Moore, John P
Entry updated 24 November 2025. Tagged: Author.
(? -? ) US African-American author of whom nothing is known besides his publication of several stories in the Illustrated Feature Section, a weekly syndicated newspaper supplement from the William B Ziff Company (see Ziff-Davis) containing literary and cultural material; this appeared from 1928 to 1932 in 34 Black US newspapers. Of direct sf interest is Moore's story sequence published under the overall title Amazing Stories and comprising "The Shot into Space" (4-11 October 1930 Illustrated Feature Section), "The Hidden Kingdom" (15-22 November 1930 Illustrated Feature Section) and "Love on Mars" (13-20 December Illustrated Feature Section). These three tales, each running to some 4000 words in a vigorous Pulp sf mode, were long overlooked by Genre SF bibliographers but eventually assembled as The Martian Trilogy (coll/anth 2025), which also includes a considerable apparatus of contextual, critical, historical and biographical essays by various hands. Story texts in this volume are taken from Illustrated Feature Section inserts in the Virginia-based Richmond Planet.
The story action is set in 2030, opening in a USA with various Technological advances and apparently without racism (see Race in SF); all characters are Black. Our first-person narrator is a successful novelist whose latest work is sf set on Mars and because of this interest is chosen – indeed, more or less kidnapped – along with two distinguished Scientists to take part in a mission to that planet, masterminded by an industrialist whose latest Invention is the world's first reliable Spaceship. (Mention is made of one previous manned Rocket ship "a few years ago", which failed disastrously.) After a plausibly gruelling journey they land and are immediately captured by one of two Martian races, a small, ugly and Paranoid folk (apparently owing to past hardships on this unforgiving world) now living in a glass-roofed Underground City. Cast out to die on the planet's surface of "trackless snow and ice", the four Earthmen are promptly rescued by rival Martians who are good-looking and normal-sized humanoids inhabiting a similar underground city; their advanced science includes a Communications tower that detects and voices words spoken on Earth (evidently not radio broadcasts since the device has been operating for a thousand years), "explaining" why Mars has adopted the English language in only slightly modified form (see Linguistics). This Planetary Romance, apparently the first such tale by a Black author, might well have become an open-ended sequence but ceased with its third episode, which is mostly a tale-within-a-tale of violent rivalry between a Martian man from each race for the attentions of a beautiful but uncaring woman (see Women in SF).
Though perhaps more for its historical than its literary value, The Martian Trilogy is an important rediscovery. [DRL]
John P Moore
born USA
died USA
works
- The Martian Trilogy (Hillsboro, New Hampshire: Experimenter Publishing Company/Amazing Selects, 2025) [coll/anth: stories first appeared 4 October-20 December 1930 Illustrated Feature Section: with contextual, critical, historical and biographical essays: pb/John Jennings]
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