The Moon Maid

Edgar Rice Burroughs

• 11 september 2020
• 1230004191155

Samenvatting:

In Burroughs's vision, the Anglo-Saxon victory in 1967 is immediately followed by the first sending of a manned spacecraft to the Moon—Burroughs having come very near to the actual 1969 date of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The spaceship is seen taking off in a blaze of worldwide publicity and celebration, with the war's Anglo-Saxon victors seeking to provide a sense of common purpose to the forcibly unified world. However, the Moon in Burroughs' imagining turns out to be inhabited and the various races and cultures inhabiting its interior provide the setting for the more typically Burroughsian adventures of "The Moon Maid". From the global point of view, the space venture horribly boomerangs by bringing the evil Earthling genius Orthis into contact with the malevolent Kalkars of the Moon, though the disastrous results would become evident only much later. In the first decades of the 21st Century the world basks in peace, there seems no enemy and no threat anywhere, and pressure grows for complete disarmament and scrapping of the International Peace Fleet. Due to resistance by the King of Britain, half of the Fleet and of the world's armament industries are retained—which is not enough to resist the Kalkar invasion fleets, built and led by Orthis, which descend on the world in 2050.