The Chessmen of Mars

The Chessmen of Mars is a science fantasy novel by the American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fifth book of his Barsoom series. Burroughs began it in January 1921, and the finished story ran as a six-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1922 before A. C. McClurg brought it out as a complete novel that November.

The book turns away from John Carter and Dejah Thoris, the protagonists of the first three Barsoom novels, and follows a younger member of the family they founded. The heroine is their daughter Tara, and the man whose suit she has so far refused is Gahan of Gathol; both Helium and Gathol are established city-states of the series. Their first meeting leaves her unimpressed, and she is still carrying that opinion when a storm takes her flier out of the country she knows. She comes down in unfamiliar territory, is chased by a pack of banths, the Martian lions of the setting, and is captured by strangers whose interests have nothing to do with hers.

Barsoom had already carried four novels when this fifth one appeared, and it keeps the invented Mars of rival city-states, hereditary nobles and small fliers that readers of the series knew, while handing the central place to a new generation. The story's first published form was the 1922 serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly, and the McClurg volume followed in the same year.