The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Science Fiction by Burroughs, Edgar Rice

The prologues to both parts, "The Moon Maid" and "The Moon Men"(part 3 of the series) constitute a future history, effectively Burroughs' vision of what the 20th Century held in store for humanity, which could be considered a kind of retroactive alternate history-a genre rare in Burroughs' writings and a bit reminiscent of such works as H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come. Burroughs was writing in the early 1920s, several years after the end of the First World War in 1918; clearly, however, he did not regard the war as having truly ended but only changed in intensity-especially as it had been directly followed by the October Revolution in Russia and the intervention of the Western powers in an effort to crush that revolution, which the staunchly anti-Communist Burroughs supported.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 - 1950) was an American writer best known for his creations of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres. Burroughs was in his late 60s and was in Honolulu at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Despite his age, he applied for and received permission to become a war correspondent, becoming one of the oldest U.S. war correspondents during World War II. This period of his life is mentioned in William Brinkley's bestselling novel Don't Go Near the Water.