Browsed by
Category: Pulp

Pellucidar Break: The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Pellucidar Break: The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Comments 7 comments

monster-men-original-dust-jacketI’ve reached the halfway point on my retrospective of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels — and if I’ve learned one thing from having done two other complete ERB retrospectives (aside from never get in a flying vehicle with Carson Napier), it’s that I should take a break before plunging forward into the second half. Or maybe plunging down into the second half. Once a Burroughs series enters the late 1930s, the drop off in quality can get frightfully steep.

So before going Back to the Stone Age, I’m rewinding to the salad days of ERB’s career and exploring a lesser-known work: a take on Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau filtered through the pulp jungle adventure; a book of great promises and great frustrations.

The story that would eventually become The Monster Men is an ambitious thematic and character experiment that explodes with the exuberance of early Edgar Rice Burroughs. It’s also a misfire where generic pulp elements and a terrible ending undermines the potential for one of its author’s most intriguing works. The ebullience of youthful ERB bursts through, but the control and follow-through with complex ideas seem to have been left to the concurrent Tarzan, Mars, and Pellucidar series.

Burroughs wrote the novel in April 1913 during a feverish period between The Cave Girl and The Warlord of Mars. He may have devised the idea in late 1912 as a short story. But he soon discovered the short story wasn’t his medium and expanded the idea into a full-length book titled “Number Thirteen.” It appeared as “A Man without a Soul” in the November 1913 issue of All Story. For its first book publication in 1929, the name was changed to The Monster Men, by far the weakest of the trio of titles, but the one we’re stuck with. “The Man without a Soul” had been used as the title for the U.K. book publication of The Mucker, which probably accounts for the change. The title coincidence between these two books, however, isn’t exactly a coincidence, something I’ll examine later.

…

Read More Read More

Thrilling, Startling, Futuristic: The Adventure House Pulp Reprints

Thrilling, Startling, Futuristic: The Adventure House Pulp Reprints

Comments 2 comments
Adventure House Thrilling Wonder-small Adventure House Captain Future-small Adventure House Startling Stories-small

I acquired many fine treasures at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Show here in Chicago last week. And there were more than a few that escaped my vile clutches. One of the biggest mistakes I made was not spending more time in the Adventure House booth. I passed it several times — you couldn’t really miss it, they had an absolutely marvelous wall display with hundreds of colorful pulps — and just about every time my eye was drawn to a rack crammed full of high-quality pulp replicas. Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories. Captain Future, Startling Stories, all bright and crisp and brand new… it looked like a magazine rack from the 1930s, catapulted eight decades into the future.

Now, I’ve picked up one or two pulp replicas in my day. They’re not just reprints of the editorial contents of old pulp magazines, but photostatted replicas, right down to the ads. For example, Girasol Collectables in Canada does a brisk business in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and Spicy Detective replicas. Most cost $35 each, which is more than I paid for the original issues of Weird Tales I have in my collection. So I’m a little guns shy about replicas, and I didn’t stop to investigate that eye-catching rack.

But I thought about it after the show was over, and two minutes online showed me that Adventure House pulp reprints are broadly available — at Amazon and other online sellers — and that they’re much more reasonably priced than the Girasol variety, at just $14.95 each!

…

Read More Read More

Evil Wizards, Robot Guardians, and the Maze of the Minotaur: Rich Horton on The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson

Evil Wizards, Robot Guardians, and the Maze of the Minotaur: Rich Horton on The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson

Comments 1 comment
Unknown March 1940-small The Reign of Wizardry Lancer The Reign of Wizardry Sphere-small

Jack Williamson’s novel The Reign of Wizardry was originally published in three installments in the grand old pulp magazine Unknown, beginning in the March 1940 issue (above left, cover by M. Isip). Its first complete appearance was as a 1964 Lancer paperback (middle), with a cover by none other than Frank Frazetta. It’s been reprinted nearly a dozen times since, including a 1981 paperback edition from Sphere in the UK (right, artist uncredited), and most recently in the 2008 Haffner Press collection Gateway to Paradise.

Jack Williamson was a SFWA Grand Master. His first story appeared in Amazing Stories in 1928 when he was 20 years old and, in a remarkable career than spanned nearly eight decades, he was still winning major awards in his 90s, including a Hugo and a Nebula for his novella “The Ultimate Earth” (Analog, December 2000). He died in 2006, at the age of 98.

The Reign of Wizardry enjoyed multiple editions over the decades, and last year it was nominated for a Retro Hugo for Best Novel of 1941 (it lost out to A.E. van Vogt’s Slan). Recently Rich Horton gave it a warts-and-all review at his website Strange at Ecbatan.

…

Read More Read More

Vintage Treasures: Famous Fantastic Mysteries, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: Famous Fantastic Mysteries, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg

Comments 7 comments

Famous Fantastic Mysteries Weinberg-smallI spent yesterday and Friday at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback show in Lombard, Illinois, about 30 minutes from my house. And as soon as I finish this article, I’m going to scoot over there again.

I found a great many treasures at this show this year. More than usual, even. And I’m looking forward to reporting on them here. One of the more interesting was a copy of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, a 1991 pulp reprint anthology from Gramercy edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg, in terrific shape, which I bought for just $5.

Famous Fantastic Mysteries was a much-beloved fantasy pulp which ran from 1939 to 1953. The publisher was Frank A. Munsey, a name well known to pulp fans. The first bi-monthly issue was cover-dated September-October 1939, and contained A. Merritt’s “The Moon Pool,” Ray Cummings’ “The Girl in the Golden Atom,” and stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Donald Wandrei, and many others. The magazine was a success, and it quickly switched from bi-monthly to monthly.

While the magazine relied chiefly on reprints, especially in the early days, it commissioned original art from many of the top artists of the day, especially Virgil Finlay and Lawrence Sterne Sevens, and today is treasured as much for the fabulous covers and interior art as the fiction.

In its 81 issues, Famous Fantastic Mysteries offered reprints of SF and fantasy pulp stories by Max Brand, E. F. Benson, Robert W. Chambers, William Hope Hodgson, Lord Dunsany, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and countless others, as well as brand new fiction from Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, Margaret St. Clair, Arthur C. Clarke, Donald A. Wollheim, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and many more. See the complete issue checklist at Galactic Central.

…

Read More Read More

Total Pulp Victory: Windy City Pulp & Paper, Part II

Total Pulp Victory: Windy City Pulp & Paper, Part II

Comments 10 comments

Horror on the Asteroid at Windy City Pulp 2016-small

Horror on the Asteroid, and other fabulous treasures

Happy Saturday morning everyone!

I leaped out of bed this morning, and hastily started packing up to head out to the Windy City Pulp and Paperback show in nearby Lombard, IL. I spent most of the day there yesterday, catching up with Jason Waltz, Arin Komins, Rich Warren, David Willoughby, Bob Garcia, Doug Ellis, and many other old friends… and more than a few fellow happy buyers and sellers.

I also found more than a few treasures, including a seller in the back with an absolutely gorgeous collection of 1970s and 80s science fiction paperbacks that looked glossy and flawless. He was asking $2 each, in many cases less than the original cover price, so it was like stepping back in time and plucking brand new books by Roger Zelanzy, Sherri Tepper, H. Beam Piper, P.C. Hodgell, Gene Wolfe, and Robert E. Howard off the shelves. I even found a complete set of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence, which Fletcher Vredenburgh enthusiastically wrote up here at Black Gate. I spent a small fortune at that booth alone, and it took a few trips back to the car to carry all my bags.

Windy City has the kind of treasures I cannot find anywhere else, like rare Arkham House collections and early issues of Weird Tales, and even a copy of the first collection by my favorite pulp writer, Edmond Hamilton’s The Horror on the Asteroid and Other Tales of Planetary Horror, published in hardcover by Philip Allan in 1936. I’ve only seen one copy in my entire life, and that was at last year’s show, resting on a table among dozens of other near-priceless volumes, like early first editions of Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert A Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and lots more (click the image above for a closer look).

…

Read More Read More

A Tale of Three Covers: Allen Steele Resurrects Captain Future

A Tale of Three Covers: Allen Steele Resurrects Captain Future

Comments 6 comments
Captain Future Winter 1941 Asimovs-October-1985-small Avengers-of-the-Moon-smaller

Captain Future was created by editor Mort Weisinger way back in 1940, but it was the great pulp writer Edmond Hamilton who made him popular. Hamilton wrote dozens of stories featuring the futuristic adventurer between 1940 and 1951, such as “Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones,” which appeared in the Winter 1941 issue of Captain Future: Man of Tomorrow (above left, cover by Earle K. Bergey). Most of Hamilton’s short novels were reprinted in paperback in the 60s, and there was even a 1978-79 anime production that brought the Captain some fame in markets like Spain and Germany, but in general the character was long forgotten here in the US by the mid-80s.

In 1995, Allen Steele wrote “The Death of Captain Future,” a fond homage to Hamilton’s classic tales. It was the cover story for the October 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, with a stellar retro-pulp cover by Black Gate cover artist Todd Lockwood (click the image above left to see Todd’s original painting). “The Death of Captain Future” was nominated for a Nebula Award, and won the Hugo Award for best novella of the year. Steele returned to the same characters four years later with “The Exile of Evening Star” (Asimov’s SF, January 1999).

Fast forward nearly 20 years, and we find Steele’s brand new novel Avengers of the Moon on sale at bookstores across the country. It returns once again to Hamilton’s Captain Future milieu, but with a more ambitious tale, and this time Steele hews much closer to the original source material, right down to Captain Future’s colorful cast of sidekicks, and the villainous U1 Quorn, a half-Martian renegade scientist. Avengers of the Moon was published in hardcover by Tor Books this week; the cover artist is uncredited.

…

Read More Read More

Julius Schwartz on A. Merritt, Amazing Stories, and the First Worldcon

Julius Schwartz on A. Merritt, Amazing Stories, and the First Worldcon

Comments 2 comments

sfcon08 - darrow - williamson signing - schwartz - unknown - ruppert-small

The first Worldcon, July 1939. Left to right: Jack Darrow, Jack Williamson,
Julius Schwartz, unknown, and Conrad Rupert. Photo by Bill Dellenback

While letters from and to Otto Binder made up the majority of the correspondence I acquired from the estate of Clifford Kornoelje (aka in science fiction circles as Jack Darrow), Binder wasn’t the only science fiction notable that Darrow corresponded with. One of his other correspondents was Julius Schwartz, remembered today for his roles in both the science fiction and comics fields. I thought I’d post two of those letters from Schwartz — along with some related material — today.

The first letter from Schwartz to Darrow is dated December 12, 1932. The Mort that he refers to in several places is their mutual friend, Mort Weisinger. It has a mention of Astounding, a mention of a dinner that Schwartz (and presumably Weisinger as well) will be having with pulp author David H. Keller. And most particularly, it has an interesting bit resulting from an interview that Schwartz had conducted with A. Merritt two weeks earlier. I don’t know if Merritt actually sued Amazing, as Schwartz claims, or whether he just threatened them, but Amazing did run an apology in their June 1933 issue.

…

Read More Read More

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Tarzan at the Earth’s Core

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar Saga: Tarzan at the Earth’s Core

Comments 5 comments

tarzan-at-the-earths-core-first-edition-j-allen-st-johnYou’ll believe a Stegosaurus can fly!

In the time I’ve written about Edgar Rice Burroughs for Black Gate, only once have I examined one of his Tarzan books. That was eight years ago. This lack of Tarzan representation isn’t because I dislike the character. A number of the early Tarzan adventures rate among my favorite Burroughs novels, and I’ll defend Tarzan of the Apes as one of the twentieth century’s Great Books. But since there’s more information available about Tarzan than any other Burroughs series, my literary adventuring was more interesting when it stayed in hinterlands of ERBiana.

However, it’s a thrill to have the ape-man swing in through the side door during one of my series retrospectives. Let’s welcome Tarzan onto the stage of Pellucidar. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Sagoths of all ages … it’s crossover time!

Our Saga: Beneath our feet lies a realm beyond the most vivid daydreams of the fantastic … Pellucidar. A subterranean world formed along the concave curve inside the earth’s crust, surrounding an eternally stationary sun that eliminates the concept of time. A land of savage humanoids, fierce beasts, and reptilian overlords, Pellucidar is the weird stage for adventurers from the topside layer — including a certain Lord Greystoke. The series consists of six novels, one which crosses over with the Tarzan series, plus a volume of linked novellas, published between 1914 and 1963.

Today’s Installment: Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1929–30)

Previous Installments: At the Earth’s Core (1914), Pellucidar (1915), Tanar of Pellucidar (1929)

The Backstory

Although most of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels occur in the same universe, linked through the author’s fictional surrogate version of himself, Tarzan at the Earth’s Core is the only point where a character from one series leaps to another as the protagonist. It’s the fourth Pellucidar novel and the thirteenth Tarzan novel — full crossover achieved for the first and last time in the ERB canon.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One by Seabury Quinn

Future Treasures: The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One by Seabury Quinn

Comments 6 comments

The Horror on the Links The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin Volume One-smallToday Weird Tales is chiefly remembered as the magazine that launched the careers of the great pulp fantasy writers of the 20th Century. But as most fans of the Grand old Lady of the pulps know, the most popular Weird Tales author wasn’t Robert E. Howard, or H.P. Lovecraft, but Seabury Quinn, someone whom is almost completely forgotten today. Quinn’s supernatural detective Jules De Grandin — a top-seller in the 20s and 30s, appearing in over ninety stories and a single novel between 1925 and 1951 — has been out of print for decades. Night Shade rectifies that injustice with the first volume of The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, arriving in hardcover next week.

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.

Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries — and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!) — captivated readers for nearly three decades.

Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero.

The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from “The Horror on the Links” (1925) to “The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by Robert Weinberg.

The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin, Volume One will be published by Night Shade Books on April 4, 2017. It is 512 pages, priced at $34.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition. Not sure who did the cover, but I’m working on it.

A Jaunt Through Clark Ashton Smith’s Collected Fantasies—Vol. 1: The End of the Story

A Jaunt Through Clark Ashton Smith’s Collected Fantasies—Vol. 1: The End of the Story

Comments 8 comments

Clark-ashton-smith-end-of-the-story-wildside-press-coverI’ve read the complete works of Clark Ashton Smith. And I’ve been known to write at length about them, or to chat with journalists on the topic. There’s nothing unusual about this, since Smith ranks among my favorite five or so authors of all time.

But only recently did I decide to undertake reading his fantasy stories in the original order he wrote them. I can thank Night Shade Books’ five volume series, The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, for making this an easier task than it would’ve been only a few years ago. When the series started to appear in 2007, the hardcover volumes went out of print rapidly. Even a hardcore fan like myself couldn’t justify a purchase of one of the high-priced used copies.

However, as of 2016, all five of The Collected Fantasies are now available in inexpensive trade paperbacks that can be purchased through online retailers with a few clicks. The texts for these volumes have been meticulously prepared (no simple feat considering the revisions and alternate versions published in the past) and offered in the chronological order of composition.

I’m taking a stroll through these editions to read the stories as they were imagined and committed to paper. Instead of regaling you with further long essays, I’m going to take on the role of sightseer, bringing back notes and a slideshow presentation about the best — and the rest — of each volume.

By the way, if you are new to Clark Ashton Smith, the Night Shade editions aren’t the best way to start out. They’re aimed at the collector and long-time connoisseur. I recommend the Penguin Classics collection The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies as a better Smith introduction. If you like the heady journey, there’s much more to explore in the dark fathoms below…

…

Read More Read More