Moon (Edgar Rice Burroughs) Books in Order

Burroughs’ Moon trilogy is a little different from his better-known planets. It’s not just "a man goes to another world." It’s also a future history, a chain of stories that follows the same bloodline across centuries. The connective tissue is a family name, Julian, passed down from one generation to the next as Earth changes around them. Each part is an adventure on its own, but together they read like a long echo of one struggle. Legacy matters as much as victory.

The opening, The Moon Maid, starts with Julian 5th on an ambitious space voyage meant for Mars. A crewmate’s treachery forces the ship to crash on the Moon instead, and the Moon is not empty. It’s a lost world with its own peoples, rival factions, and dangers that feel half science fiction and half fantasy. Julian gets caught between an underground power that treats humans as tools and surface cultures fighting to survive, and he has to decide who he is willing to become when the only choices are ugly ones.

Then the story pulls back and looks at the cost.

In The Moon Men, Burroughs jumps ahead to a battered Earth where invaders from the Moon, the Kalkars, have turned whole nations into wastelands. Another Julian is living in the ruins of Chicago, scraping by, resisting, and trying to find a way to fight back in a world that has lost most of its old technology and comfort. It’s still a fast-moving adventure, with escapes, ambushes, and long treks, but the mood is harsher, more like a frontier tale set in the bones of a modern city.

The Red Hawk pushes even farther into the future. Civilization has shifted again, and the tools of war have changed with it, spears and bows replacing guns, tribes and clans rising in the empty spaces where countries used to be. A later Julian, known as the Red Hawk, becomes a leader trying to finish a struggle that has stretched across generations, while the remnants of the invaders and their collaborators still hold power.

The trilogy is pulp, but it also has teeth.

It’s at its best when it leans into motion and contrast: rocketships and ruins, palace-like strongholds and dust-choked roads. If you want to read it in order, start with The Moon Maid, then continue to The Moon Men and The Red Hawk for the long aftermath and the final push.