To quickly recap from my review of ERB's 1923 MOON MAID: that novel's "sequel" was actually written first as a stand-alone story set on a future-Earth dominated by Communism. When that project didn't sell, ERB reworked it into the sort of "science romance" for which he was known. MOON MAID established the existence of a race of humanoids on the moon, and at that novel's conclusion the bad humanoids, the Kalkars, apparently wipe out the good ones, the Va-nas. The one survivor, Nah-ee-lah, is taken to Earth as the wife of MAID's hero Julian V, while Julian's enemy Orthis, an Earthman who collaborated with the Kalkars, remains on the moon, plotting his next move.
Four generations later, the narrator tells how the enmity between Julian and Orthis was resolved: that the two met one another in a spaceship-battle, and when Julian got the upper hand in the struggle, Orthis achieves a pyrrhic victory by blowing up his ship and that of Julian V. But Orthis also leaves behind his seed in a Kalkar woman, and thus, when Julian V's descendant Julian IX reaches manhood, he will contend with the descendant of the original Orthis.
Following the death of Julian V, craven Earth-rulers pave the way for the Kalkars to invade and take over the planet. Obviously in the original story it was probably just Russians and their allies, but the end result is the same: Americans are dominated by tyrants who keep normal humans in bondage and forbid them from worshiping God. Continuing ERB's motif from the first novel, in which Kalkars are described as lazy scum who want others to do all their work, the Earth-Kalkars are the same, and it's their constant tyrannies that cause the powerful young Julian IX to start a revolution.
Surprisingly, ERB spends much more time setting up the revolution than showing it, possibly because he really wants to convince the readers of the Kalkars' evil (and thus, indirectly, of Earth Communism). Yet we don't really see that many "pure Kalkars." I mentioned in my MOON MAID review that ERB illogically referred to the moon-Kalkars as "mongrels," which was impossible in ERB's setup, since the Kalkars and Va-nas were a homogenous people despite their division. But in MOON MEN, most of the villains in the novels are what ERB calls "half-breeds," resulting from the unison of the moon-humanoids with Earth-women, whether willing or not. In this trope I see a strong similarity to Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD, in that Doyle's character Roxton claims that the casual enslavement of Bolivian Indians is largely the fault of Caucasian/Indian half-breeds. Naturally, Julian IX and all of his American friends and relations are treated like "pure" humans, though no one brings up the fact that one of Julian IX's ancestors was an alien Va-na. ERB even claims that the unseen pure Kalkars are not as cruel as their half-breed spawn, because the latter feel like they must be extra cruel to humans because of their mixed heritage. Or-Tis, one of the local commanders of the Kalkars, is the foremost of these, though ERB creates a lot of lesser evildoers on whom the hero vents his wrath before the big climax.
The matter of ethnic mixing also surprisingly comes up in regard to the hero's inevitable romantic interest, a young woman who takes shelter with Julian IX's family. Julian IX falls into immediate love with her-- with the amusing note that he thought his mother the world's beautiful woman until he met this young girl-- and she with him. Inevitably, the nasty Or-tis tries to get control of the girl to debase her, even as his ancestor pursued Nah-ee-lah. The ethnic mixing I mentioned, though, is signified by the heroine's name, "Juana St. John." Why ERB gave this character a Hispanic first name and an English surname will probably never be known. A charitable view might be that he didn't think mixing between different ethnicities was wrong in itself, as long as the products believed in God and hard work. But one will search through the novel in vain for any details on Juana's Hispanic heritage.
Though Juana is a little less of a damsel than Nah-ee-lah, neither she nor any of the other MOON MEN characters are very evocative, and the novel has a downer ending in that the revolution actually fails and Julian IX is executed-- though again, with the implication that he has left behind the seed of a heroic male descendant. I doubt the original stand-alone novel ended this way, and the conclusion is probably the result of ERB's decision to continue another chapter in the saga, set over ten generations later. That said, the end of MOON MEN is very close to that of ERB's probable inspiration, Jack London's 1908 IRON HEEL.
MOON MEN has no mythic core; ERB just keeps blathering about American values and God and the horrors of miscegenation. But I will exonerate the novel of one suspected "crime." I didn't mention this in my MOON MAID review, but there's an odd detail there in which it's asserted that the moon-Kalkars all have hooked noses. Any time one reads of characters being given prominent noses, there's a tendency to think that the author is evoking, consciously or not, a bias against Jewish people. And since the moon-Kalkars are analogues to Earth-Communists-- and since some famous real-world Communists possessed Jewish heritage, like Marx and Trotsky-- I wondered if ERB had worked some anti-Semitism into his series. However, MOON MEN has no mention of hooked noses, and I suspect I won't find any in RED HAWK. More, one of the main support-characters is an elderly Jew, Samuels, whose Jewish background is as respected as the Christianity of the other good guys. Samuels suffers a "noble death" at the hands of the oppressors, and so I tend to dismiss the theory of anti-Semitic influence upon the series, unless I find something really egregious in RED HAWK.
No comments:
Post a Comment