The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs

"Yes, Nah-ee-lah, they are murdering your people, and well may Va-nah curse the day that Earth Men set foot upon your world."

The lunar barbarians are not, in fact,
six-limbed centaurs, but quadrupeds

Not long ago my brother mailed to me from our ancestral homeland of New Jersey our collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks.  Today MPorcius Fiction Log tackles the 1985 Ace publication of The Moon Maid, a tale which was first printed as a serial across five issues of Argosy in 1923.  This novel has appeared in a variety of forms, sometimes in an omnibus with the two other components of Burroughs's Moon Sequence, The Moon Men and The Red Hawk, sometimes on its own, as in this volume.  It was even serialized a second time in 1928-9 in four issues of the magazine Modern Mechanics and Inventions under the title Conquest of the Moon.

The Moon Maid's frame story, which makes up the six-page Prologue and like a page at the very end, takes place in 1967, shortly after decades of world war have ended with "the Anglo-Saxon race" having achieved "domination" of the world.  Aboard an airship the frame story's narrator meets a man who in the text goes by the pseudonym "Julian."  Julian claims to be able to remember in precise detail all of his past lives; some of these "past" lives took place in the future: "There is no such thing as Time," he explains.  In each of his incarnations Julian has been a descendant of one of his other incarnations, all of whom seem to be professional military men.  The main text of The Moon Maid, like 175 pages in fourteen chapters, is Julian's telling of the tale of one of his 21st century incarnations, "Julian 5th," who was (will be) a principal figure in Man's first interplanetary space voyages!

Julian 5th (henceforth "Julian") was born in the year 2000 and is an engineer and officer in the "Peace Fleet," the navy of airships which enforces severe gun control over the Earth and thereby maintains peace.  The Moon Maid takes place in the same universe as the Barsoom books, and for decades Earth has been in radio contact with the Mars of immortal John Carter.  The scientists of both worlds have finally developed vessels which can travel between Earth and Barsoom, and smartypants Julian is selected to command the Earth's first interplanetary ship.  Also assigned to the ship for its first trip to Mars is the lead scientist on the space ship project, anti-social genius Orthis, who just happens to be Julian's old rival from their university days.  Orthis is smarter than Julian, but Julian's goody-two-shoes ways and sterling work ethic often meant Julian edged Orthis out for top honors, and Orthis is just the kind of scoundrel who holds a grudge!

Those polar bears are not as cuddly as they look!

The trip to Mars has barely begun when Orthis gets drunk and sabotages the ship.  While Orthis is locked in his cabin, in irons, the other four members of the crew manage to make an emergency landing on Luna, guiding the vessel into a colossal crater and down a shaft hundreds of miles deep!  The Earthmen discover that Luna has a hollow core, and that on the inner surface of the Moon's crust is a fertile world of lakes and rivers, mountains and plains, forests and jungles, a world with no horizon and no night, illuminated without cease by the glow of radioactive rock.

Julian and the three loyal crewmen are gentlemen, so, when Orthis promises to behave, they free him and let him take part in their exploration of the Moon.  Julian and Orthis are captured by a tribe of the barbaric Va-ga people, nomadic cannibals who can run on all four of their limbs as fast as horses but can also stand erect and use tools with their fore paws.  Most lunar animals are inedible reptiles, so the tribes of the meat-loving Va-gas survive by raiding each other and eating male casualties, making no culinary distinction between friend or foe.  Raids are so common and so destructive that, among the Va-gas, males are far outnumbered by females (who are never eaten), and each male Va-ga's status is reflected in the number of females in his harem.

An earlier Ace edition

The nomads carry captive Julian and Orthis with them as they travel around the lunar inner world, hunting for other tribes to consume, and the Earthlings learn the language of the people of Va-nah (the natives' name for the Moon.)  After a storm (Burroughs spends some time describing the weather inside the Moon) we meet a member of another intelligent lunar species, the more sophisticated U-ga, who look like Earth humans.  The U-ga are able to glide around in the low lunar gravity by carrying bags of lighter-than-air gas and wearing artificial wings; Nah-ee-lah, the most beautiful woman Julian has ever seen and, like so many women we meet in ERB stories, a princess, falls among the Va-gas and is taken captive because the storm has damaged her bag of gas. 

While Julian is making goo-goo eyes at Nah-ee-lah (she of the "skin of almost marble whiteness," "hair of glossy blackness," and eyes that are "liquid orbs" like "dark wells of light"), Orthis is busy ingratiating himself with the monstrous leader of the Va-ga tribe, like David Spade in that conehead movie (see, I have seen some recent movies!)  Orthis convinces the tribal chief to give Nah-ee-lah to him, but, before he can take possession, Julian (who beats up Orthis for good measure) leads her out of the barbarians' camp under cover of a second ferocious storm. 

Princess Nah-ee-lah leads Julian on a search through the mountains of Va-nah, her object her home town, the city of Laythe.

"We are near Laythe?" I asked.

"I do not know.  Laythe is hard to find--it is well hidden."  

Laythe, the princess explains, is concealed because it is the home of the descendants of emigres who fled the revolution which exterminated the U-ga upper class and swept away the high civilization of the U-ga some centuries ago.  The revolutionaries, the Kalkars, with the class inequality of the ancien regime as their pretext, accidentally destroyed the technological and cultural achievements of the U-ga when they rashly overthrew the U-ga political and economic system, plunging Va-nah into its current period of barbarism.  The Kalkars still seek out the Laytheans for enslavement or destruction.

A Dutch edition

As they climb mountains and contend with reptilian great cats (ERB heroes customarily have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with some ferocious feline), Julian and Nah-ee-lah fall in love, but before they openly express their feelings for each other they are separated during a fight with some Kalkars!  Nah-ee-lah escapes, but Julian is thrown in a dungeon in a Kalkar city, where he meets another Laythean, Moh-goh.  Julian and this guy quickly engineer their own escape, and Moh-goh leads Julian to Laythe.

At Laythe, Julian presents himself as an aristocrat of Earth, and so is well-treated and introduced to all the nobility.  He finds that Nah-ee-lah made her way back to her family, the Emperor and Queen, but when he meets her she pretends to not know him!  Heartbreak!  Julian integrates himself into Laythean life, spending his time making friends and enjoying himself.  One of the nobles who befriends Julian is the head of a conspiracy to overthrow Nah-ee-lah's father; Nah-ee-lah having given him the cold shoulder, Julian at first tries to stay out of these stupid intrigues, which he doubts will lead to anything.  But, when he realizes this rebel Duke is in cahoots with the Kalkars, he can't just stand by; Julian does a little detective work, monitoring the Ducal-Kalkar relationship.  When relations between the rebel Duke and the Kalkars suddenly collapse and the Duke decides to immediately launch his uprising, Julian rushes to the Emperor's palace, getting their moments before the Duke's assassins burst in on Nah-ee-lah and her father.  Nah-ee-lah is preserved, but the Emperor is killed, sword in hand.

Nah-ee-lah and Julian are reconciled (she thought he had joined up with the Duke's rebels, as Moh-go was a known member of the conspiracy) and express their love for each other.  The Duke's rebels lay siege to the palace, and Julian commands the defense of the Princess, who, upon the death of her father, is now the monarch of Laythe.  In a scene that surprised me, the common people of the city rush to the palace, but not to save their beautiful Empress--their gullible minds stuffed with the lies of the smooth talking Duke, the mob sides with the rebels!  Here we see the skepticism of democracy and contempt for the common people that is so common in classic SF, in which the cognitive elite are always manipulating the masses, for good or for ill.

It is interesting to see Burroughs, presumably inspired by the French and Russian Revolutions, singing us a song of tragedy, complete with romantic descriptions of the fallen royals and their supporters, many of whom, including Nah-ee-lah's mother, commit suicide, instead of the more conventional triumph of good over evil we generally see in adventure fiction.  (Presumably we'll see the Kalkars brought to justice in future Moon books.)  Burroughs's pastiche of the French and Russian Revolutions here elides any responsibility the Bourbons and the Romanovs may have had in leading their nations into the kind of perilous condition that provided unscrupulous Jacobins and Bolsheviks an opportunity to seize power and inflict upon the people of the world their reigns of terror; on Burroughs's Moon, the monarchy is blameless and the common people are ingrates who fall prey to the clever lies of the evil revolutionaries.

An Australian edition

Just when the rebels are about to take the palace the Kalkars attack the city.  These bastards have artillery and hand grenades, built for them by that treacherous scientist Orthis!  The rebels and royalists of Laythe unite briefly to resist this high tech onslaught, but, armed with swords and spears as they are, it is hopeless--the city is demolished and the citizens are massacred.  Julian and Nah-ee-lah manage to escape and for a time enjoy an Edenic existence on a secluded island, but, even though they are together, they are not truly happy--Julian, a fighting man and engineer, and Nah-ee-lah, a politician (though not exactly a successful one), cannot be truly satisfied while idle.  Luckily, Julian's spaceship shows up--over the ten years of Julian's adventures, the three loyal astronauts have managed to repair the vessel.  Julian, Nah-ee-lah, and the three loyal crewmen return to Earth.  What happens to Orthis is not revealed; it seems like he may have become the Emperor of the Moon.  Hopefully we'll find out his fate in the next Moon book.

The Moon Maid has as its base elements used by Burroughs again and again--a superior guy finds himself in another world and fights barbarians and great cats and begins a love affair with a princess--but ERB livens up the proceedings with a few new components and some surprises.  The space travel stuff adds something different to the mix, and I rather enjoyed all that, and the success of the rebels and Kalkars and the destruction of Laythe was a turn of events I was not expecting.  Perhaps also of note is the theme of reincarnation in The Moon Maid; not only is Julian reincarnated as his own descendants and ancestors, but the religion of the U-gas, it is hinted, largely revolves around reincarnation.  And then there is the story's skepticism of scientists and intellectuals ("Kalkar" means "thinker") and technology; learned men like Ortis and the Kalkars are treacherous and selfish and use any intellectual ability they may have, and superior technology they can construct, to abuse and exploit others.

Burroughs also raises the philosophical issues around the eating of meat.  Not only do the barbaric Va-gas eat their own kind, but the civilized U-gas actually breed the Va-gas--intelligent beings!--within their cities as cattle!  In fact, the vast armies of Va-gas who inhabit the countryside are the descendants of particularly willful Va-gas who escaped the cities in the chaos of the Kalkar revolution of centuries ago--the Va-gas in Laythe are bred to be docile.  Julian debates with Nah-ee-lah on the propriety of eating intelligent beings, and while he himself refuses to eat meat while on the Moon, he does wonder if the U-ga practice of eating Va-gas is really any worse than the Earth practice of eating cows and pigs. 
 

I'm a Burroughs fan and I enjoyed The Moon Maid and appreciated the odd elements Burroughs included in this specimen of his many adventure tales.  But there are some annoying problems with this edition of the novel that had me wishing I had a copy of the 2002 omnibus edition of Burroughs's Moon books put out by Bison Books and the University of Nebraska Press, an edition promoted as "Complete and Restored."  For one thing, this Ace edition is plagued by typos--missing quote marks and misspellings and the like--and typesetting errors, like lines appearing out of order or appearing twice.  Very irritating--shame on you Ace!  Then there is a problem which is perhaps attributable to Burroughs himself or one of his magazine or book editors--I got the impression from Nah-ee-lah that Laythe is hidden from the Kalkars, so well hidden that even she had trouble finding it, but when Moh-goh takes Julian there it is clear that the Kalkars know right where the city is, that the city is not really hidden at all.  I wonder if the disposition of Laythe is more clear in the 2002 volume, which we are told "contains the story as published serially, along with numerous passages, sentences, and words excised from the magazine version or added later by the author."

We'll read the next book in Burroughs's Moon sequence, The Moon Men, soon, but first a trip to 1970 for short stories commissioned by famed SF editor Damon Knight.