Amazon.com description: Product Description: "The black hair, the steel-gray eyes, brave and smiling, the noble features-I recognized them at once, and leaping to my feet I advanced with outstretched hand. " 'John Carter!' I cried. 'You?' "For a moment he fingered the chessmen idly. 'We have a game on Mars similar to chess,' he said, 'very similar. And there is a race there that plays it grimly with men and naked swords. We call the game jetan. It is played on a board like yours, except that there are a hundred squares and we use twenty pieces on each side. I never see it played without thinking of Tara of Helium and what befell her among the chessmen of Barsoom. Would you like to hear her story?' " The Chessmen of Mars is the fifth of Edgar Rice Burrough's famous Barsoom series. A planetary romance, this is one of two Barsoom novels which explore and parody the limits of excessive intellectual development at the expense of physical existence. The concept of variations on chess inspired later authors, including Lin Carter, Kenneth Bulmer, John Norman, and even J. K. Rowling, who included a game of Wizard's Chess in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.