The Moon Maker by Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine and tells the story of the Flying Ring spaceship and its expedition to save Earth. Its female protagonist is Rhoda Gibbs, a mathematical genius who discovers a massive asteroid named Medusa that is barreling through space towards Earth. With a group, Gibbs travels into space to intercept Medusa by throwing it off its trajectory with a nuclear explosion, which ultimately results in the asteroid becoming a second moon to Earth.

The present lot shows Gibbs on the moon’s surface. She has lost track of time while exploring and is almost out of air. The picture is captioned She had entered the dust cloud raised by the Ring as it reached the surface. The image shows Gibbs staggering towards the Flying Ring after it has landed on a search-and-rescue mission to find Gibbs.

Gibbs is the third known female character depicted as an astronaut in a science fiction story. The probable first women to fly into space are those described in Andrew Laurie’s The Conquest of the Moon, published in 1889. The second likely female astronaut is the character Lilla Zaidie Rennick in George Griffith’s 1900 Honeymoon in Space, making Rhoda Gibbs the likely third woman in space in a science fiction publication.