Way before the advent of comic books or paperback novels, our geeky forebears got their fill of escapist exploits from those descendants of the penny dreadful, the cheaply printed, but oh so delectable pulp magazines. Starting with Argosy in 1896 and peaking in the 20s and 30s, the pulps or dime novels were a fecund morass which nurtured the genres of Science Fiction, Westerns, Crime Drama, Historical Romance, Mystery, and Horror as well as the Science Heroes that developed into the Superheroes we see conquering the box-offices of today.

I was born at least a generation and a half too late too experience the pulps when they came out, but they do figure in my memories as a very young reader. Visiting my Great-Aunt Vicky and Great-Uncle Bob at their used bookstore in Maine I would beg to spend the night in the attic. With a flickering Coleman lantern I'd wile away the hours devouring Pogo comics, the Heinlein juveniles, and the adventures of none other than The Shadow. My favorite lullaby was a pair of pearl-handled .45s blazing into the night. Even now Lamont Cranston/Kent Allard's terrifying laughter echoes through my fondest memories. But I digress, constantly.

This anthology of all previously unpublished work tears out of the gate with Joe Lansdale's "The Crawling Sky" The Reverend Jebediah Mercer from the novel Dead in the West is once again Hell-bent for leather hunting down eldritch horror in the East Texas badlands. Here the Rev gives an accounting for himself:

I am on a mission from God. I do not like it, but it is my mission. I'm a hunter of the dark and a giver of the light. I'm the hammer and the anvil. The bone and the sinew. The sword and the gun. God's man who sets things right. Or at least as right as God sees them. Me and him, we do not always agree. And let me tell you, he is not the God of Jesus, he is the God of David, and the angry city killers and man killers and animal killers of the Old Testament. He constantly jealous and angry and if there is any plan to all this, I have yet to see it.
...It is my lot in life to destroy evil. There is more evil than there is me, I might add.

Oh. Yeah.
How's that for a cover letter? Try reciting that over a few belts of whiskey at your local watering hole in your best approximation of a Nacogdoches drawl. The results can be quite efficacious. I need more Rev. Mercer stories.

The Weird West feel is also strong in "Quiet Bullets" by Christopher Golden, but owing more to Rod Serling or Ray Bradbury than H.P. Lovecraft. Golden takes us back to those simple innocent times of being ten years old and all the fear and confusion that entails mixed with the cozy chills a really good ghost story can deliver. The creepiness continues as we discover something terribly wrong with William F. Nonaln's "Perfect Nanny" and pull back the lid of what we think we know in Cherie Priest's "Catastrophe Box". Ms. Priest was inspired by a case of real-life psychic researcher Harry Price (1881-1948) but her conclusion goes way past mere table-rapping at séances or wimpy cold spots.

The wild times to be found in the pulps didn't have to rely on fantastic elements. Plenty of gritty two-fisted tales were inspired the the greed and savagery to be found in the all too real mean streets. "A Gunfight" is David J. Schow's homage to Donald Westlake, a breathless blow by bloody blow report of a hardened criminal's desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of the Mob. FPS games are rarely this exciting. Tim Truman, the artist who collaborated with Lansdale on the infamous Jonah Hex comic books in the late 90s and did the cover illustration for Son of Retro Pulp Tales also has a story here. Turning away from the rotten core of the Big Apple, "Pretty Green Eyes" is a piece of hard-boiled nastiness of moonshiners and corrupt strike-breakers in the old West Virginia backwoods of Truman's own family history. Although this is his first published all-prose fiction, no one familiar with his work will be surprised to find he hits every crime pulp note square in the jaw. "Border Town" also draws from it's author's roots. James Grady presents a snowbound Montana train station in 1938 with a woman on the run and rat-bastard Nazi spies.

Speaking of fascist monsters, we veer back towards the bizarre for Matt Venne's "The Brown Bomber and the Nazi Werewolves of the S.S.". I'll just let the over-the-top title speak for itself adding only that the final paragraph was surprisingly stirring. Plunging even deeper into the lurid ridiculous potential of pulp are "The Forgotten Kingdom" "The Lizard Men of Blood River" by Mike Resnick and Stephen Mertz respectively. Both these adventures of Lost Cities and Nearly Nekkid Native Princesses have tongue thrust full through cheek. Resnick's hysterical pun-spewing rogue, the Right Reverend Lucifer Jones was probably the class clown at the same seminary Reverend Mercer went to. It seems in this day and age we can't take the Great White Hunters or Jungle Explorers seriously any more — somehow I feel Shia LaBeouf is all to blame. I wonder if a serious reinterpretation of Allan Quatermain or the like can still be done. Maybe he's as off-limits as another favorite of mine, the sinister Fu Manchu. It seems a shame really.

There's only one story here with Rocketships and Bug-Eyed Monsters and that's this one humble offering from Harlan Ellison. Yeah, you read that right, Harlan Muthafuckin' Ellison!. If his story intro is to be believed, "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" was originally penned in 1991 for a Bantam Books project that never saw the light of day. It's a wild take on the old fairy tale set in a seedy Mars colony with exploited native labor and an ancient artifact men and martians would kill for. A dark reflection of 1940s cosmic dreams that would not be out of place along side some of the "New" Space Opera of today. But what it really reminded me was the kick-ass thrills I got when I first read Deathbird Stories. This is pure balls out Ellison. I don't know if I'd want to be stuck in an elevator with him, but he writes a damn good story.

With four or five the stories being quite excellent and great fun to be had all the way through, Son of Retro Pulp Tales is way ahead of the curve and a mighty satisfying read. I wish Subterranean would come out with more affordable trade paperback editions, but that's just how they roll. In every one of these stories you sense the pure glee the writers had in shaping these cheap thrills from their own fond memories. This has the sense of wonder, adventure, and just plain fun that should never go out of style.

Son of Retro Pulp Tales will be available any day now directly from Subterranean Press,
or from the Usual Clowns.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the agents of Shadowskeedeeboomboom as Chris Hsiang. He has the power to cloud his own mind and as yet lacks a boon companion. What a surprise.

I love this scene from the season finale on Tuesday, where Special Agent Dunham tells her underling to get her information on "any incidents related to science, biology, or unexplained phenomena." And then she discovers that all the science things make a neat star pattern - and that is the solution to the mystery! It's completely ridiculous, but strangely satisfying.

When I was among a group of reporters who talked to JJ Abrams about Fringe last year at Comic-Con, one of the things he emphasized about his new show was that it was supposed to be in the mold of 1970s scifi. He and show creators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman grew up with psychedelic scifi movies like Altered States, and wanted to recreate that sense of trippy fun.

With all of mad scientist Walter's references to LSD and various other drugs, I think they've got the 70s vibe nailed. But what's really made this show gel reminds me more of old pulps like Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, where writers like H.P. Lovecraft launched their careers. As Jeff Prucher reminded me with his science fiction dictionary Brave New Words, so-called hard science fiction, obsessed with "realism," didn't exist until the 1950s.

Before that, authors just let their imaginations run wild. Astrogaters piloted ships to the stars, fighting with heat rays and eating food pills, completely unperturbed by things like how they would get to another galaxy moving at less than the speed of light. Nobody tried to come up with bullshit explanations about gravity wells and chemistry and how biology really works. As a result, we got some incredibly imaginative stories about the unknown.

Fringe is also explosively, weirdly creative, and I think that's because its creators really don't care about what's scientifically possible. We get multiple versions of Earth at war with one another. An underground cabal of renegade scientists is secretly experimenting on the masses, causing us to explode or making the skin on our faces grow so fast it plugs up our mouths, noses and eyes. Kids are being dosed with a drug called cortexiphan that allows them to see other dimensions. There are pale, alien-like creatures walking among us, machines that let people swap memories, and teleportation is easy (though it does have some nasty side-effects).

There are no dreary explanations like we get on Eleventh Hour or House about how there is really, truly an Actual Scientific Reason why a woman's skin suddenly peels off or a guy is dying of the bends even though he's never gone diving. I don't mean to disparage hard science fiction, because done well it's one of the most glorious things in the world. But done badly it becomes a mess of awful, badly-written data dumps that wind up having about as much scientific validity as a spy ray.

On Fringe, Walter's science experiments sound like the magic they are. "So you see, we can transfer his thoughts to your mind," he'll say. Or "So you've heard of pyrokinesis." Then Peter, his son, will explain that he can retrieve sound waves from melted glass, recreating the noises that occurred near the glass when it was melted. That way, they can find out how a person next to a melting window was kidnapped.

Goofy! Absurd! And yet, exciting. Somehow Walter and Peter's mad science manages to capture a truth about real science that "hard SF" rarely does: The sheer, awesome plunging-into-the-unknown of it.

This is a classic science fiction illustration by Golden Age great Wally Wood, which just went online at the Hooray For Wally Wood blog. You can see loads more amazing Wood art over there, and the whole image is below. So what is that guy saying?

Book cover scans from Martin Isaac, J Levar, and Kyle Katz and Gojira2012 and Martin Prine.

via AP News

Here's a great one with a psychedelic Saturn whose rings are all rainbowy. The title could be translated to "Beyond Saturn."

And then there El Fiera - the Beast! Totally scary!!!

Boixcar [via el Desván del Abuelito]

Cartier contributed his own essay to the anthology, “Life on Other Worlds,” and it’s clear from these drawings that he and Kyle both have an eye for unusual physiology. They take familiar anatomical structures – flippers, tentacles, antennae, gills – and combines them in novel yet plausible ways so that we can almost imagine how these alien creatures move when not in two-dimensional captivity.

[Golden Age Comic Book Stories via Biology in Science Fiction]

We first told you about Planet Stories back in July - it's Paizo publisher Erik Mona's labor of love to bring classic sci-fi and fantasy stories back into print. The Swordsman of Mars is the latest edition, following protagonist Harry Thorne, who changes bodies with a Martian and goes back in time. In the Mars of the past, he has a series of very pulpy adventures in which he dispatches various creatures and enemies at the tip of his expertly wielded sword.

Over at the Paizo message board, Mona gave a brief example of the sort of "editing" that was perpetrated on Kline's story:

ORIGINAL ARGOSY VERSION (from the A.C. McClurg & Co 1929 harcover edition):

"Robert Ellsmore Grandon stifled a yawn with difficulty, as the curtain went down on the first act of "La Tosca." Opera bored him utterly. He silently wished that his well-meaning aunt would not drag him with such clocklike regularity to these monotonous matineés. She had taken a box in the Chicago Auditorium for the season, and so far he had not escaped a single performance."

1961 ACE PAPERBACK EDITON (published 15 years after Kline's death):

"Robert Ellsmore Grandon stifled a yawn with difficulty as the curtain went down on the first act of Don Giovanni and wondered what was the matter. It wasn't that opera bored him, or that tonight's performance was inferior; in fact, what he had been able to give his attention to struck him as among the best performances he had ever seen."

On his blog, Mona has an entire chapter from both versions for you to compare. The original text is about four times longer than the chopped 60s version! Image by: Paizo.

Two Swordsmen of Mars! [Paizo]

Here's the exciting conclusion:

See the rest of the covers in El Estratografico's Flickr gallery. [1950s Spanish Scifi Novels on Flickr, via EasyDreamer]

Compare this "classy" version of The Way Station with these older covers:

Iain M. Banks' publisher, Orbit, says it's giving his Culture books covers that "don't scream scifi," in order to stand out from the rest of the pack. But sadly, the bottom line, says one reader, is that a cover should tell distributors and bookstore clerks where to shelve a book. [Media Bistro]

He must escape or die.
. . . Almost instantly the shrill sound of a whistle broke to his right and a street guard stepped from a doorway, struggling to free her rifle from her garments.
"Male Pig!" she screamed. "Halt!"

Keith flees underground, literally and figuratively, where he meets Angela, a boot-wearing resistance fighter hottie. Luckily for Keith, while women on the outside reject all males, Angela and other female members of the Subterraneans resistance movement are "attached to the men with arm-clinging closeness." Soon he and Angela are working (arm-in-arm, of course) to assassinate the President, and reclaim gender supremacy for men.
The Feminists had about as much to do with the women's movement as Cheez Whiz does with a sharp Wisconsin cheddar but it probably simultaneously terrified and titillated readers threatened by the very thought of those uppity, "bra-burning" libbers. At least one person was thrilled by the vision it presented—don't miss the editorial comment scrawled on the front cover!

Famous names: Alan "weirdgod" Moore, Kevin O'Neill

Crunchy goodness: 5
Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: The 2003 movie starring Sean Connery has been known to cause people's eyeballs to turn into projectile shit. Do not sit in the same room as someone watching this movie, or you'll wind up with shit-splattered clothes while your newly blind friend begs for death. Not nearly as fun as it sounds.

Sights you'll never unsee: Mister Hyde rapes the Invisible Man to death — and the gruesome results will make you wish the invisibility trick kept working posthumously.

The shit: You can literally spend hours poring over all the little in-jokes in the comic itself, while each issue comes with a ton of fake Victorian ads and little prose pieces that immerse you in a bizarre distortion of the era that gave us steampunk.

Notes on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen #1 by Jess Nevins and divers hands