Maza of the Moon by Otis Adelbert Kline was first published as a four-part serial in Argosy, from December 21, 1929, to January 11, 1930, just as the nation was entering its first few months of a great depression. A.C. McClurg of Chicago reprinted Kline's novel (more properly a romance) in a hardbound edition in March 1930. Avon Comics adapted Maza of the Moon as a one-shot comic book called Rocket to the Moon in 1951. Walter Gibson (1897-1985) is now given credit for the script, with Joe Orlando (1927-1998) and it looks like Wally Wood (1927-1981) as artists. I have the Ace Books paperback edition of Maza of the Moon, published in 1965 with a cover illustration by Frank Frazetta (1928-2010). The events in the book begin just a year before, in 1964. Compare that to 1967 for The Moon Maid.
Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was younger than fellow Chicagoan Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) by about half a generation. There is a story that Kline and Burroughs were rivals and carried out a literary feud. I don't know anything about that, but it seems to me that Kline and his stories would have been pretty small potatoes to Burroughs. Nonetheless, Maza of the Moon has some real similarities with The Moon Maid, published nearly seven years before in the same magazine (with a different title). It seems clear to me that Kline followed Burroughs' successes by writing in each of the older writer's genres and using all of the same kinds of settings: the Moon, Mars, Venus, the jungles of Earth, and so on.
I'll say straight out that I think Maza of the Moon is a better book than is The Moon Maid. There are a few reasons for that, first of which is that Kline's prose is just plain better. Composed in a more modern style--looser, more informal, more pulpish--Maza of the Moon is actually readable, whereas The Moon Maid is pretty atrociously written. (It's too heavy with Victorian-style prose, a problem, I think, for many nineteenth-century natives who aged into the twentieth.) In some places, Maza is really exciting. There is also a lot of very vivid imagery, especially as the hero first reaches and explores the Moon. On the other hand, like The Moon Maid, Maza of the Moon is unsophisticated, more or less a story for children or adolescents. Its hero is without self-reflection, even after he inadvertently kills off scads of Moon people with a missile he shoots at their home world. In many places, too, Maza of the Moon isn't a novel so much as a simple plot summary. Some of John W. Campbell's early stories have the same kind of simplistic structure in which vast and myriad events are summarized in mere sentences or paragraphs. I guess you've got to tell your whole story within the confines of a popular magazine no matter how much skimping is involved.
Kline's Moon book has a clever structure. Like a modern-day movie, it has several plot lines running parallel to each other. The story jumps from one to the other, moving all pretty efficiently towards a common climax. The primary plot line is a planetary romance à la ERB in which a Superior Man of Earth journeys to another world, goes through wild adventures and escapes, defeats his enemies, and wins the woman of his dreams. A secondary plot line tells of how men of the Moon invade Earth and wreak havoc here. There is also a 1930s-style super-science plot line and an Alien Abduction plot line (was that a first?), as well as elements of the older Yellow Peril-type story, what is now called an Edisonade (also an older story type), and an account of Ancient Astronauts (something new for the twentieth century). In other words, there is something for everyone in Maza of the Moon. Kline could probably have sold it to any pulp title.
As in Burroughs' Mars and Moon novels, the planetary romance part of Maza of the Moon offers a lot of description of the peoples of the Moon, their culture, their civilization, and so on. It's the same kind of ethnological and anthropological exploration you will find not only in Burroughs' work but also in other Lost Worlds-type stories. If Lost Worlds are descended from stories of Utopia, then there is a utopian element in Maza, perhaps the elusive conservative Utopia of legend. More interesting, I think, is the Alien Invasion plot line, for that is less like Burroughs than it is like H.G. Wells, or even Charles Fort. In Burroughs' earlier book The Moon Men, the Kalkars establish a tyrannical regime on Earth, in other words, a Dystopia. In Maza of the Moon, the invasion coming from our lone satellite (a former planet, by the way, one that made war long ago with Mars) is more nearly apocalyptic.
I think there is an important distinction to be made in that last part, for the Alien Invasion-type story can be either dystopian or apocalyptic. In some people's minds, there isn't much distinction to be made between Dystopia and Apocalypse. (They are especially loose with the term Dystopia. To them, Dystopia is anything unpleasant, even if its only mildly unpleasant.) In some works of fiction, one leads into the other, either by design or by happenstance. Anthem by Ayn Rand (1938) is an example of a post-apocalyptic Dystopia. THX 1138 (1971) and Logan's Run (1976) are two cinematic iterations of the type. Contrast these works with Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003), in which Apocalypse follows Dystopia--or brings it to an end. The main action in that novel is set in a Post-Apocalypse.
I think it's important to be precise in these things, though. I think that, narrowly defined, Dystopia describes a society that is perfectly awful and at the same time sophisticated, carefully constructed, carefully maintained. Order and stasis are its main features. It is, in other words, anti-utopian, but it is also, in a different way, anti-apocalyptic, for Apocalypse is chaotic, violent, destructive. And a post-apocalyptic world is one in which everything has broken down, in which structures are simple, if they exist at all, and in which there isn't any great thing either made or maintained. There just aren't the resources for it any longer, especially the resources of mind and heart and demography. Dystopia is not Apocalypse is not Post-Apocalypse. That's how I see it.
I'll have more on these things later, as I always do.
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There are lots of interesting things in Maza of the Moon. I won't go into all of them, but there are:
- Voice-activated communications (pp. 5-6) and Zoom-like visual communications (pp. 5-6)
- Solar power (p. 6) and parabolic antennas (p. 91)
- Atomic power (p. 6) and an explosion that destroys an island in the Pacific Ocean, sending up a great mushroom cloud in the process (pp. 10-11)
- A United Nations-like organization (p. 6)
- An Elon Musk-like entrepreneur in the protagonist (pp. 6-7)
- Supersonic aircraft (p. 8), an airship (p. 9), anti-missile batteries (p. 31), and force fields (p. 133)
- Eruptions, observed by telescope, on a distant world, which result in an airborne attack on London (p. 16) and two skyscrapers destroyed in New York City: They "toppled to the street, adding to the shambles as panic-stricken people scurrying for shelter were crushed in the ruins." (p. 17)
There are also . . . light sabers! "In her [Maza's] right hand was a short, tubular instrument which greatly resembled a flashlight," the source of a "bright, red ray" used to cut the poor hero loose from his bonds as if he were engulfed by the Sarlacc. (pp. 50 & 49)
And there is . . . a Death Star attack! "Shooting up from the center of the crater [Copernicus] was a bright band of green light." A scientists explains: "'If powerful enough, the green rays will contract and destroy all matter with which they come in contact'." (p. 98) (Han Solo was right: that is a moon.)
And there are . . . UFOs on the Moon! (p. 43) And in the skies above Earth! (p. 73) The Moon people come to Earth in flying globes rather than flying discs, but these are, I think, antecedents to flying saucers and perhaps inspired by the earlier works of Charles Fort.
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So in Maza of the Moon, Otis Adelbert Kline told a Lost Worlds-type story concurrently with an Alien Invasion-type story. He effectively one-upped Burroughs by combining the events of The Moon Maid with those of The Moon Men, all in a single novel-length serial. And his Moon men are defeated in the end and everybody lives happily ever after. Kline may have drawn inspiration from (or copied) Edgar Rice Burroughs, but he was also clearly influenced by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (1896) and perhaps also Charles Fort's speculations about interplanetary warfare and visitors coming to Earth from other worlds, haunting our skies in their wondrous craft based on the circle . . .
And speaking of circles, in ending this series, I have circled back to my previous one. But I have three other things to write and show first. Then it's on to a conclusion of "Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales."
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| Argosy, December 21, 1929, with cover art by Robert A. Graef (1879-1951). Note the cinnamon-roll hairstyle like Princess Leia's and the battle of the red versus the green light sabers. |
Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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