Dr. Yaszek & Friends To Present John P. Moore’s The Martian Trilogy – First Known Space Opera By A Black Author

How do you recover a lost work of science fiction—and return it to the history it helped create?

On Wednesday, September 16 at 11 a.m., I’ll be at the Georgia Tech Library Georgia Tech Library leading a roundtable about the recovery and republication of John P. Moore’s The Martian Trilogy (1930), the first known Black-authored space opera.

This has been a wonderful collaborative project involving Georgia Tech’s Sci-Fi Lab, the Library, and Amazing Stories, the oldest science fiction magazine in the world. I’ll be joined by librarian Matt Frizzell, who trained our student research team; Sci-Fi Lab researcher Val Barnhart; and science fiction authors Ed Hall and Dedren Snead, who contributed essays to the new edition.

We’ll talk about how we located, researched, contextualized, and prepared Moore’s work for republication—and what recovering it can teach us about Black science fiction history and the stories that disappear from our cultural record.

And because this is science fiction, not just history, we’ll also have a dramatic reading from The Martian Trilogy and plenty of time for audience questions!