Here Comes the Moon, the Moon, the Moon, the Moon the Moon.

The end is nigh. Of the 84 Edgar Rice Burroughs books I've been able to identify (it's harder than you'd think, for various reasons), I have now read 76...45 of them out loud to Joe over the course of the past decade. All that remains to me (barring the appearance of some of the thus far unpublished works, of which there are a few that are of substantial length--come on, people now!) are The Amtor Series 1 (5 books) and The Caspak Series  2  (3 books). I'm planning on reading those to Joe, so it looks like my solo Burroughs First Time Reading is at an end...though I do have a volume of letters--Brother Men: The Correspondence of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston--which I've just recently acquired. (I couldn't help but notice that Wikipedia does not yet have a page on this book, so if that's still the case after I give it a read, I may attempt to rectify that situation.) 

It's been at least good most of the time. There were a few books that were not up to snuff...but there were also some truly delightful reads--most of which were not books that ERB is known widely for. The Moon Trilogy, for instance...which I've just finished reading...was not something I had high expectations for. For one thing, I was unfamiliar with the title, and that carries some negative karma in and of itself, I suppose. But for a bigger thing, I had read negative comments in some of the ancillary Burroughs material I've been reading. As a matter of fact, even the introductory / postductory material in The Completest Edition I read (courtesy of Bison Books / The University of Nebraska Press 3) had some scathing things to say about The Moon Books. (Which is just inappropriate, I must say. Don't shit where you feed, boys and girls. And keeping it real doesn't mean you have to be mean, for fuck's sake.) So one of the reasons I decided to read it now was because I didn't want my last new solo ERB read to be of a mediocre or even bad book. 

Now I'm kind of wishing that I had saved The Moon Trilogy...because I think it really kicks ass. I may even re-read it with Joe (after we finish off Amtor and Caspak) if he's interested.

I had purchased some paperback copies of The Moon Maid and The Moon Men (which also included the third "novel," The Red Hawk) some time ago. And they were nice...especially The Moon Men with its Frank Frazetta cover:

But as I was poking about in preparing my ERB checklist, I began to wonder if The Moon Trilogy was really a trilogy or not...since I could not find a separate book version of  the last book anywhere. (Hey, I told you that I had OCD tendencies.) And in my poking about, I found this bit of a blurb for The Moon Maid: Complete and Restored (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) on Amazon:

"The most complete version of The Moon Maid saga ever made available, this edition contains the story as published serially, along with numerous passages, sentences, and words excised from the magazine version or added later by the author."

As a matter of fact, this version purports to have 18,000 more words than the "other" versions. That's a whole lot of ERB 💘 there.

And so, despite the truly awful cover art--

--I decided to go for it.

Well, I make mistakes so that you can avoid them, after all. I only spent $7.94 (new it lists for $21.95!) on this item (about equally split between book and shipping cost), but I wish I had just trusted Ace Books and read my nice looking paperbacks. So far as I can discern, there is no difference between the text of The Completest Version and the Ace Books Version(s) 5 ...and there are three reasons why I don't like The Completest:

Uno: It is ugly. Ugly cover, and more ugly drawings within.
Dos: The editor saw fit to include some really negative and unnecessarily harsh criticisms of Burroughs in the ancillary material...none of which offers any enlightenment vis-à-vis the books or ERB.
Tres: There are quite a few typos in the text. Like a dozen. And that's just sloppy. Especially in an edition put out by a university press. I emailed them to ask if they were interested in a list of the typos with an eye toward correcting them in a future edition. I'll let you know if I hear from them. But don't hold your breath, right?

So...yeah. I wish I had known all of that beforehand, because then I'd have been reading those pretty Ace editions. If Joe decides he wants some of this Moon action, I will definitely read from those books instead of The Completest.

And speaking of the book itself....

Well. The first volume, The Moon Maid, is pretty typical ERB science fiction in many ways. Some of the familiar tropes are here: the journey to an inner world (hey you'll just have to read it if you want that to make sense), the fair damsel in distress who needs rescuing, the need to learn a new language muy rápidamente, the seriously ugly bad guys. The I'm Going to Tell You a Story framing device. Yep. But I don't mean to imply that any of that is bad. Au contraire. I found The Moon Maid to be an exciting read, and I was sad to see the story end. But there was an extra little twist to it that I'd never seen in Burroughs before...or in any other writer, for that matter, with only one exception--Yukio Mishima, and years after The Moon Maid 4  : the hero, Julian, is reincarnated a whole bunch of times. Twenty, to be exact. So Julian I is born in 1896 and dies in 1918, and Julian XXI is born in 2434-ish  (further information redacted). Not all of the Julians appear in the trilogy--this ain't 100 Years of Solitude, after all--but there are a few others who pop up along the way. And that's pretty cool, isn't it? I thought so, too. And lest I forget...there's also a bit of a mention of John Carter. There is something about literary crossovers which really pleases my soul, and while this is just a slight one, it still made me happy. 6  

The second volume of the trilogy, The Moon Men, is a totally different animal. It is unlike any of the other Burroughs books I've read. In fact, more than anything else it reminds me of Orwell's 1984. This story is set some time after the events of The Moon Maid, and in it the Moon Men have conquered the Earth and subjected humanity to intense degradation. The Julian of this era fights back against the occupation forces...and the ending is quite a surprising twist. This would make a superb science fiction movie...and I really can't understand why no one has gotten around to doing that as of yet.

The last volume was a bit disorienting. It skips way ahead in time...I think it was 400 years...and it a lot of ways it is more like Burroughs's The War Chief and Apache Devil novels. Other than the fact that the bad guys are the descendants of Moon Men, I don't think there's any science fiction element to this part of the story at all. Well, it is set 400 years in the future, so I guess that alone puts it into the science fiction genre, but you know what I mean.

All in all, though, this was a really great series. Highly recommended!

And...I received a reply to my email to Bison Books / The University Of Nebraska Press a mere two days after I'd sent off my query...and get this: not only was the fellow who responded polite, but he thanked me and said yes, please send the list of typos along, and gave me the email address of the guy in charge of such things. Yowza. I am used to either being ignored (most of the publishers I've emailed reference corrections) or actually attacked (the Ed "What An Asshole" Brubaker response, so this was quite a nice contrast. I'm going to sit down and compose that email right now, as a matter of fact. (The final tally was 14, by the way, which isn't terrible, but still.... They definitely should hire me. Willing to work for free books, boys and girls. Just sayin'.)



1  Venus, as in Carson of.
2  The Land and People That Time Forgot and The Abyss.
3  Speaking of...these folks have a little Burroughs Cottage Industry going, with 14 ERB titles on hand and 2 more "about." 
4  Which doesn't mean that no author had done this, of course. Just that I hadn't run into it. And I've read a lot of books. About 6,000, I'd guess. Just sayin', sir.
5  I think those 18,000 words were cut out from the magazine versions when the books were first published, and the Ace texts were created from the magazine texts.
6 ERB did a bit of that crossover stuff, didn't he? Let's see...Tarzan did a crossover with the Pellucidar series and with the Barney Custer "trilogy"...and there's even a little nod to him in The Mad King. And in the first few pages of Pirates of Venus there is mention not only of Tarzan, but also of David Innes and several other key characters from the Pellucidar series. I have the feeling that there are other crossover moments that aren't occurring to me right now, too. Feel free to amend me if you have knowledge of this matter.