Mars in fiction from his home planet, often invading Earth, but sometimes simply a lonely character representing alienness from his surroundings. Martians, other than human beings transplanted to Mars, became rare in fiction after Mariner, except in exercises of deliberate nostalgia – more frequently in some genres, such as comics and animation, than in written literature. Mars in fiction Fictional representations of Mars have been popular for over a century. Interest in Mars has been stimulated by the planet's dramatic red color, by early scientific speculations that its surface conditions might be capable of supporting life, and by the possibility that Mars could
A Princess of Mars the planetary romance had become very popular in the emerging science fiction pulp magazines. The novel can also be classified as the closely related genre sword and planet, which consists of what are essentially sword and sorcery stories that take place on another planet. "A Princess of Mars" is widely considered to be the archetypal novel of the sword and planet genre. 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. Burroughs employs a literary device for "A Princess of Mars" to which he