The Strange Moon Saga of Edgar Rice Burroughs by D. K. Latta

American writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was a prolific creator of pulp and adventure stories. Burroughs wrote — as he himself would admit — for the money, but also had a versatile (and sometimes bizarre!) imagination, and he tried his hand at everything from historical fiction (The Outlaw of Torn) to noirish melodramas (The Girl from Hollywood) to his signature jungle and extra-planetary adventures.

But perhaps nowhere was this range demonstrated better than in his Moon trilogy. Not one of his more famous concoctions, it’s often been re-published over the years as simply two volumes: The Moon Maid and its sequel The Moon Men (which is comprised of two entirely separate short novels/novellas). Adding to its oddness is that the moon is only the setting in the first novel! What makes it an unusual trilogy is that Burroughs wrote three linked stories — following different generations of the same family line — that are, themselves, representative of entirely different SF sub-genres.

At first glance one might assume this was some reflection of Burroughs through the ages, perhaps having lost interest in the original milieu (as sometimes is obvious when an author pens a “sequel” to some long ago work but takes it in an entirely separate direction). Yet in the case of Burroughs’ Moon stories, they appear to have been published over the span of only a couple of years (the editions I have list book copyrights between 1923-1925, with magazine serializations preceding that). Suggesting this was what Burroughs had intended to do with the property all along. (Although according to one thing I read, Burroughs actually wrote the second story first, but couldn’t sell it as it was, so then sandwiched it inside the trilogy).

The first volume (The Moon Maid) guides us through the fairly familiar Burroughs’ oeuvre: a plucky earthman lands on an alien world (here it’s earth’s moon, which has an entire ecosystem at its hollow core, echoing both Burroughs’ own inner earth stories and H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon) and gets involved in daring escapades while becoming smitten with a beautiful princess. But even here there are perhaps odd tonal aspects that suggest Burroughs has other things on his mind. This then leads to the second segment (“The Moon Men”) which jumps ahead a few generations to an earth conquered by lunar invaders and living under the cruel heel of totalitarian oppression. The overt SF/fantasy of The Moon Maid is mostly absent, earth civilization seeming to have fallen back into the 19th Century (which makes a little more sense if, as it has been suggested, Burroughs initially wrote it as a non-SF story about Soviet Union totalitarianism which he then re-conceived as the middle piece in this SF saga). While the third and final installment, titled “The Red Hawk,” is set even further in the future and essentially feels like a historical adventure via a post-apocalyptic conduit, as Burroughs appropriates explicitly from North American Indigenous peoples with the hero (the eponymous Red Hawk) leader of a nomadic warrior tribe battling the last of the moon men invaders (who have been losing ground, bit by bit, for generations).

As I say: I’m not sure there’s anything comparable in Burroughs’ canon. In some of his series he might switch the heroes about (David Innes is sometimes just a supporting character in the Pellucidar books, John Carter isn’t the hero of every Mars book) and the second of his two Mucker books (The Return of the Mucker) is a little more fantastical than the first. But I’m not sure there’s any other series reflecting such a separation in tone and idiom even as they are unarguably meant to be seen as a linked continuity (a sub-plot of a kind of feud between two family lines runs through the trilogy).

They also are interesting in considering what — if any — literary influences Burroughs might have been riffing on.

Burroughs has always struck me as a slightly curious creative figure. He’s a guy who, if the legends are to be believed, had never had much interest in writing until turning to it, more out of financial desperation, in his thirties — and he proceeded to churn our over ninety novels (and various short stories) in a variety of genres and many boasting an extraordinary level of creative imagination — even as they were often repetitive, cliched, and recycled ideas. Anglophiles have asked how did William Shakespeare, a glove-makers son from a small town, become (to some) the greatest playwright in the English language and the author of scores of plays requiring intimate familiarity with foreign cultures and royal courts? And pulp fans can equally ask how did Burroughs appear almost from nowhere and become, for a time, one of the most successful writers of imagination in the English language?

Although Burroughs may well have presented this sense of being a literary dilettante as a way of sidestepping questions of where he got his ideas. As I recall, he publicly suggested he had just been leafing through some early pulp magazines (lying around the office simply because his company had bought ads in them) and blithely thought that he could write as well (or as badly) as the people getting published. But some of Burroughs’ stories seem likely to have been inspired by specific — and well known — writers such as H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and others.

Yet is that failing to give Burroughs his due as a seminal storyteller? Or, for that matter, ignoring that other, now forgotten writers, might have inspired them all? As well, some of Burroughs’ stories were clearly inspired by things going on in the real world — surely the true mark of an artist, that he is imbibing and then processing events around him and then putting that on the page.

So as I say, with The Moon Maid Burroughs starts out on fairly familiar ground for him, of an earthman finding himself on a weird and alien world. The book even begins with a certain patented weirdness that one sometimes associates with Burroughs — the story starting out weird even before the weirdness begins. The story begins in 1967 — the future (remember, the book was written in the 1920s). The narrator of the prologue describes a world unified after decades of war and finally able to relax and enjoy global peace. There is obviously a bit of right wing, racist imperialism here, as the narrator makes clear the world is unified under a decidedly white, Anglo-Saxon rule — although even here there’s a bit of ambiguity, suggesting everyone’s just glad to be done fighting, whoever won. What motivated Burroughs to envision this future is unclear — although there had just been a world war, it was over by the time Burroughs wrote this, so it’s not like he was pessimistically envisioning that conflict ensuing for the next few decades (as he did in The Lost Continent which was written while the war was still on-going). Although perhaps it gives some insight into how the world was viewed at the time — that there was always conflict happening somewhere. So perhaps Burroughs was just extrapolating from that, assuming it would all conflate into one never-ending world conflict.

Anyway, this future narrator then meets the mysterious Julian — a man from his time but who claims to somehow have the memories of all his reincarnations — including those yet-to-be-born, essentially allowing him to know the future (true to Burroughs: this isn’t even the weird stuff). And Julian tells the narrator that although the world is now celebrating peace and looking forward to the future — it will be short lived. A celebration further enriched by earth having just made radio contact with a civilization on Mars — which Burroughs explicitly links to his Mars stories (Burroughs being an early example of a writer creating a linked universe, having written other stories explicitly interconnecting his series — most notably in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core).

And this leads to the main story — Julian recounting his “memories” of his descendant Julian 5, who while heading the first manned space flight to Mars finds him and his crew instead being dragged into the moon’s orbit and discovering openings to a hollow core. Among the crew is the brilliant but craven scientist, Orthis, who is responsible for the navigational mishap. Burroughs was never one for subtlety and rarely had much literary patience for nuanced characters. Orthis is clearly a bad egg — although Julian keeps giving him the benefit of the doubt (much to his later regret).

Anyway, once they’ve accidentally found themselves headed for the moon, and face certain death (given their limited supplies) they discover the subterranean ecosystem. Julian (with Orthis along) set out to explore, leaving the others to watch the ship. There are familiar ideas and themes — the hero exploring a strange world (visually not dissimilar to Pellucidar) with a slightly dream/nightmare aspect (Julian quickly realizing he has no way to gauge time or direction in this inverted landscape); encountering a savage, inhuman race, the Va-gas (shades of the Tharks from the Mars books); and also meeting more human-looking lunans (the Ugas) in the person of a comely princess captured by the Va-gas — Nah-ee-lah (shades of Dejah Thoris, Diana, and other Burroughsian heroines his heroes meet in shared captivity).

But there’s something intrinsically darker to the story — something unpleasant. I remember having that feeling when I read it years ago as a younger person, and also re-reading it now. Burroughs’ worlds always mixed aspects of horror and danger with the escapist thrill of these amazing worlds. But the inability to measure time or direction is unsettling, like a disorienting dream. And the moon is a limited, closed environment — feeling more claustrophobic than cathartic. The ecosystem has such a limited food chain that cannibalism is a necessary part of a balanced diet. Va-gas eat each other and the Ugas eat the Va-gas. And though Julian declines to partake, he’s pretty easygoing about it all (in a lot of his books Burroughs would revisit the idea of cannibalism with an attitude that seemed, if not approving, at least surprisingly blasé for a man of his era — let’s just say I’m not sure I’d have wanted to be trapped in life boat with Mr. Burroughs if he ever got peckish).

Eventually Julian and Nah-ee-lah escape the Va-gas and wander a bit aimlessly (as mentioned, direction and distance are difficult for them to gauge in this world) with Ugas enemies every bit as dangerous as the Va-gas lurking about. Nah-ee-lah’s city state home is Laythe, while its rival city is Kalkar. It’s here we can see a way in which the story is presented somewhat differently than a modern writer might do it — reflecting both its time and Burroughs’ own somewhat elitist views (and which also ties into his racism). Because Nah-ee-lah is a princess from the highly classed city of Laythe, while Kalkar is a city taken over by essentially working class proletarians — and Burroughs’ sympathies (and therefore, the readers’) are with Laythe. Nowadays we might expect a writer (whether left-wing or right-wing) to have the plucky hero side with the underclass and overthrow the elites! But this is where we can wonder if real world events were inspiring Burroughs’ plotting (and fuelling his fears), for this was just a few short years after the Russian Revolution. And we can see that fuelling Burroughs’ vision of a world where the underclass rebel against the upper crust and unleash greater tyranny. The novel eventually builds to a surprisingly downbeat climax as Laythe falls to the Kalkars with Julian and Nah-ee-lah racing through a city set ablaze and overrun by an enemy army in a sequence that kind of put me in mind of the fall of Troy (just to return to my thread of musing about literary influences Burroughs might have been drawing upon).

The story has a, sort of, happy resolution insofar as Julian and Nah-ee-lah escape to earth — but even that’s a short term victory since we have already been told by Julian-the-narrator (remember him from the beginning of the book?) that earth itself will eventually be conquered by the moon men.

So as I say, this opening story in the trilogy is both entirely in keeping with Burroughsian tropes and clichés familiar from his Mars and other stories…while seeming darker, more pessimistic. As if Burroughs’ was going through a depressed or cynical phase, possibly inspired by the bloody years of the Great War and the Russian Revolution, imagining this closed-system world up-ended by revolution and based on cannibalism that eventually, in a sense, consumes itself…and so by necessity turns its lustful eye to its neighbouring world: earth.

The next story, “The Moon Men” (collected in the book The Moon Men) begins with Burroughs/the narrator once more encountering the prophetic Julian who then tells him of the life of Julian 9. And there’s a complete stylistic shift. Instead of cliffhangers and daring do on an exotic world, it takes place on an earth that has been conquered by the Ugas (specifically descendants of the Kalkars — the more colourful Va-gas barely referenced). It’s basically a story of characters living under the heel of their oppressors, eking out a living, trying to nurture what little slivers of happiness they can, and where even among the earth humans you can’t be entirely sure who might be secretly collaborating with the moon men. At the same time, because this is Burroughs, there remains a stripped down, pulpy, page-turning vibe to the story that means it avoids being unrelentingly dour. Julian 9 is, like most Burroughsian heroes, a bit of an Alpha Male type and stands up for himself regularly. As a science fiction story used to envision a depressing, totalitarian future (and one that is decidedly less fanciful than Burroughs’ usual Scientific Romances) one could maybe see it as a (pulpy) version of something like George Orwell’s 1984 — except Burroughs has anticipated Orwell by a couple of decades! But when literary scholars talk about these kind of Dystopian SF tales, they often track back to We, by the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin, as the seminal example of the sub-genre. Except “The Moon Men” even slightly pre-dates We by at least a couple of years!  (Certainly any English-translation available in the West).

Now, to be clear — I’m no literary scholar, nor with an encyclopedic knowledge of literature (heck — I hadn’t even heard of We until a couple of years ago when I listened to a BBC Radio adaptation of it and initially assumed it was derivative of 1984, not the other way around). It’s unlikely Burroughs had any influence on Zamyatin or Orwell or anyone else of that ilk. Still, it’s intriguing that while reading “The Moon Men” I just assumed it was Burroughs riffing on Orwell or someone, only to realize he was earlier. But perhaps that indicates there was some work that pre-dates them all! (In other ways, there were aspects of “The Moon Men” that reminded me of the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear — with its tale of people living in an oppressive 19th Century community; an interesting antecedent given “The Moon Men” lacks any sci-fi trappings and feels 19th Century-ish).

But just as how with The Moon Maid, it’s not hard to assume The Russian Revolution was inspiring Burroughs’ nightmares, one can infer the post-revolution Soviet State was in Burroughs’ mind when he concocted “The Moon Men.” (As I mentioned, I have subsequently read that this part of the trilogy in fact started out as an explicit commentary on the U.S.S.R. But unable to sell it, Burroughs re-conceived it as an SF story more in line with his more popular works).

One aspect in the story is that Julian and his friends engage in a bit of covert resistance by secretly meeting at an abandoned church for religious services — religion being outlawed. Burroughs himself was, I believe, an atheist, so it might seem an odd symbol for him to use. But again, it can make you wonder if he was inspired by some earlier story, or whether simply the idea of “Godless” communists was so integral to Western fears of the Soviets that it seemed an obvious thing for him to import into his fantasy — that of church going Americans resisting their godless oppressors.

Which brings up an unusual thing in the story — or I should say an unusual “who.” A supporting character is one Samuels the Jew, a sympathetic elderly friend of Julian’s. Given Burroughs racist and classist attitudes (I was and remain a fan of Burroughs’ stuff, but there’s no point in sugar coating the problematic aspects) it’s interesting that anti-Semitism — at least in this story — doesn’t seem to be one of his vices. Indeed, even though Samuels attends the Christian services with his friends, Burroughs makes a point that he does so out of camaraderie, not because he has renounced his own religion. Samuels is also interesting because, off the top of my head, I don’t really recall Burroughs’ identifying Jewish characters (for good or ill) in, well, any other novel by him (though obviously I may just not remember). Now given that Burroughs was an atheist, it’s maybe unsurprising that he wouldn’t normally think to identify a character by their religion.

Obviously, I keep circling back to questions of whether he was being influenced by some other novel he had read. I harp on this just because I find it intriguing — the origin, the provenance if you will, of tropes and narrative ideas. Especially in regards to Burroughs who was often coy about his influences, even as it seems obvious he must have been mining the works of those who preceded him, while putting his indelible spin on things — Tarzan, for instance, being arguably Kipling’s Mowgli dropped into Haggard’s African jungle (with La, the High Priestess of Opar, a riff on Haggard’s She). Burroughs became such a successful writer by essentially writing pulpy, reader-friendly versions of more literary sources, and adding a touch of literary ambition to pulpy, low-brow stories.

Anyway, “The Moon Men” ends even more depressingly — and shockingly! — than did The Moon Maid with the death of the hero (certainly it was a surprise when I first read it as a youngster years ago).

But the saga picks up again a few generations later in the final story in the trilogy (also usually published in The Moon Men) — this time without a prologue involving the first Julian relating his “future” memories.

“The Red Hawk” (the name of the hero, the latest iteration of the Julian clan, as well as the title of the story itself) is set in an America that has returned to essentially a pre-colonization North America, with the Red Hawk and his people roaming the countryside ala nomadic tribes of North American Indians, riding horses and equipped with bows and arrows (with some jousting thrown in!). Indeed, the moon men have been losing ground for generations and have been pushed from much of North America, with their few remaining strongholds on the west coast.

Once more there is a stylistic shift: from the Scientific Romance adventure of The Moon Maid to the Dystopian drama of “The Moon Men” and finally essentially a sweeping pre-industrial historical saga of “The Red Hawk.” In an odd way, the whole trilogy reminds me of Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which each section was set generations removed from the last. Not, I should admit, that I necessarily believe Miller was influenced by Burroughs.

“The Red Hawk” also has aspects that are intriguing to ponder. The world and society Burroughs’ envisions is clearly pre-colonization Native Indian (albeit with white characters). It’s intriguing to think about because, as I’ve mentioned, Burroughs was kind of racist. Yet one wonders if he viewed Native People through a slightly different lens — after all, he wrote at least a couple of novels about a white man raised by Indians (in shades of John Fennimore Cooper) and in a previous essay (“Cracking the Colour Code of Mars”) I suggest he was picturing a Native Indian influence to his Martian novels. Burroughs himself had actually served in the U.S. Cavalry (just to put in context how long ago he lived, and the world he grew up in). And though a Cavalry officer would seem likely to have animosity toward Indians (given the Calvary was a military force essentially created to fight Indians) equally it’s possible in that context he developed a certain interest in, and respect for, the Native People. In one scene Red Hawk encounters what the reader can infer is an actual American Indian, whose people have been variously enslaved by both the Kalkars and Red Hawk’s tribe, the Americans, and she waxes philosophic, telling the Red Hawk: “We belong to the land, we are the land…you (ie: Kalkars, Americans) will come and go, leaving no trace; but after you are forgotten we shall still be here.” It does seem possible that Burroughs’ frequently racist, Anglo-Saxon-centric worldview became a little more ambiguous when contemplating Native Indians.

Since I’ve mentioned it a few times, I’ll address my points about Burroughs’ racism briefly. Obviously Burroughs was a product of his time — hence why I can be cavalier about some of his attitudes in a way I wouldn’t be if someone was writing these same stories today. That isn’t to say that people didn’t know better back then (notably, of course, the people being discriminated against) — but arguably fewer people knew better, or had less information with which to know better. I mean how much Burroughs’ racism and elitism was just straight up ignorance is hard to say (at another point in “The Red Hawk,” the hero encounters what seem to be the descendants of Japanese people whom are described as tiny people about three feet high — and it’s unclear if Burroughs, who himself was around 6 feet, genuinely believed Japanese people were that small!) But when I talk about his racism (and elitism) I’m not just talking about his depiction of actual races and people (which, after all, often don’t come up in his stories set in strange, imaginary worlds) but rather the underlining belief that certain people are inherently inferior to others. The three stories in this trilogy never let us forget that the lunar Kalkars are genetically inferior to earth people, and a point is made of lauding the humans who have kept their bloodline “pure” and free of Kalkar influence. The Kalkars may be an imaginary people from the moon, but the broader symbolism is pretty clear. (Although Burroughs would be staunchly anti-Nazi a few years down the line, when the Nazis arose with their own belief in eugenics).

Anyway, despite its inherent seriousness, this story also reflects a familiar aspect of Burroughs style — a certain wry whimsy. And a deliberate irony created by what the character believes versus what the reader knows. Red Hawk is our narrator, giving the story his POV — but because he is essentially a primitive man and the reader has the advantage of 20th (and in our case 21st Century) knowledge we are aware of things he doesn’t understand. So when someone speculates that the earth is round, Red Hawk scoffs at such ludicrousness, insisting that of course the world is flat; likewise, when Red Hawk first reaches the Pacific Ocean (his people having been pushing westward for generations, but never before having actually reached the coast) he is horrified to discover this long dreamed of body of water seems poisonous — Red Hawk having no experience with salt water. (Another interesting bit is that the Red Hawk’s people bear the American flag — which they call simply The Flag — but after so many generations, they worship it as a deity in what might be seen as shades of the Star Trek episode, “The Omega Glory,” which aired decades later).

Equally interesting is a slight philosophical change in the final story. As I’ve said: Burroughs had little patience for subtlety. Bad guys were bad guys, good guys good. This was both a narrative short hand, but also one assumes a reflection of Burroughs’ racist/classist views where certain people come from good stock, and bad people often simply look sinister. The trilogy began, all those generations ago, with Julian 5 and the sinister Orthis, and in “The Moon Men” Julian 9 also finds himself at odds with a descendant of Orthis. Yet in “The Red Hawk,” Red Hawk (ie: Julian 20) encounters a descendant of Orthis who wants to bury the hatchet. Things get more personal when Red Hawk meets and becomes smitten with a woman who is also a descendant of Orthis. Which given the one-note villainy of the Orthis clan previously is, in a sense, a startling plot twist — and interjects an unusual philosophical nuance into Burroughs’ tale.

Oh sure, the moon men remain irredeemably inferior beings beneath out heroes’ contempt — I’m not saying Burroughs goes all Star Trek and embraces an edict of universal brotherhood or anything. But the burying of the hatchet between the earth families does link these otherwise quite disparate tales by beginning with a bitter rivalry between Julian and Orthis and then resolving generations later with their descendants throwing aside their animosity. A better and more emotionally satisfying resolution, I would argue, than simply having Julian 20 kill the last remaining Orthis!

With “The Red Hawk” the moon men are finally defeated (as I say: Red Hawk’s magnanimity doesn’t extend to non-earth beings) and after the claustrophobia of the moon’s inner world of The Moon Maid, and the oppressiveness of the conquered earth in “The Moon Men,” the open plains and pre-industrial civilization of “The Red Hawk” seems oddly welcoming and hopeful. Red Hawk, the proud chief of a warrior people, acknowledges that with peace there are fewer and fewer excuses to fight — but he finds he doesn’t really mind, content to oversee his herds and raise his family. And that brings to a close arguably Burroughs’ most unusual and conceptually ambitious series.