Green Martian communal social order

The Green Martian communal social order makes collective survival its governing principle: property is largely shared, children are raised by whoever takes responsibility for them, and reproduction is managed by councils of chieftains. On a resource-strained Barsoom, this system regulates life with the same severity that it accepts violent death. Its efficiency is also its human cost. By separating children from their parents and treating tenderness as weakness, it sustains a society in which duty, combat, and communal need displace home and family affection.

Survival, Population, and Violence

The order is shaped by a harsh demographic arithmetic. Only about one Martian in a thousand dies from sickness or disease, and about twenty in a thousand undertake the voluntary pilgrimage down the River Iss. The remaining 979 die violent deaths, in duels, hunting, aviation, or war; many children also fall victim to the great white apes of Mars. After maturity, life expectancy averages about three hundred years, but the narrator suggests it could approach a thousand without the many routes to violent death. He connects this violence to the planet’s waning resources: medical and surgical skill prolong life, while the conditions of survival and continual conflict make life itself lightly valued.

Weapons are part of that condition, not an exceptional instrument reserved for warriors. The narrator observes that no male or female Martian voluntarily goes without a weapon of destruction. The detail makes the society’s endemic violence more than a matter of military policy: readiness for force is built into ordinary life. Likewise, the population system does not simply allow births to follow individual choice. Green Martian adults select which lives the community will support, linking resource scarcity to reproductive administration and to the use of violence as a constant check on population.

Children and the Regulation of Birth

Green Martian children emerge from eggs after five years of incubation, fully developed except for their smaller size. Their mothers do not recognize them, and their fathers are difficult to identify; the young are treated as the community’s children. Their initial education is narrowly practical: foster mothers teach them to speak and to use the weapons with which they are equipped from their first year. The women who capture the newly hatched young become their caregivers, but that social role does not depend on biological maternity. Sola, for example, had not begun laying eggs until less than a year before she took responsibility for another woman’s offspring.

Reproduction is governed through selection and controlled incubation. Each adult female produces about thirteen eggs a year. Eggs that pass tests of size, weight, and specific gravity are stored in cool underground vaults, then examined annually by a council of twenty chieftains. From each year’s thousands, all but about one hundred of the most perfect are destroyed. After five years of selection, roughly five hundred chosen eggs are transferred to nearly airtight incubators, where the sun’s rays hatch them after another five years. In the hatching witnessed by the narrator, all but about one percent hatched within two days. Eggs that hatch later are unwanted because prolonged incubation might be inherited and disrupt the schedule by which adults calculate their return to the incubators.

The incubators themselves are hidden in remote strongholds. Their secrecy protects the community’s supply of children: if another tribe discovered and destroyed an incubator, the community would have no children for another five years. The system therefore treats reproduction as both a biological process and a strategic resource, administered through testing, storage, timed hatching, and protection from rival communities.

The narrator interprets the resulting absence of parental and filial love as a cause of the loss of finer feelings and humanitarian instincts. He distinguishes this outcome from deliberate cruelty toward children: adults, in his account, act within a hard struggle on a dying planet, where each additional life increases the burden on the community. Selection favors the hardiest, and the birth rate is regulated to offset deaths. Yet the system’s efficiency has a stark boundary: children judged deformed or defective are killed, and the narrative emphasizes that they receive no visible mourning. Scarcity explains the institution’s purpose without erasing its moral cost.

Property, Retinues, and Authority

Green Martian property is communal with defined exceptions. Individuals may claim their personal weapons, ornaments, and sleeping silks and furs, but may not accumulate more than they need. A person holding surplus acts as its custodian, and the excess passes to younger members when required. The arrangement separates possession from unrestricted ownership: even what an individual carries is limited by communal need.

A chieftain’s retinue likewise does not correspond to an earthly household. Its women and children are neither wives, family, nor servants; it functions more like a military unit for whose members the chieftain is responsible in instruction, discipline, and sustenance during continual migrations and conflict. The green Martians have no word corresponding to the narrator’s concept of a wife. Mating is treated as a communal concern, directed by each community’s chieftains without reference to natural selection. The narrator compares their control of breeding to the management of a racing stud, an analogy that exposes how thoroughly social policy extends into reproduction.

The narrator judges that this system, maintained for ages and placing the community’s claim to offspring above the mother’s, produces cold and joyless lives. He also notes a contradiction in its moral image: adult Green Martians are described as absolutely virtuous, with Tal Hajus identified as an exception, yet that chastity does not amount to tenderness or benevolence. Institutional order can preserve one standard of conduct while suppressing the intimate attachments that might give it warmth.

Tenderness, Dissent, and Political Consequences

Sola’s response to the captive Dejah Thoris reveals how the communal code defines compassion as weakness. When another woman asks whether Dejah Thoris will be held for ransom or made to die at the great games before Tal Hajus, Sola expresses hope that she might be spared. Sarkoja rebukes her: sympathy, she says, marks atavism and could make Sola unfit for the responsibilities of maternity. Sola answers that Dejah Thoris has never harmed them and would not harm them if their positions were reversed. She contrasts the Red Martians’ peace with one another, broken when war is required, with Green Martian conflict among communities and even among individuals within the same community. Her response makes the cost of the social order visible from within: she regards existence as an unbroken passage of bloodshed from hatching to the final journey down the River Iss.

Sola’s own history shows that biological kinship and love survive despite the system’s attempt to separate them. Her mother was considered too small for the responsibilities of maternity and was less cold than other Green Martian women. She met a young warrior while wandering the hills, and their attachment grew into a secret relationship maintained for six years, although discovery would have brought punishment before Tal Hajus and the assembled horde. When the mother returned with the young Tharks, she secretly carried Sola into the city and placed her among the other children, knowing that they might never meet again. The children were then assigned to chieftains’ retinues, as communal procedure required.

Tal Hajus imprisoned Sola’s mother and tried to force her to name Sola’s father. She remained loyal, died under torture, and concealed the truth by claiming she had killed Sola and thrown her to the white apes. Sarkoja alone disbelieved the account and suspected Sola’s origin, but did not expose her. Sola eventually tells John Carter that her father is Tars Tarkas, and explains that she trusts Carter to reveal the truth if doing so should help him, Tars Tarkas, Dejah Thoris, or herself. This secret makes private kinship politically consequential: the order that officially disperses parenthood cannot prevent a hidden bond from shaping trust and the possibility of later action.

The narrator’s own encounters with the Tharks show that its customs can reward behavior that departs from their ordinary severity. After he strikes a warrior who has roughly pulled him to his feet, the surrounding Martians respond with laughter and applause rather than vengeance. He later learns that the blow killed his opponent; under their customary justice, he receives the dead man’s position and trappings and is treated as a chieftain. The episode demonstrates how authority and status are tied to combat, even when the victor does not initially understand the rules that have elevated him.

A different challenge comes through the narrator’s treatment of thoats. Rather than rely on the customary beating used to control them, he gradually wins their confidence through kindness. They follow him, respond readily to commands, and become unusually docile mounts. He presents this gentler training not merely as a personal preference but as a practical advantage: reliable animals improve a warrior’s effectiveness and reduce the risk that a mount will unseat its rider at a critical moment. Tars Tarkas asks to learn the method, and Lorquas Ptomel has it demonstrated to the assembled warriors. The resulting improvement in military movements earns the narrator a gold anklet from Lorquas Ptomel. In this limited but concrete change, care is not simply an alternative to communal utility; it proves useful by the society’s own measure of military effectiveness.

Meaning and Limits of the Social Order

The communal system is neither a simple absence of rules nor an unstructured collective life. It assigns property, care, breeding, discipline, and military responsibility through shared custom and chieftain authority. Its rules respond to an environment the narrator describes as depleted, and its population policy aims to rear only the hardiest while replacing deaths. But the same principles that make life administratively legible also narrow the space for individual attachment: children are separated from parents, intimate partnership is subordinated to community breeding, and compassion can be condemned as a failure of fitness.

The narrative tests that order through contrasts rather than through a single institutional reversal. Sola’s pity for Dejah Thoris and the concealed history of her parents reveal feeling that the society’s customs cannot fully extinguish. John Carter’s status follows the Tharkian rule that victory confers rank, while his treatment of animals shows that kindness can achieve results where coercion is the accepted norm. Together, these episodes expose the central tension in the Green Martian communal social order: it seeks to preserve the community under scarcity, but measures survival in ways that repeatedly sacrifice the affections and gentleness that might make survival humane.