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It is the 1930s and John P. Moore, an ambitious author, has just had his first story, a science fiction tale featuring the adventures of scientists and journalists taking the first trip to the planet Mars, published in Amazing Stories.
But you won't find that story, along with its two sequels, inside the pages of any copy of Amazing Stories - not in a pulp magazine collector's vault, not on the internet archive and that is because the Amazing Stories that published Moore's tales appeared within the pages of the negro newspapers of the day.
Now, for the first time in over ninety years, you can read John P. Moore's tales of interplanetary adventure and learn about the rediscovery of the Black Amazing Stories, the featured science fiction section of the IFS, a syndicated insert distributed by many negro newspapers, that had a circulation that enormously larger than the pulp magazines, and established by one of the men who would go on to buy Amazing Stories in the late 1930s.
Lisa Yaszek is Regents' Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech and an award-winning author and editor whose work explores science fiction as a global storytelling tradition connecting past, present, and future. Her books include Sisters of Tomorrow, Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, and the Future Is Female! series. She received the Science Fiction Research Association's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024.
John Jennings is the curator of the Megascope list and illustrator of the graphic novel adaptations of Octavia E. Butler's Kindred and Parable of the Sower. He is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, and was awarded the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. He also coedited the Eisner Award-winning anthology The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art.
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