Astonishing Adventures Magazine

Carlucci and others have started up a new Pulp Magazine, Astonishing Adventures. It will be web-only and free for now -- however, this is a place to get your pulp on and your stuff read. Build a base of readers for if/when you expand your work into other magazines or even novels. (Did you read Mike Nelson's on-line novel Dingo, like I told you? Get to it. Noir with a ... twist.) You've got 25 days to get your space alien/evil Nazi/geneticaly modified ape with a gun story into their in-box for consideration. Bill Cunningham has an excellent overview here. Bill, by the way has been doing a much better job on his website at what I thought I'd be doing on this website than I ever could. I need to find a new approach. Or start shamelessly cribbing his.

"Pulp" as a genre seems to have really gripped writers my age. The idea of accomplishing characterization and big-theme story-telling through high action and high emotion stories -- it's as if mannered structure to science fiction, or more appropriately what we probably mistake science fiction to be, is eroding away. Or more likely 40 is when you stop worrying about making a fool of yourself.

I myself may start a separate blog to do chapter postings of what is affectionately called "the doomed pulp novel." I told the idea to Cory Doctorow and Geoff Thorne and nobody put a mercy bullet in its brain, so I edge ever forward. The fact that the fictional world would be shared/Creative Commons is the interesting bit ...

But what is pulp? Star Wars, of course, is pulp, not science fiction (Star Trek always stays in sci fi), as is Doctor Who. 24 is pulp. Farscape was best when it was pulp. Transmetropolitan, which you MUST READ, is scifi-journo-hero pulp. Heroes is not pulp, and Lost is sometimes pulp, depending on who's writing it.

Any time the heroes resolve a complex situation by running down a corridor as shit explodes around them and completely over-the-top implacable enemies scream imprecations through rising flames and our guys pause just long enough to say something somehow simultaneously smart and corny and heart-achingly true, then start running again because the clock is ticking and nobody saw this twist coming and they're making it up as they go along -- pulp.