In 1930, a newspaper syndicate published a serialized science fiction story set on Mars. A seminal early space opera written in a style that might have been familiar to contemporary readers of H.G. Wells, “100 Years Hence” may have been seen by more than half a million people. That’s an astonishing number in an era when the audience for the most popular science fiction pulp magazines — and even many early sci-fi novels — was only a fraction of that size.
Still, the story quickly faded into obscurity — the victim of the perishable nature of its medium, a mysterious writer’s voice that suddenly went silent just a few years later, and the earliest curators of a burgeoning genre who, it turns out, were looking elsewhere for their rising stars.
Instead of becoming a cornerstone in a genre that has dominated pop culture for generations, author John P. Moore’s story remained unseen for nearly a century in the archives of the Illustrated Features Section, a weekly cultural supplement bundled with prominent Black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, and the Afro-American.
It took a new generation of scholars — faculty and students from Georgia Tech’s Science Fiction Lab located in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication — and a partnership with the legendary genre outlet Amazing Stories to help recover and reintroduce Moore’s writings to contemporary audiences, highlighting that early Black science fiction of that era wasn’t only a response to the political and cultural climate of the day. It was also a smash commercial success.
“The significance of this recovery to the genre lies in the fact that we can no longer say modern Black science fiction arose solely as a response to white science fiction,” said Amazing Stories publisher emeritus Steve Davidson, who has published the stories as a book called The Martian Trilogy.
“It offers the opportunity to say that Black science fiction existed all along in parallel. It was addressing the same issues and, in some cases, had a better circulation than the white publications.”