I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the story of the interesting periods of my life and of my death. I cannot explain the phenomena; I can only set down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strange events that befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay undiscovered in an Arizona cave.

エドガー・ライス・バロウズの本作は、魂の永遠性と異郷への憧憬を謳い上げた惑星ファンタジーの原点です。死を超越したジョン・カーターの運命は、読者を深紅の惑星へと誘います。異種族間の高潔な精神や文明の哀愁が混ざり合う世界観は、後のSFの源流として今なお輝きを放っています。 実写映画では壮大な視覚効果が補完されましたが、原作の神髄は活字による没入感にあります。主人公の孤独な内面や異世界の空気感を描く文体は、読者の想像力を極限まで刺激します。映像で視覚を楽しみ、原作で物語の深淵に触れる。この往復こそが、百年にわたり愛される伝説を堪能する最高の贅沢です。