A Rain of Frogs
~ Hooray for the Pulps
by Rob Hunter
eBooks as the pulps of the 21st Century
The Runaway Bungalow, Otherworlds etc...
We who bend over a flickering monitor, squinting past our failing eyesight to extract the last vital juices from the word that will say it all... Oops, excuse me. Forgot the word. Shift, F7. Ahhh... the Thesaurus, now where was I? Yes. Can we ever hope to run with the writers who decorated the age of the pulps? Full color covers—tumbled towers, space ships like the Skylark of Valeron, heroes like Doc Smith and Conan the Barbarian and captive maidens a-quiver with unspeakable horror inside their (yet to be invented) Spandex brassieres. The pulps were a dream. You can’t outdo a dream armed with but puny successes of 21st Century technology.
Otherworlds—a new anthology from SpecFicWorld.com—is a PDF download, but don’t let that stop you. The e-book format was supposed to be the Next Big Thing; genre and niche writers of every complexion would revel in the streets. Nope, didn’t happen. On the plus side, in an amazingly short twenty years, we have all figured out how our computers work. Electronic books are cheap, easy, and get where they’re supposed to go most of the time. Nice. (In the interest of full disclosure, I was at one time signed on as a contributor to Otherworlds with my novella, The Runaway Bungalow. Bungalow subsequently became a stand-alone offering beside Otherworlds in SpecFicWorld.com's Featured Fiction section.)
When I was a kid, I recall standing in line at the corner newsstand (Elroy Keller’s drug store on Center St. in Milwaukee, WI) waiting for the truck to arrive, chuck its wired-together bundles of the latest pulps, and speed thence to the distant suburbs where legions of kids like me waited hopefully. OK, the ladies on the shiny covers didn’t wear much in the way of clothes, heady stuff for a 7th grader. This was the 40s, remember? Get a life.
Here we are, stuck in the 21st Century—now what do we do? Until a cheaper, faster modus of transporting non-mass-market, limited edition, small press run stuff from writer to reader comes along, I’ll opt for the e-formats. Our reach should exceed our grasp, else what’s a heaven for?
There once was a golden age when I was barely old enough to slip in under
the tent flap and into the show. We now call it the golden age of the pulps.
The pages were raggedy-edged and they were expensive. Well, twenty-five
cents mostly, but they were thick. Tales of wonderment and awe, a life of
adventure and romance down at the corner drug store. Good stuff.
My humble submission is: e-format publishing is the closest thing the 21st Century has to the pulps of my childhood. These e-thingys are the new pulps. And inside? The pulp pieces we would have written long ago if we had been around then to write them, surpassing perhaps, the Feng Shui articulations of period pulp-fiction where we secretly live our dreams. (A note: to be sure I had used the term Feng Shui as I meant it to be understood, i.e. a balancing of our human selves between heaven and earth, I abandoned typing and slipped away for some quality Google time. Top of the list: “Attract more Health, Wealth & Love. Secrets they don't want you to know.” Ahh... not quite. I got back to things.)
How’s about sex with alien vegetable life-forms? Uh... in the heyday of the pulps we would have to have called it “inter-species hanky-panky.” Mercurio D. Rivera calls his tale “Sleeping with the Anemone.” And—again, bear with me: the F7 key seems to be stuck—a case of intra-species hanky-panky, none dare call it “incest,” a word I had not yet heard in the 40s—in the surprisingly crafted “Hermaphrodites Are from Mercury” by Trent Roman.
The offerings of Otherworlds—including Ian Faulkner’s “Cadmus Graves and the Missing Clone,” Lawrence Dagstine’s “Human Transfer,” Mercurio Rivera’s “Sleeping with the Anemone,” and “Heramphrodites are from Mercury” by Trent Roman are... well, pulpy. These guys have tapped the magic well of pulpitude:
Slurp, slurp, slurp, Cadmus Graves is on the case as a badly molded jelly baby stalks the night in Faulkner’s private eye comedy noir piece.
Tiny touches hinting at a post-climate-disruption apocalypse but without belaboring it, show a fine touch. Dagstine in Human Transfer: “Citizenship deportation papers for the North American Peninsula will cost $70,000...”
Mommy, mommy! It's eating the linoleum...
This is Exurbia, America. Teardrop-shaped Cars of Tomorrow strain at their tethers, hovering beside perfectly manicured shrubbery, miniature robot aphids scuttle relentlessly, devouring their flesh and ichor cousins, through roundabouts and cul-de-sacs designed to please—but not arouse—the eye. Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver flicker abandoned, guttering blue-gray images on a neglected TV. Where are the children? Why with their identical Moms in their identical yards, of course, out back past the swing set, waving farewell to a platoon of space-suited male parents as they blast off. “Careful—Janice, Timmy. Daddy’s backwash, remember?”
With military precision a line of rocket-packed Dads ascends from the back patios of Anytown, USA to zoom to the City.
Ah, for the days when a writer didn’t have to figure out how a gizmo worked, just had to come up with a concept and a name. Skimmer. Anti-grav, terraforming, collective intelligence, hyper-drive. In the 1930s and 40s there was a pavilion of wonder called the pulps and their cousins, the Sunday supplements and Popular Science. We have the Internet and cable TV. And with any luck the interregnum separating us from the last golden age is about to end. If you compare the cost of today’s e-rendering of the pulps I once waited for with a quarter and two nickels clutched in a sweaty palm, the price has—even figuring for inflation—gone down! The pulps are thriving and well, thank you, in the 21st Century.
A footnote on the pulps.
Esmeralda: What is your name?
Butch: Butch.
Esmeralda: What does it mean?
Butch: I'm American, honey. Our names don't mean shit.
—from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, the movie
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pulp Fiction (uncapitalized) as a free standing phenomenon at a three-generational remove from Quentin Tarantino’s film, some explication on what lies lurking inside the shaggy covers:
“...this is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.
“No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell.
“The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else. Here's how it starts:
1. A DIFFERENT MURDER METHOD FOR VILLAIN TO USE
2. A DIFFERENT THING FOR VILLAIN TO BE SEEKING
3. A DIFFERENT LOCALE
4. A MENACE WHICH IS TO HANG LIKE A CLOUD OVER HERO
“One of these DIFFERENT things would be nice, two better, three swell. It may help if they are fully in mind before tackling the rest.”
...from William Denton’s “The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot,” itself an abstract of Bigger Than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage by Marilyn Cannaday (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990), a biography of Lester Dent.) You may want to check this one out. The Denton website flies under the banner of the Miskatonic University Press are well worth your time. Mr. Denton is a web librarian at York University in Toronto.
Technorati tags: Pulp Fiction (the movie), Pulp fiction (the magazines)