THE READING RHEUM: THE MOON MAID (1923)

I hadn't read Edgar Rice Burroughs' THE MOON MAID or its two sequels in thirty or more years, and remembered little about them, much less the complications of their origins, as summed up by this site:

Edgar Rice Burroughs began work on The Moon Maid in June of 1922. The Moon Men had already been written but was yet unpublished. The Moon Maid was published as a five part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly on May 5, 12, 19, 26; June 2, 1923. The first edition hardback which contained all three parts of the story was published by McClurg in February 1926. It cut out almost twenty-five per cent from the magazine version (mainly from The Moon Men). The Ace paperback edition, 1962, restored the original material. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote The Moon Men in April and May of 1919 under the working title Under the Red Flag. It was published as a four part serial by Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 22, 28; March 7, 14, 1925. It is a cautionary tale about the dangers of Russian communism. The sequel to The Moon Men was first published as a three part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly September 5, 12, 19, 1925. 

So in essence, ERB attempted to branch out and write UNDER THE RED FLAG as a sort of Earth-bound future history, more or less along the lines of Jack London's 1908 THE IRON HEEL. His publishers wanted something more in the vein of his previous successes Tarzan and John Carter, so he wrote THE MOON MAID, revised RED FLAG into MOON MEN, and then concluded the series with a years-later wrap-up in THE RED HAWK. I may or may not get a chance in the near future to re-read the second two parts, which as noted were subsumed into Ace Books' MOON MEN. So, though I've read summaries of what happens in the other two books, I'll confine remarks in this post to THE MOON MAID.

The title alone suggests the first John Carter book, A PRINCESS OF MARS, but though I consider MAID a mythic novel, it's not even close to the level of inventiveness of the first three Carter books. Like many ERB books it begins with a frame-device, in this case a man telling the entire story to another man. This time both the story and storyteller inhabit future-eras of Earth's history, and the frame establishes in a vague way that the storyteller is a reincarnation of the story's hero (who, spoiler alert, dies in the second novel). 

The story proper begins with protagonist Julian V captaining a spaceship from future-Earth of the 2000s, on its way to Mars. But the ship's crew includes Julian's rival Orthis, who like the hero came up through Earth's military hierarchy but who fiercely hated Julian for always being the better man in all departments. Orthis sabotages the ship so that it crashes on the Moon. Julian and Orthis are quickly separated from the ship and its forgettable crewmen, and both fall into the hands of an intelligent quadriped species, the Va-gas. While Orthis conspires with these feral creatures, Julian encounters a hot young humanoid named Nah-ee-lah, the "maid" of the title, and helps her escape the Va-gas. After various exploits, during which Julian and Nah-ee-lah fall in love but don't express their feelings, they reach (albeit separately) the maid's home city of Laythe. But not only does Laythe face trouble from within, from a rebel uprising (led by a guy who wants to move in on Nah-ee-lah), there's a "mongrel" race of Moon-humanoids, The Kalkars, who end up annihilating the city. The novel ends with Julian and Nah-ee-lah escaping to Earth, where I assume Julian has just enough time to sire at least one offspring for the events of the next book. In that book, the Kalkars, aided by the renegade Orthis, will succeed in conquering Earth. Thus MAID is a setup for that event, and as a result Julian V's story doesn't so much end as wind down temporarily, albeit conveying some of the cliffhanger-vibe seen in PRINCESS OF MARS.

Julian V, Orthis and Nah-ee-lah are all adequate but unexceptional representatives of their respective roles. ERB does his story no favors by resorting to the hackneyed idea that Orthis simply hates Julian for being his superior, and that Julian V hates him back in response. Despite ERB's muddled attempt to provide some convoluted theory of a strange identity between Julian V and his future incarnations, he comes off as a crude John Carter imitation, and Nah-ee-lah, the only named female in the story, is a routine helpless femme who doesn't assume any greater dimensions, as does Dejah Thoris.

The antagonists supply all the mythic content of MOON MAID. Late in the book Nah-ee-lah gives Julian a compact history of how Laythe (possibly named from the river of the dead from Greek mythology), the usual pre-lapsarian society, creates its worst antagonists. The four-legged Va-gas originate as herd animals who escape the control of the Laytheans, though it's not clear as to when they develop intelligence. Having been bred to provide meat to humans, the Va-gas perhaps understandably enjoy feasting on the flesh of the Laythean people. However, during Julian's time with them he's horrified to witness that the quadripeds also eat their own kind, even those fallen in battle with enemies, and this naturally does not set well with the Earthman's morals. In one memorable scene, the ability of cannibalism to eradicate familial bonds is seen when Julian describes the females of the tribe chowing down on their dead relations, with mothers eating sons and wives husbands.

The Kalkars derive their name from a Laythean work meaning "thinkers." They became an offshoot from their own people thanks to their forefathers, who liked to sit around and imagine injustices-- which is ERB's on-point critique of the instigators of the Russian Revolution. The Kalkars sow chaos within the ordered, guild-like structure of Laythean society, but Laythe somehow survives while the Kalkars form their own separate tribe. But Orthis, having escaped the Va-gas, uses his knowledge of Earth-tech to help the nasty mongrels conquer the ordered hierarchical society, thus presaging a similar conquest on Earth. Even if one doesn't agree with ERB's take on the rise of real-world Communism, in the Moon-world he creates two malign beings of opposed natures: one characterized by too little thought, and the other by too much (bad) thought.

I don't know about the other two parts, but MOON MAID is part of a loose continuity with the Mars books. It's through Earth's radio contact with Mars that future-Earth perfects space travel with the use of Martian "rays," and Storytelling Julian even mentions John Carter, though it's not clear just what he knows about the Martian hero.