a Confederate officer mustered out of service at the close of the Civil War, is miraculously transported to the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. He arrives in the middle of a desert, naked and unarmed, wholly ignorant of local customs and conditions, unable to speak the language of the natives (in fact, knowing nothing about the natives, or even that there are any). Shortly encountering a group of barbarian nomads, John Carter is taken prisoner, and would seem to face a life of degraded slavery ending in early and ignominious death.

Instead, through the display of courage and skill, Captain Carter rises to the position of Warlord of Mars, having along the way fought his way from pole to pole of the red planet, returned to Earth for a period of several years and then travelled again to Barsoom, encountered a variety of strange races of men and beasts, weird nations and weirder peoples. He has, in addition, gained the lesser title of Prince of Helium (not the inert gas, but the leading city-empire of Barsoom), and has won the hand of the incomparable Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium.

The volumes in this trilogy are A PRINCESS OF MARS, THE GODS OF MARS, and THE WARLORD OF MARS. Their enduring qualities have led to their translation into many languages, including even an Esperanto edition of PRINCESS. Further, the same book has been issued by Oxford University Press in its "Stories Told and Retold" series, as a "teaching novel" for school use. Other authors in the "Stories Told and Retold" series include Dickens' Doyle, Shakespeare, Stevenson, Defoe, Wells, Sabatini, Anthony Hope, and Nordoff and Hall.

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