, which were of a very light yellowish-green color....[49]They are nomadic, warlike, and barbaric; do not form families; have discarded concepts of friendship and affection (presumably in the name of survival); and enjoy torture.

Except for Guatemala, Honduras, Samoa, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Colombia, Equatorial Guinea and Mexico, Burroughs' works, including A Princess of Mars, has entered public domain in the rest of the world.

It was originally due in 2006, with Jon Favreau (Zathura, Iron Man, Cowboys & Aliens) as director and Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News as producer.

Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins, who appeared together in the 2009 movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine, play John Carter and Dejah Thoris.