Planetary Romance

Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars, serialised in 1912, sent the Civil War veteran John Carter to a dying Mars of four-armed warriors, airships and swordfights. It brought the form to a wide audience, sometimes called sword and planet, and Burroughs followed it with series set on Venus and inside the Earth.

Leigh Brackett made Mars her own in the 1940s and 1950s, with stories like The Sword of Rhiannon (1953) full of ancient canals and dead seas. C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet (1938) gave the form a theological turn, and Jack Vance's City of the Chasch (1968) brought it ironic wit.

As astronomy closed the door on living canals on Mars, the form moved to invented worlds. Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, starting with Dragonflight (1968), Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series and Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World (1966) all set adventure on colony worlds where science had faded into something like magic.

Expect a hero, often from Earth, plunged into an alien world of warring kingdoms, monsters and ancient ruins. Travel across vast landscapes drives the plot, and the world's cultures are the main attraction. Science is light, and swords often outnumber guns.

The classics are pulpy, fast and colourful, and the Burroughs books in particular reflect their era. Later planetary romances settled into long series exploring one world in depth.