STRANDED

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. Here, she is trying to retrace her steps and find the way back to the Flying Ring. The picture is captioned Rhoda staggered toward where the Ring would land. Would she arrive in time? The image shows the Flying Ring shooting up as the astronauts navigate the spaceship to save Gibbs before her air supply runs out.

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.