John Young Brown

(1858-1921) US educator and author, almost certainly the son of Kentucky politician John Young Brown (1835-1902) and the father and grandfather of later Kentucky politicians who bore the same name, one of whom was governor of the state (1979-1983). The protagonist of his sf novel, To the Moon and Back in Ninety Days: A Thrilling Narrative of Blended Science and Adventure (1922), hitches a ride on a spaceship powered by Antigravity device to the Moon. The discovery of Selenites there turns out to be a hoax but the trip was real. The posthumous publication of the tale was arranged by residents of the small city of Providence, Kentucky, where Brown had been a popular teacher; he had indeed written his novel partly for educational purposes. In The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Critical and Biographical History (1991), Jack L Chalker and Mark Owings suggest that the novel may have been partially inspired by the magazine version of Hugo Gernsback's Ralph 124C41+ (April 1911-March 1912 Modern Electrics); they further argue that Lunar Publishing Co, the company created to publish To the Moon and Back, is the first genre imprint in the twentieth century.