Pulp Fiction

Screw Tarantino.

I'm talking about real fantasy pulp fiction, straight out of the 1930s, yards better than modern fantasy lumbering behind embossed covers featuring dragons and sunsets and whatever.

I'm fortunate enough to be friends with Erik Mona, publisher at Paizo, and the driving force behind Planet Stories, Paizo's attempt to make a few bucks off reprinting out-of-print pulp fiction classics.

Erik sent me an assortment of Planet Stories books about a month ago, and I have read them like a starved man. This is what I've wanted for about 15 years now: someone with trustworthy sensibilities to tell me what the good fantasy is. Not the good-enough fantasy, the GOOD fantasy.

I've already blown through Elak of Atlantis, Black God's Kiss, and City of the Beast. I was reading them serially, but I've since trifurcated, and am trying to read three at once (this never works out): Northwest of Earth, Lord of the Spiders, and the Secret of Sinharat, that last one written by Leigh Bracket, who got writing credit on a little flick we like to call The Empire Strike Back.

Many of these stories are not masterpieces, right? They're not keen indictments of the frail human condition. But now I see why people lionize pulps, why George Lucas keeps trying to remake them. I see, basically, where comic books came from.

The energy in these stories leeches out of the paper into your brain. These working writers wore out typewriters, just writing the very next thing that came into their heads. And the stories mostly read like that--you don't know what's coming next, because the author quite possibly didn't know either, but they are both "rip" and "roaring" and you will do well to purchase one or more of these books, both for your own edification, and to insure that Planet Stories is properly funded to continue this literary archaeology.