A Princess of Mars was one of the earliest examples of pulp science fiction from the 20th century. Written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1917, it details the saga of civil war veteran John Carter who is mistakenly transported to Mars. He turns his warrior ways to rescuing a princess, salvaging an oxygen generator and becoming a princwase himself. He is expelled back to earth, just as mysteriously as he first transported to Mars. Perhaps his manly ways on earth were too incompatible with the non-humanly ways on Mars. After all, the princess embodied an ideal of beauty which included nudity as well as, by the look of the cover illustration, more highly chiseled facial features than were favored in the earthly ideal of feminine beauty at the time. Carter's war-tested manliness was too improper a match for the less than clear gender specificity of his Martian lover.