Presently Ghek pushed aside a door that opened from the stairway, and
before them Tara saw the moonlight flooding the walled court where the
headless rykors lay beside their feeding-troughs. She saw the perfect
bodies, muscled as the best of her father's fighting men, and the
females whose figures would have been the envy of many of Helium's most
beautiful women. Ah, if she could but endow them with the power to act!
Edgar Rice Burroughs created one of the most iconic figures in American
pop culture, Tarzan of the Apes, and it is impossible to overstate his
influence on entire genres of popular literature in the decades after
his enormously winning pulp novels stormed the public's imagination. The
Chessmen of Mars, first published in 1922, is the fifth book in
Burroughs' Mars series, about the adventures of Earthman John Carter on
the Red Planet. Here, Carter's daughter, Tara of Helium (aka Kansas), is
caught up in a deadly game played by the bizarre creatures of the alien
world... while also finding herself under the sway of the nameless
warrior sent to rescue her. American novelist EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
(1875-1950) wrote dozens of adventure, crime, and science fiction novels
that are still beloved today, including Tarzan of the Apes (1912), At
the Earth's Core (1914), A Princess of Mars (1917), The Land That Time
Forgot (1924), and Pirates of Venus (1934). He is reputed to have been
reading a comic book when he died.
