Pulp Fantasy, Pulp Science Fiction and Pulp Horror and Pulp Everything Else

[BAYLOR]

Your thoughts on the quality of the works and, the writers ,most of whom who labored for so little money to produce them. And what are favorites and why?

 

[hitmouse]

A curate's egg.
Most of it is completely disposable fun but it contains some nuggets of genius, often naive, as one might expect from prose published in such huge volume. Modern SF and its aesthetic crystallised from the pulps, and most of the great mid-20th century SF writers earned their bread, at least initially, from publishing in the pulps. Naming individuals is a bit pointless, because they were all at it.

 

[Swank]

 

[paranoid marvin]

Does this include the 'Amazing Stories/Fantastic Tales etc comics? I remember seeing these US publications in the UK as a child, and being mesmerised not only by the imagination of the stories, but also by the toys you could buy through mail order (but sadly couldn't be delivered to the UK!). From memory most of the stories were told by way of comic strips, and any chance I had to get them I did.

 

[BAYLOR]

Does this include the 'Amazing Stories/Fantastic Tales etc comics? I remember seeing these US publications in the UK as a child, and being mesmerised not only by the imagination of the stories, but also by the toys you could buy through mail order (but sadly couldn't be delivered to the UK!). From memory most of the stories were told by way of comic strips, and any chance I had to get them I did.

Yes.

 

[BAYLOR]

Does this include the 'Amazing Stories/Fantastic Tales etc comics? I remember seeing these US publications in the UK as a child, and being mesmerised not only by the imagination of the stories, but also by the toys you could buy through mail order (but sadly couldn't be delivered to the UK!). From memory most of the stories were told by way of comic strips, and any chance I had to get them I did.

I know im quoting this again but this question just occurred to me . Did magazine like Weird Tales ever make it to the UK?

 

[BAYLOR]

`I very highly recommend The Spider novels by Norvell Page.

 

[BAYLOR]

Doc Savage Man Of Bronze by Kenneth Roberson

 

[BAYLOR]

The Shadow by Walter Brown Gibson another great series . superb writing

 

[BAYLOR]

Henry Bedford Jones 1887 to 1849 pulp writer referee to as The Kind of the Pulps wrote of the genres, Western , detective stories , science , historical adventure stories fiction novels and short stories and quite a alot of both. and example of a short story he wrote Gimlet Eye Gunn. I found him while looking some info about Robert E Howards.

He wrote D'Artaganon which is. sequel to The Three Musketeers.

 

[Vince W]

Dumas himself wrote two sequels to The Three Musketeers; Twenty Years Later and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Lawrence Ellsworth of TSR games fame has been retranslating the entire Musketeers saga into one cohesive tale.

 

[BAYLOR]

Dumas himself wrote two sequels to The Three Musketeers; Twenty Years Later and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Lawrence Ellsworth of TSR games fame has been retranslating the entire Musketeers saga into one cohesive tale.

The Man in the Iron Mask is also a sequel.. Dumas wrote something 277 novels in his lifetime, he disparagingly described as a novel factory , one could argue that he was precursor to Pulp writers.

Henry Bedford Jones was far more prolific than Dumas.

 

[KGeo777]

The illustrations were very influential. I assume the idea of the bug-eyed alien monster came out of the pulps and the giant biped robot.
There's a sub genre called Men's Adventure Fiction which was at its height in the 1960s I believe, they tended not to have any fantasy or sci-fi elements from what I gather. But some of them may have been inspired by Doc Savage and other action-oriented stories.

What stands out to me from my modest sampling of the pulp fiction era is that unlike the superhero, they usually were about normal people rather than mutations or alien--enhanced heroes. Not sure how many villains were presented as tragic either. Trying to think if any of Conan's foes were ever depicted as pitiful. Maybe one or two of the evil queens were given a little sympathy.
The aesthetic qualities of the illustrations in terms of how they sold the ideas--lots of gun action. And many blondes. I always think of Buster Crabbe with their art work. Or a German political ad of the 1930s.

 

[KiraAnn]

Henry Bedford Jones 1887 to 1849 pulp writer referee to as The Kind of the Pulps

So old Henry was -37 when he died? And he was kind to pulps?

 

[Extollager]

I know im quoting this again but this question just occurred to me . Did magazine like Weird Tales ever make it to the UK?

Do you mean pulp horror magazines "like Weird Tales"? I don't know. The lurid, quasi-pornographic covers might have disgusted British distributors too much if the mags ever did reach Britain.

We do know that sf pulps reached England. C. S. Lewis used to read some of them. The might be sold at Woolworth's stores. Read the article below for details.

C. S. Lewis Was a Reader of American Pulp Magazines

This article is posted here for discussion. C. S. Lewis and American Pulp Science Fiction By Dale Nelson C. S. Lewis, Oxford don and then Cambridge scholar specializing in medieval and Renaissance literature – an impressionable reader of American science fiction pulps? The inventor of...

www.sffchronicles.com

 

[BAYLOR]

So old Henry was -37 when he died? And he was kind to pulps?

1887 to 1949