CZM Book Club: The Comet, by W.E.B. Du Bois
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.7 • 902 Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Margaret reads you a 1920 classic fiction story by the seminal theorist
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.0 | Cool Zone Media. |
| 0:11.2 | Book club, book club, book club, book club, book club. Hello, and welcome to Coolzone Media Book Club. |
| 0:19.6 | The only book club where you don't have to do the reading, because I do it for you. |
| 0:24.3 | I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week I bring you, usually, stories. |
| 0:29.1 | And this week, I'm bringing you a story by someone that I didn't even realize wrote fiction, but someone that I've referenced a lot in my historian research, historical research. |
| 0:38.7 | I'm not really a historian, but in the history podcast that I run. |
| 0:43.0 | Because I'm going back to a story from 1920 written by the civil rights leader, Harvard-trained sociologist and prolific author, W.E.B. Du Bois. Basically, if you've heard me reference on |
| 0:59.4 | cool people who did cool stuff, the idea that the Civil War was won by the general strike |
| 1:07.2 | of enslaved people in the U.S. South and how that crippled the Confederate economy. |
| 1:11.7 | I'm referencing W.E.B. Du Bois, and he's written a lot, but that's the most influential on my |
| 1:18.4 | understanding of history. W.E.B. Du Bois was born in 1868, and he is primarily known as a non-fiction |
| 1:26.7 | writer, most notably the souls of black folk and black |
| 1:31.0 | reconstruction in america but he also left us some fiction that explored ideas he couldn't articulate |
| 1:37.2 | with his non-fiction work and it's it's actually good fiction just to be clear sometimes when |
| 1:42.6 | non-fiction writers are like i I'm going to write a story. |
| 1:45.4 | They're not nailing it. But yeah, no, the story is very good. De Bois was one of the founders of the |
| 1:54.4 | NWACP and was a longtime editor of its newspaper, which is called The Crisis, which is a fantastic name for a paper. |
| 2:03.1 | Politically, he was a pan-Africanist and sympathetic to socialism and found capitalism to be the |
| 2:07.9 | root cause of fascism, though pragmatism and personal conflicts with socialist organizers |
| 2:12.9 | often led him back to electoral politics. This story, the Comet, is a pillar of early 20th century black science fiction, |
| 2:23.3 | and a lot of critics look back on it as an early example of Afrofuturism. |
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