The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My Americanism was very strong in me--stronger, perhaps, because of the century old effort of our oppressors to crush it and because always we must suppress any outward evidence of it.  They called us Yanks in contempt; but the appellation was our pride.

Let's take a break from our exhaustive exploration of 1970's Orbit 8 to read the first half of the water damaged copy of 1974's Ace edition of The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs that my brother acquired at some point.  This volume, with its great Frank Frazetta cover and cool Roy Krenkel title page, includes both The Moon Men, first published in serial form in Argosy in early 1925, and The Red Hawk, which was serialized in the same magazine in late 1925.  We'll read The Moon Men today and handle The Red Hawk in the near future.

Like The Moon Maid, The Moon Men begins with a brief frame story set in the late 1960s in which the narrator talks to a man, "Julian," who can remember his past incarnations, including "past" incarnations that "took place" in the future!  One of the first things Julian of 1969 tells the narrator is something I have been wondering about since I finished The Moon Maid--what happened to evil genius Orthis, who took a lead role in designing Earth's first interplanetary ship and then sabotaged it on its first flight?  You'll remember that in the 2030s Orthis became leader of the revolutionary totalitarian Kalkars, and built high tech weapons which enabled the Kalkars to destroy the last lunar city to resist Kalkar rule, monarchical Laythe.

The Julian living in 1969 tells us in Chapter I of the The Moon Men that in the 2040s Orthis, having become ruler of the moon, designed and built a space fleet and in the year 2050 that space fleet, manned by 100,000 Kalkars and 1,000 Va-gas, conquered the Earth!  Earth, you see, was ripe for the picking because the world government, based in London and Washington, had slashed its military budget and enacted severe gun control and sword control policies:

It was a criminal offense to possess firearms.  Even edged weapons with blades over six inches were barred by law.    

Both Orthis and Julian 5th, hero of The Moon Maid, died in the last battle of this war of conquest when their flying warships met in battle, leaving Nah-ee-lah, princess of fallen Laythe and heroine of The Moon Maid, a widow.  These Moon books of Burroughs's are a catalog of tragedies!  Julian 5th's death was in vain, doing nothing to stop the conquest of mother Earth by the evil Kalkars, though without Orthis to lead them the Kalkars have no ability to build or maintain modern technology.

I'm guessing these are Juana, Julian 9th and
General Or-tis

The Moon Maid was in part an allegorical retelling of the Bolshevik Revolution, depicting the high tragedy of evil revolutionaries who bamboozle the public and overthrow a benevolent monarchy.  Well, The Moon Men pursues the next stage of this theme, presenting us with an allegorical description of sordid and humiliating life under communism, of a world of misery presided over by cruel, corrupt and incompetent brutes who justify their misrule with hypocritical sloganeering about brotherhood and community!  (Wikipedia suggests that The Moon Men was begun in 1919 as a story about life in Russia under the Communist Party dictatorship and that Burroughs developed that material into an interplanetary adventure story at the behest of his publishers.)

From Chapter II to the final chapter of The Moon Men, Chapter XI, the novel is narrated by Julian 9th, born in Chicago in 2100, and he paints a bleak picture of twenty-second century life!  Earth's lunar rulers forbid reading and writing among Earthlings; religion, even the very mention of God, is verboten, and marriage is illegal.  The skyscrapers, locomotives, and other infrastructure of modern life have fallen into ruin due to lack of maintenance--technological knowledge has degraded to a medieval level, and the Kalkars can't even manufacture more cartridges for their rifles, and so must maintain strict fire discipline!  Economic conditions are morbid; there is no money, so Earth people trade by barter and all commerce must take place in public under the eye of the tax collector, who seizes an arbitrary portion of each transaction.  As for social life, Earthwomen hide in their hovels rather than run the risk of being expropriated by lustful Kalkar officials.  Some Earthling mothers euthanize their female babies so that they will not have to suffer such a dreadful fate, and there are plenty of Lucrece-style suicides among Earth females.

The plot:  When Julian 9th is twenty years old the lazy and inefficient Lunarian officer who has been commanding the soldiers of the Chicago sector is replaced by a mixed race (part Lunarian Kalkar, part Earthman) go-getter, a real hands-on tyrant, General Or-tis, a descendant of the evil scientist Orthis!  Or-tis lays eyes on Juana, the beautiful girl Julian just recently fell in love with after rescuing her from feral dogs, and bends the apparatus of the state to the task of stealing her from our hero.  A parallel plot concerns a traitorous Earthman, a spy and informer; he reveals to the Kalkar authorities the clandestine religious services attended by the people of Julian's community as well as their possession of such forbidden artifacts of the good life of pre-Kalkar days as a crucifix and U. S. flags; thanks to this jerk (who is hoping the Kalkars will let him have Julian's beautiful mother) innocent people are arrested, tortured and murdered.  In the last three chapters Julian 9th launches a campaign of revenge against his community's oppressors and leads an uprising against the Chicago-area Kalkar authorities; Or-tis and the spy and various other petty tyrants are killed, but the Kalkars crush the uprising and Julian 9th himself is executed.  Juana, pregnant with Julian's child, does manage to escape--I think she is the only character with a speaking part who survives the grim and bloody tale of Earth's horrible future told by the Julian of 1969.

There are lots of SF stories that depict life in an authoritarian/totalitarian society, but The Moon Men, a relatively early example of the genre, has some interesting peculiarities.  For one thing, many of those other dystopian books are warnings about the dangers of science and high technology and depict the government exploiting all manner of electronic surveillance and communications devices and advanced psychological techniques.  (The Chinese Communist Party may well be bringing these sorts of horrors to life today and exporting them to other oppressive regimes.)  But here in The Moon Men, Burroughs presents totalitarianism as leading to severe economic and technological backsliding; rather than coolly efficient manipulators, the government tyrants in this book are indolent and stupid brutes who employ the simplest and least systematic methods.

I'm looking forward to seeing if this interaction,
depicted by Emsh here and Frazetta on later
editions, occurs in The Red Hawk--nothing
like this happens in The Moon Men! 

The Moon Men is also, for a SF novel, very patriotic and very sympathetic to religion.  American flags, apparently artifacts from World War I, are inspirational relics to opponents of the Kalkar regime, who go by the name "Yanks" and call their philosophy "Americanism."  There are plenty of SF stories that attack socialism and collectivism or advocate private property and individualism, as Burroughs does here, but casting my mind back for other SF examples of a sentimental patriotism that is specific to the United States and not just an advocacy of the market economy and representative government that transcends national boundaries, the only comparable specimen I am coming up with is in Gene Wolfe's "Viewpoint," from 2001.

Julian and his compatriots meet in secret at a concealed church for monthly ecumenical services where Catholics, Protestants and Jews are all welcome.  (Students of depictions of Jews in genre literature may find The Moon Men a worthwhile read--at the same time readers of high-brow literature might encounter expressions of skepticism and hostility to Jews in such places as T. S. Eliot's 1920 volume of verses, readers of the pulps would find in Argosy Burroughs's depiction of a sympathetic and courageous Jew, a victim of thuggish anti-Semitism and governmental tyranny who makes common cause with the Christians in his community and loses his life in the fight for that cause.)  I found Burroughs's positive view of religion here particularly interesting because I always think of Burroughs as a religious skeptic, based on his treatment of religion in the Barsoom books, in which John Carter strives to expose the diabolical conspiracy behind Mars's bogus religion.

In The Moon Men Burroughs seems to be presenting an ideal vision of America (and religion), a place where people are brave and band together across ethnic and religious boundaries to fight for individual liberty and fair play. 

The Moon Men is also recognizably a Burroughs story, and we have a protagonist in Julian 9th who, like a Tarzan or John Carter, is stronger than everybody else and fights evil people and vicious beasts with his bare hands, cracking their bones and tossing them this way and that in his efforts to defend himself, his beloved and his friends.  Unlike Lord Greystoke and the Warlord of Mars, however, Julian presides over a tragedy, his family and friends and followers, and himself, ultimately overcome by their enemies, and, with the sole exception of Juana, killed.

An atypical specimen of the Burroughs oeuvre and an interesting piece of SF history that addresses issues of politics, economics, religion and racism current in the 1920s and still current today, The Moon Men is quite engaging.  We'll see how Burroughs wraps up the Julian saga in The Red Hawk soon.