Tonight, we’ll read the opening to “The Moon Maid”, a fantasy novel written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and published in 1926.

This novel constitutes a future history, and in it Burroughs' vision of what the 20th century held in store for humanity, which could be considered a kind of retroactive alternate history. In Burroughs's vision, in 1967 the planetary rulers send a first manned spacecraft to the Moon—coinciding very near to the ac he Apollo 11 Moon landing. Of course, in Burrough’s version, the moon turns out to be teeming with life.

Burroughs is best known for his creation of Tarzan and the Barsoom series set on Mars, and The Moon Maid falls into that same interplanetary tradition, blending high adventure with speculative science. The novel imagines a Hollow Moon inhabited by intelligent civilizations, including the Va-Gas, a centaur-like warrior race, and the more advanced yet decadent U-gas. It also links to other books in what became a loosely connected trilogy—followed by The Moon Men and The Red Hawk—in which themes of empire, resistance, and rebirth play out across centuries.

The story begins with a framing device—common in Burroughs’s work—where a manuscript or oral account is “discovered” and passed along to the reader, granting it a sense of mythical authenticity. Through this lens, we are introduced to Julian 5th, a descendant in a long line of Julians who would come to play a pivotal role in the history of Earth, the Moon, and even future interplanetary relations.

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