"The Red Hawk" is a short sequel to "The Moon Men" and wraps up Edgar Rice Burroughs' Moon trilogy. It was originally published in Argosy All-Story Weekly as a three-part serial from September 5 to September 19, 1925. Ace Books reprinted it with "The Moon Men" in a paperback edition from 1962.
"The Red Hawk" picks up in about the twenty-fourth-and-a-half century, more than three hundred years after Julian 9th's revolt, which took place in 2122 (one hundred years and a year from now). The protagonist of "The Red Hawk" is Julian 20th, a leader of a clan of nomadic peoples living in the American Southwest. The title "The Red Hawk" refers to him, who has as his totem the red-tailed hawk.
"The Red Hawk" is a post-apocalyptic story. Its people have regressed into a society in which men are tested, by nature and the elements, more so by each other and in combat against the Moon Men. If the primitive and warlike society in which men test themselves is the conservative Utopia, then "The Red Hawk," like Burroughs' Mars novels, can be considered one of that type. And if there is an Internet American Indian Science Fiction Database (IAISFDb), then "The Red Hawk" would have a place there. Unfortunately, Julian 20th and his people keep Indians as slaves. But these Indians abide and the Red Hawk and his people move on, against the Kalkars and their human allies.
In that distant future, the Kalkars are no longer in touch with their fellows on the Moon. They are cut off from their home world and have been pushed back to a redoubt in southern California. Though still in place, the Dystopia of the Moon Men is in retreat. One characteristic of Kalkar society is forced breeding of girls and women, from age fifteen until they reach age thirty and are still childless, or age fifty as a rule, when "their usefulness to the State is over." (p. 170) The purpose is to breed warriors. It may be axiomatic that a dystopian society is always at war and always in need of warriors. In any case, in the minds of real-world utopians, Society is coterminous with the State, and what's good for Society is good for the State. Never mind the individual.
In "The Moon Men," Julian 9th understands that human society is decaying and that religion and faith in God are disappearing. In "The Red Hawk," things have reached such a state that Julian 20th believes that the earth is flat and that it was created by the American Flag, which is his object of worship. His brother, a man of ideas, tries to convince him that the earth is in fact round, but even in the end, Julian 20th still holds to his beliefs, even if he has grown in other ways. He may be one of few Burroughs heroes who grows over the course of his story.
"The Red Hawk" ends quickly enough with a victory of the men of Earth over the Kalkars, long ago of the Moon. Along the way, Julian 20th gets with Bethelda, a descendant of Orthis, and so the multigenerational feud between these two families ends. "The Red Hawk" ends, too, with the one Flag--the formerly forbidden Stars and Stripes--raised once again over America. "The Red Hawk" is a strange kind of story. There are many admirable things about Burroughs' society of the future, but there are also things that are not at all admirable. In other words, he wrote about one possible of many human societies.
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"The Moon Men" as an Alien Invasion type-story is admittedly self-conscious in its connection to the dystopian-type story. Put another way, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his book first as a Dystopia before converting it to an Alien Invasion story. An unselfconscious story of Alien Invasion/Dystopia, if there is one, might be a better example of how these two types are connected. But there were precedents--or at least one precedent, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds--to "The Moon Men," and there were certainly successors to it. One of those was in Weird Tales in the same year in which "The Moon Men" and "The Red Hawk" were first published. But more on that after another Moon book.
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| Argosy All-Story Weekly, September 5, 1925, with a cover story "The Red Hawk" by Edgar Rice Burroughs and cover art by Modest Stein (1871-1958). Ironically, Stein was an Anarchist and a sympathizer with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, his native country. But then even Anarchists and Bolsheviks have bills to pay, and so they are forced to illustrate stories written by reactionary puppets of the bourgeois regime. |
Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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