A Princess of Mars

A Confederate captain hiding from Apaches in an Arizona cave wakes naked on Mars, where the low gravity makes him a giant and the green warriors who capture him have no word for love. Burroughs was thirty-five, failing at business and selling pencil sharpeners when he wrote it; he signed the magazine version "Norman Bean" in case it embarrassed him, and the typesetter printed it as Norman. It invented the planetary romance wholesale, and every sword-and-rocket story since has been paying rent. Fifty-five plates by painters including Albert Bierstadt and Caspar David Friedrich carry the barren sublimity of Alpine peaks, moonlit harbours and Baltic nights into a tale of a dying, canal-crossed Mars.