In November, Chicago-based Agita Publishing, formerly From Beyond Press, will publish three volumes of science fiction, adventure, and horror written by Black writers—Black Ink: Pulp Stories from Black Newspapers, 1929-1955.
While there may have been few people of color writing for pulp magazines in their heyday of the 1920s through 1950s, that doesn’t mean there weren’t Black writers creating their own tales of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror. Instead of mainstream pulps, they published in Black newspapers that had circulations in the hundreds of thousands. These stories of daring rogues, alien encounters, and future technologies are as exciting as any of the “classic” adventure fiction that continues to be lauded today. With three distinctive anthologies of stories all reprinted for the first time, the Black Ink series is a step toward placing those Black speculative fiction writers into the conversation that has long excluded them.
Each volume will have a novella-length work as its centerpiece:
Volume 1: William Thomas Smith’s The Black Stockings (1937), in which a white supremacist presidential candidate and his masked terrorist group, the Black Stockings, vow to kick all immigrants and minorities out of the country, and a Black guerrilla network armed with advanced weapons battles against them. Introduction by artist Cauleen Smith, cover art by Daimon Hampton.
Volume 2: Cora Ball Moten’s The Creeping Thing (1929), one of the first zombie stories in English, a truly terrifying horror-mystery hybrid about a detective investigating a strange series of disappearances in a bizarre southern mansion.
Volume 3: George H. Hill’s From Outer Space and The Orbit of Doom (1955), connected stories of flying saucers, espionage, and alien civilizations that are as thrilling as they are prescient. Each volume will contain additional pulp-style shorter stories that illustrate the striking breadth of genre fiction that Black newspapers provided readers.
The series is edited by Timothy R. Granger and Michael W. Phillips Jr. Granger, who writes fiction as Timaeus Bloom, is a graduate student in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Master’s Program at Florida Atlantic University. Phillips, the founder of Agita Publishing, holds a Master’s in history and has edited the Beyond Pulp Reprints series at Agita since its founding.
Agita Publishing, formerly From Beyond Press, is a Chicago-based publisher of science fiction, horror, contemporary fantasy, and poetry.