This book and its series are noted as early inspirations for many later science fiction authors, including Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury. Bradbury admired Burroughs' stimulating romantic tales, and they were an inspiration for his The Martian Chronicles (1950), which used some similar conceptions of a dying Mars.[36][37] Burroughs' Barsoom novels have also been cited as a model for H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.[38] Frederik Pohl paid homage to the novel in his short story "Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam" (1972), although it is a backhanded compliment: the story so offends the actual Martians, they obliterate the Earth (as the Martians attempt to do in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells).
Others influenced by Burroughs and his John Carter books include James Cameron, who mentioned the influence on his science-fiction epic Avatar (2009) in The New Yorker magazine,[39] and George Lucas, whose Star Wars films were influenced by Flash Gordon, which in turn was influenced by Burroughs.[40]
Author Michael Crichton named a character on the TV medical drama series ER (1994-2009) after John Carter.[41]
The John Barnes novel In the Hall of the Martian King (2003) features a Space Shuttle named John Carter. The ninth book in the Diane Duane Young Wizards series was entitled A Wizard of Mars (2010), in reference to the book.
Burroughs' Barsoom series was popular with American readers, helping inspire their support for the US Space Program, and also scientists who grew up on reading the novels. These include pioneers of space exploration research and the search for life on other planets. Scientist Carl Sagan read the books as a young boy, and they continued to affect his imagination into his adult years; he remembered Barsoom as a "world of ruined cities, planet girding canals, immense pumping stations—a feudal technological society". For two decades, a map of the planet, as imagined by Burroughs, hung in the hallway outside of Sagan's office in Cornell University.[33]
Author-Illustrator Mark Rogers lampooned the Barsoom series in the second Samurai Cat book. The novels based on the TSR Buck Rogers RPG has a military academy on Mars called the John Carter Academy, which one of the characters in the franchise attends.
In April 2012, for the novel's centennial anniversary, Library of America published a hardcover edition based on the original book, with an introduction by Junot Díaz (ISBN 978-1-59853-165-7).
The Lin Carter Callisto stories are in part an homage to John Carter.
