Mars

Visualizing the physical landscape of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series.

This vivid pictorial map of a fictional Mars, or Barsoom, was created by Italian artist Gino D’Achille to accompany Ballantine Books’ 1970s reissues of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian Series novels. The image renders the fantasy world into a fully realized extraterrestrial place – complete with regional topography (including polar areas!), a transportation network, major cities, and environmental hazards. D’Achille’s dramatic illustrations (originally used in the novel’s cover art) in the negative space add further to the science fiction environment – ochre deserts, flying battleships, distressed damsels, and hideous alien creatures.

The world was introduced to Confederate soldier John Carter and the world of Barsoom through the creative vision of influential science fiction/adventure author Edgar Rice Burroughs. A Princess of Mars was first released in 1912, launching a series that would expand into ten sequels published into the early 1940s. Burroughs was also well-known for his popular Tarzan novels, in which his personal beliefs of racial superiority and eugenics were clearly manifest in the ‘Lord of the Jungle.’ Despite his problematic themes, Burroughs’ works left a lasting impression on the science fiction genre.