What to read after “A Princess of Mars” by Edgar Rice Burroughs: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Linked stories follow human expeditions to Mars, from the first landing to later settlements, where the abandoned cities of an older civilisation still hold traces of its people. Against the red desert and the empty seas, the settlers bring their own dreams and failings, while Earth moves toward war.
Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, follows the man in black across a vast, dying desert. His pursuit leads him through ruined towns and old memories, and forces him to weigh his obsession with the Dark Tower against the life of a boy he meets on the road.
Doctor Adoulla Makhslood is the last real ghul hunter in the desert city of Dhamsawaat, and he wants only to retire. When a series of murders points to a powerful supernatural enemy, he takes up his sword again with his young apprentice and a fierce tribeswoman, and the three pursue the danger beyond the city walls.
Zafira is the Hunter, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to enter the cursed Arz and bring food to her starving people. Nasir is the Prince of Death, sent by his father to kill her. Both are drawn into a desert quest for an artifact that could restore magic, and neither expects what they find.
Shasta has grown up poor in Calormen and dreams of escape. When he meets a talking horse who longs for Narnia, the two flee north together, joined by a runaway noble girl and her horse. Their road lies across a burning desert, with pursuers close behind and a secret about Shasta's past waiting at the end.
Loulie al-Nazari, the Midnight Merchant, trades in jinn relics with her jinn bodyguard Qadir. When the sultan forces her into a search for a lost lamp, she must cross a desert of jinn, thieves and old stories, where the line between merchant and prey keeps shifting.
Amani Al'Hiza lives in Dustwalk, a dead-end desert town, and hides two things: she can shoot like a legend, and she is half djinn. Refusing a blackmail marriage and a future in Dustwalk, she disguises herself and joins a stranger heading into the desert, where a rebellion is gathering.
On the desert planet Arrakis, young Paul Atreides survives the destruction of his family and is taken in by the Fremen. As he learns their ways and the spice trade that powers an empire, he becomes the centre of a prophecy, a rebellion and a war for control of the known universe.
Daphne Pembroke needs help to free her kidnapped brother, so she hires Rupert Carsington, a strong, reckless nobleman with more charm than sense. Their search for him and a stolen papyrus takes them up the Nile, where tomb robbers, the desert and their growing feelings prove equally dangerous.
Port and Kit Moresby travel from New York to North Africa with their friend Tunner, hoping the trip will mend their marriage. As they move deeper into the Sahara, the heat, illness and emptiness of the landscape strip away the habits that held them together, and each of them drifts toward a different kind of loss.
An envoy from a galactic federation lands on the frozen world of Gethen to invite its nations into an alliance. Its people have no fixed gender, and as he crosses the ice with a disgraced politician, he learns how much of his own culture he took for granted.
Each dawn the young caliph marries a bride, and each dawn she is dead. When Shahrzad volunteers to marry him, she survives the first night by telling stories and begins to look for the truth behind his cruelty.
A man wakes on a spacecraft with no memory of his name and two dead crewmates. As his past returns, he learns he is humanity's last hope against a dying sun, and that his only ally may be something he never expected.
In a bombed Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, a nurse tends a badly burned patient who can no longer remember his name. As the others in the house circle him, fragments of his past as a desert explorer and his affair with a married woman resurface.
In 1925 the explorer Percy Fawcett walked into the Amazon to find a fabled civilization he called Z, and never came out. Decades later a journalist follows the same trails, sifting clues and rumors to learn what became of the missing expedition.
A human expedition reaches Mesklin, a world where gravity varies wildly and the natives are intelligent, centipede-like traders. When the expedition's rocket is stranded at the pole, a human scientist must trust a Mesklinite captain to cross a brutal landscape and recover it.
In a galaxy where thought and technology work differently at its edges, a human expedition releases an ancient menace from a lost archive. Two children stranded on a medieval world and a crew racing to stop the Blight are drawn into the same crisis.
Lessa hides as a drudge in the hold that was stolen from her family, waiting for a chance to reclaim it. When dragonriders visit, she impresses the golden queen Ramoth and becomes a weyrwoman. With deadly Thread falling from the sky, she and the rider F'lar must find a way to save their world.
Nahri has survived in eighteenth-century Cairo by faking healings and stealing what she can. A careless summoning calls a djinn warrior to her side and drags her to Daevabad, a city of magic and old feuds, where her true blood makes her a threat to everyone around her.
Years after the war against the Formics, Andrew Wiggin travels as a Speaker for the Dead, revealing the truth of the departed. On the colony world Lusitania he is drawn into the fate of a human family and the alien Pequeninos, whose customs hide a terrible secret.
Richter expects a new virtual world to be a game, then wakes trapped inside it. Alone in a monster-filled forest, he learns its rules, gathers resources and experience, and begins building a settlement, while the world's other powers take notice of the newcomer.
A radio astronomer detects a signal from a star system twenty-six light years away, and the message it carries turns out to be a set of instructions for a machine. As governments and faiths argue over its meaning, she must decide what she will risk to make the journey.
A giant cylinder enters the solar system, and a small expedition is sent to meet it. Inside they find a sealed alien world of cities, seas and machines, with no sign of its makers and systems that are beginning to wake.
Abducted human women crash-land on a frozen alien planet. Georgie sets out for help and meets Vektal, a blue horned alien who says she is his mate and that his chest purrs in her presence. He will help her people survive, but the planet's harsh rules bind them together.
Start with “The Martian Chronicles”, “The Gunslinger”, “Throne of the Crescent Moon”: they are the closest to “A Princess of Mars” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “A Princess of Mars” these are Desert World, First Contact, Quest), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Throne of the Crescent Moon”, “We Hunt the Flame”, “The Stardust Thief”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
