There’s certainly been a resurgence of pulp reprints in recent times. Between publishers such as Black Dog Books, Steeger Press, DMR Books and many others, one might think that there’s not much left that hasn’t been reprinted. I can assure you there’s no shortage of unreprinted material, some of it quite good, in fact. A Million Years in the Future by Thomas P. Kelley, which was serialized in Weird Tales in 1940, falls in this category.

The title is extraordinarily precise: the novel takes place in the year 1,001,940. Over the past five hundred millennia Earth has been repeatedly ravaged by invaders from other galaxies, the most vicious of which are the Black Raiders from the distant planet Capara. As a result of these assaults, Earth has descended into a state of savagery.

The narrator of the story is Jan, Prince of the Bardonian tribe. When Jan spots one of the Black Raiders’ ships land nearby, he brazenly attacks the ship’s few guards. Despite being armed only with a pair of swords, he manages to slay them all with his amazing combat skill. However, he is taken unaware and captured when reinforcements arrive. The ship’s commander sentences him to slavery on the Moon of Lost Souls. Having no further use for the despoiled Earth, the Black Raiders wipe out all life on the planet with their Vapors of Vengeance. Jan is now the last Earthman alive, with nothing left to live for but revenge.

Jan, of course, manages a daring escape from the Moon of Lost Souls. During the course of his adventures he makes allies (such as Abel the bird-man and Princess Vonna of Penelope, another planet conquered by the Raiders) as well as enemies (such as the Vampire-Women of the Moon of Madness and Queen Tara, the immortal ruler of Capara that the Black Raiders worship as a goddess). Jan discovers not one but two methods of completely annihilating the Raiders’ home planet—the question is, will he be able to pull it off?

A Million Years in the Future is a highly entertaining story, although not a flawless one. There are a few coincidences that seem too lucky or improbable, but no more than you would find in the typical Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. Burroughs’ popularity didn’t seem to suffer for it. Therefore I think most fans of action/adventure science fiction would be too caught up in the excitement of the fast-paced plot to dwell on the imperfections of A Million Years in the Future.

Despite being serialized over four issues, A Million Years in the Future never made the cover of Weird Tales. Illustrations by Hannes Bok appeared in the magazine, however. Check them out in the gallery below.