Oz is China

Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum

Nigel Bruce

Jul 31, 2023 • 1 min read

Cover of "A Princess of Mars," the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Barsoom" series.

When Burroughs came to write his John Carter adventure novels, he had internalized much of what Baum was trying to do in the Oz books and in The Boy Fortune Hunters series (one of the six is set in China). Burrough's own first efforts were children's stories between 1901-04, but success came in 1912 when Tarzan and Under the Moons of Mars were first serialized. The latter was novelized as A Princess of Mars in 1917, the first of his Barsoom series.

The land of Barsoom (Mars) is divided into different races just like Oz - with red, green, white, yellow and black races, with each having particular characteristics. For example, the reds are the good guys, the greens are the savages (one of them is shown below). Burroughs' worlds are much more dystopian than Baum's, which Burroughs regarded as children's stories, though he got on well with Baum when they became friends in Los Angeles some time between 1913 and 1916.

Burroughs-green-martian — A four armed Green Martian on his thoat, as represented in the original 1920 edition of "Thuvia, Maid of Mars"

Besides the Baum's books, there are echoes here of previous fanciful speculation by Percival Lowell about life on Mars and canals across the Martian landscape, as well as the on-going search for lost worlds, mostly in South America. Machu Picchu was "discovered" by westerners in 1911 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World came out the following year. Burroughs' tackled the subject himself with The Land That Time Forgot in 1916.