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Experience the Joy of the Pulps With The Incredible Pulps

Experience the Joy of the Pulps With The Incredible Pulps

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The Incredible Pulps-smallWe’ve been chatting a lot about pulp fantasy recently — for example, in our recent explorations of Appendix N, Unknown magazine, escaping our genre’s pulp roots, forgotten pulp villains, Clark Ashton Smith’s Martian pulp fiction, and much more.

I occasionally get asked what I mean by “pulp.” It’s not the most intuitive term, I’ll grant you that, especially for younger readers. For them, if it means anything it usually conjures up images of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and perhaps vague echoes of noir detective stories.

“Pulp fiction” means the fast-paced genre stories written for the popular magazines of the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, and modern fiction written in conscious emulation of that style. The most popular of the pulp magazines, including Argosy, Adventure, All-Story Weekly, and Detective Story, had reliable circulations in the hundreds of thousands. They cost a quarter or less, and were printed on cheap (pulp) paper, frequently with ragged, untrimmed edges.

The pulps are still discussed and collected today for a number of reasons. Several of the most important writers of the 20th century — including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, H.P. Lovecraft, Ralph Milne Farley, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Louis L’Amour, and Harold Lamb — got their start in the pulps. They featured some of the most famous heroes of the early 20th Century, including Doc Savage, The Shadow, Conan, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, Zorro, and many others.

But the best fiction from the pulps has been reprinted many times and — unless you’re Howard Andrew Jones, Stephen Haffner, or John C. Hocking, on the trail of an obscure or neglected author — you rarely dig through pulps for the fiction any more. No, there’s really only one reason most of us still collect pulps. And that’s the fabulous covers and artwork.

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Voices in Fantasy Literature, Part 1

Voices in Fantasy Literature, Part 1

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Apex Magazine March 2013-smallI have gone through phases of reading adventure fantasy, planetary romance, smoke and sorcery and epic fantasy. These sub-genres pack serious power.

Adventure fantasy is an adrenaline hit. Planetary romances like A Princess of Mars are shots of heroic wish fulfillment. And smoke and sorcery wallow in the grit of a spaghetti western.

I also go through phases where I’m looking for the emotional power and the subtle voice and character work of more literary fantasy. I recently read three pieces of short fantasy that hit me hard for different reasons. All are available online for free.

The first was “If You Were My Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky, Apex Magazine, March, 2013. Swirsky’s whimsical voice captivates the reader with a sing-song charm, but subversively so. The very brief story rolls faster and faster down a hill, on its way to a powerful cliff.

Here’s a sample to give you a taste of its romantic, earnest strangeness:

If you were a T-Rex, then I would become a zookeeper so that I could spend all my time with you. I’d bring you raw chickens and live goats. I’d watch the gore shining on your teeth. I’d make my bed on the floor of your cage, in the moist dirt, cushioned by leaves. When you couldn’t sleep, I’d sing you lullabies.

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The Rebirth of Ares Magazine

The Rebirth of Ares Magazine

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Ares Magazine 2014-smallIn the early ’80’s, Simulation Publications, Inc. (aka SPI) published a magazine named Ares. It included science fiction and fantasy along with articles and a complete game in every issue. It was short-lived, lasting only 19 issues, and Dragon revived it briefly within its own pages as an Ares section (see our review of issue #3 of the original magazine, featuring the game Barbarian Kings). And so it remained as an intriguing concept that simply ceased publication.

But that wasn’t the last hope for Ares. As Yoda would say, “No, there is another.” One Small Step Games, under Michael Anderson, decided to venture into remaking the old magazine. “The big idea is to fill a void,” says Anderson, “a new magazine that combines a standalone, unique, playable board game in every issue with a collection of spectacular, new fiction.”

With pay rates of five cents per word, Ares is serious about finding great fiction. Their preferred genres include fantasy, science fiction, horror, and pulp adventure.

They plan on publishing bi-monthly, and each issue will include 80 pages of fiction and other content, wrapped around the playable game. The first game will be War of the Worlds by independent game designer Bill Banks.

On January 1, Ares will launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding for this endeavor. If successful, the target delivery date for the first issue is May 1, 2014.

A magazine of speculative fiction AND a playable game? That sounds like a great combination to me.

Check out their website for more information: Ares Magazine.

November Short Story Roundup

November Short Story Roundup

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oie_852046AW469KF6The Autumn or November issue, or simply Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #18, finally showed up, so let me start this month’s roundup by digging right into Mssrs. Simmons’, Farney’s, and Ledbetter’s magazine.

Of the various fantasy magazines I read, HFQ is my favorite. Not only is it dedicated entirely to the subject matter of its title, its contents are consistently of the best quality. That means they find the stories that don’t settle for the usual and too-often-repeated S&S fixtures and are capable of stirring up the genre’s thick and tired blood.

In its pages I’ve read about chess with King Oberon, a desperate flight from a ghostly lion, and vast necromantic battles. I’ve found writers like Seamus Bayne and Michael R. Fletcher, who make me stop what I’m doing and read their stories. They also get great artists to create terrific banner art for them. This month’s image, “Song of Battlefield”, is by Norimichi Tanka.

One of the strongest appeals of S&S is its ability to sweep us out of our lives into more heroic places: somewhere life isn’t divided into hours spent in gray cubicles or cars stuck in traffic. The reality of such worlds would be much more grim and the rewards fleeting.

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Vintage Treasures: The Unknown, edited by D.R. Bensen

Vintage Treasures: The Unknown, edited by D.R. Bensen

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The Unknown edited by D R Bensen-smallIn all of our recent discussions of pulps, we have sorely neglected one of the greatest pulp fantasy magazines of all time: John W. Campbell’s magnificent Unknown. It wasn’t deliberate; we’ve just been focusing on Amazing Stories, Galaxy, and the pulp roots of Dungeons and Dragons of late.

So to do a little catch-up, I thought I’d talk about a splendid anthology I’ve been reading this weekend: The Unknown, a collection of ten short stories and one novelette from the pages of Unknown. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to quote from the Wikipedia entry on Unknown, since I think it does a fine job of summarizing the genesis and impact of Campbell’s great experiment in fantasy:

Unknown (also known as Unknown Worlds) was an American pulp fantasy fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1943 by Street & Smith, and edited by John W. Campbell. Unknown was a companion to Street & Smith’s science fiction pulp, Astounding Science Fiction, which was also edited by Campbell at the time; many authors and illustrators contributed to both magazines. The leading fantasy magazine in the 1930s was Weird Tales, which focused on shock and horror. Campbell wanted to publish a fantasy magazine with more finesse and humor than Weird Tales, and put his plans into action when Eric Frank Russell sent him the manuscript of his novel Sinister Barrier, about aliens who own the human race… The magazine is generally regarded as the finest fantasy fiction magazine ever published, despite the fact that it was not commercially successful, and in the opinion of science fiction historian Mike Ashley it was responsible for the creation of the modern fantasy publishing genre.

The Unknown contains an excellent survey of Unknown magazine, with entertaining editorial comments and fiction contributions from Henry Kuttner, Nelson S. Bond, Theodore Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, H. L. Gold, Manly Wade Wellman, Fredric Brown, and Anthony Boucher — plus a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale from Fritz Leiber, and more.

It also reprints interior art from the magazine by the great Edd Cartier (see a sample here), who painted the covers for many Unknown issues. I wish more paperbacks from the era did this, as I found the artwork delightful.

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A Step Into Dark Realms

A Step Into Dark Realms

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Dark Realms 25-smallI’ve always been a fan of small press magazines, especially genre magazines. That’s where you frequently find much of the cutting edge fiction and design — they take the kinds of creative risks that larger magazines simply can’t afford to. While I was running my own small press magazine, I didn’t have time to keep up on what was going on at the fringes, of course. And I missed out on a lot. But now that the print version of Black Gate is no longer an ongoing concern, I can afford more time to look around.

I bought my first issue of Dark Realms last week. A back issue, #25, cover dated Winter 2007. To be honest, I’m not sure what Dark Realms is all about, but it seems like my thing. The cover has a vampire dude, and promises to explore “The Inquisition” and the “The Dark Secrets of Loch Ness” inside. The subtitle reads “Exploring the Shadows of Art, Music, and Culture.” I’m up for that.

First thing I want to know, of course: is this thing still being published? Call it the ghoulish curiosity of a publisher with his own dead magazine. Sadly, I discovered I’m too late to actually support Dark Realms — the magazine give up the ghost five years ago, in 2008, after an impressive 32 issues.

From what I can tell after spending a few hours with it, Dark Realms is an odd mix of non-fiction, artwork, horror fiction, music reviews, and ads for goth necessities. However, while the magazine is visually very striking, it seems to rely heavily on a small number of contributors.

Issue #25 is a fine example. The moody and effective cover is by Joseph Vargo. On the inside front cover is a house ad for an art book and a tarot deck — both by Joseph Vargo. In the middle of the magazine is another ad, this one for Tales of the Dark Tower, a very professional-looking original anthology based upon characters created by Joseph Vargo. Turn the page and we come to the first fiction piece of the issue: “Spiders in the Attic,” written by… Joseph Vargo (with art by Joseph Vargo).

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Some Comments on the SFWA Rate Increase

Some Comments on the SFWA Rate Increase

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SFWA logoSo, I saw that SFWA (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) is raising their qualifying payrate from 5 cents/word to 6 cents/word. This rate is part of SFWA’s formula for determining whether a market or an individual sale is a professional sale for the purposes of qualifying for SFWA membership. With some other minor details, a writer can qualify for full SFWA membership with three professional short fiction sales, or the sale of one novel at professional pay.

The last time SFWA raised its qualifying rate was nine years ago, when social media was less developed than now, and I’ve already seen some reactions about what this will mean for magazines that qualify right now at 5 cents/word. Short fiction economics being what they are, a few magazines will be at a decision point. Do they incur the costs of raising their pay rates and remaining SFWA-qualifying markets, or do they remain at 5 cents/word and possibly lose out on that part of the author population that is looking for SFWA membership? Many magazines are volunteer-run operations (bless them!) and/or are running losses, and/or are making ends meet with grants and kickstarter campaigns. Publishing is not a business you go into to make money. Hayden Trenholm, publisher of Bundoran Press, often tosses out the old saw that the way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a big fortune.

Writers (and publishers) are human beings. They pour their hearts into acts of creation in defiance of odds and common sense (once again, bless them, and me, who participates in the insanity of creation against all advice just as much as anyone else). We all ache for acceptance and recognition of our art, and SFWA is powerful professional recognition. Someone is saying “You are good, we welcome you to our group.” Heady stuff for any artist, although that’s not exactly the wording on the acceptance note. Whether or not you subscribe to the whole professional association thing, our reactions as artists are very much human.

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Satellite, December 1956: A Retro-Review

Satellite, December 1956: A Retro-Review

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Satellite Science Fiction December 1956-smallThis is one of a great many ’50s digests. It began publication in October 1956 as a bimonthly, and became a monthly in 1959 for its last four issues (the last was May). 18 issues total. (Apparently the June and July issues were assembled at least to some degree.)

The publisher was Leo Margulies, and the editor for the first two issues was Sam Merwin, who had done good work with Startling Stories/Thrilling Wonder Stories.

According to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Margulies took over after that– although the ISFDB credits Cylvia Kleinmann for a number of the later issues. I tend to trust the SFE here, especially with Malcolm Edwards and Mike Ashley responsible for the entry.

That said, Kleinmann (Margulies’ wife) was also for a time editor of Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine (also published by Margulies) so very possibly she was the editor, or perhaps it was a collaborative effort, and, as Todd Mason notes, Margulies had a long history of fronting anthology projects (under his name) that were actually edited by others.

Frank Belknap Long edited the final four 1959 issues, which were letter-sized instead of digest.

For most of its run, Satellite featured “A Complete Novel in Each Issue” (according to the SFE, to compete with paperback novels). Based on the TOCs I’ve seen, these really were reasonable-length novels for the day – in the range of 40,000 words.

The December 1956 issue, the magazine’s second, has a promising TOC – stories by the likes of Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Gordon Dickson, Algis Budrys, and Michael Shaara among others. Indeed, the first few issues of the magazine were pretty promising, though it never really became a top market.

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The Shadow of Fu Manchu Falls Upon Me

The Shadow of Fu Manchu Falls Upon Me

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MaskMoviePortraitMovieMirrorMaskofFuManchuWithout Fu Manchu in my life, I would never have started down the path of penning these articles. One thing I was certain of was that there were no more surprises. I had found every official appearance of Sax Rohmer’s master villain and would, in due course, cover all of them in this blog eventually. So it seems appropriate that in this the year that marks the centennial of the first Fu Manchu novel, my 200th article covers a hitherto unknown official piece of Fu Manchu history.

A few weeks ago, I attended Classicon in Michigan and convention organizer, Ray Walsh handed me the January 1933 issue of Movie Mirror with Joan Bennet on the cover. The second feature was The Mask of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer. I suspected it was an excerpt from or serialization of the book I was unaware of and found it intriguing that it had eluded both Bob Briney and Larry Knapp, the two foremost Rohmer scholars who have done a phenomenal job of compiling bibliographical information on the author.What the issue actually contained was something far more valuable: an 11-page “fictionization” of the 1932 MGM film starring Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy, fully illustrated with stills from the movie, some of which were quite rare. The adaptation was credited to Constance Brighton, an author I have found no other information concerning which made me suspect the name was a pseudonym.

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Try Out Spellbound Magazine

Try Out Spellbound Magazine

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Spellbound Summer 2013-smallTwo weeks ago I reported on the great work editor Raechel Henderson was doing with Eggplant Literary Productions. The impetus was dropping by her booth at Windycon, where I saw the fabulous array of new fantasy novels and novellas she’d recently released, including new e-books from Lenora Rose, Laura J. Underwood, Lori Ann White, Patricia Russo, Martin Clark, and many others.

Eggplant is effectively a one-woman show, so I was tremendously impressed to see so many new titles. I know what it’s like to finance, edit, art direct, design, layout, produce, market and distribute one issue of a genre magazine every year… so just seeing the host of new releases Raechel had published in the last 12 months meant I needed to go have a bit of a lie down.

It’s not just her surprising accomplishments in the area of e-books, which are only a small part of Eggplant. On top of the book line, Raechel also produces the excellent Spellbound, a thriving new magazine that has published 19 issues since 1999.

Spellbound is a children’s fantasy e-zine  for kids 8-12 years of age, which makes it almost unique in the marketplace. It was originally launched in Fall 1999 and went on hiatus after 15 issues, after  the Spring 2003 issue. It was re-launched in Winter 2012 with greatly increased production values, including gorgeous color covers; so far Raechel has released four new issues like clockwork.

If you enjoy children literature — or have an inquisitive or imaginative child in your life — Spellbound makes a great value. Each issue contains original stories, poetry, art, and a Recommended Reading list, all centered around a special featured creature. The Fall 2013 issues showcased Creatures of the Deep, Dark Woods, with gorgeous cover art by Francesca Resta; the Summer 2013 issue focused on Dragons (click on the image at right for the full-sized cover art).

Individual issues of Spellbound are $5.00 (US) each; a four-issue, one year subscription is $20.00 (US). Order directly from the Eggplant website.

What’s next for Raechel and Eggplant Production? I’m not certain, but I’m looking forward to seeing what they produce next. Ignore them at your peril.