Pulp Appeal: A Few Contemporary Anthologies

After talking so much about classic pulp, Cameron decides to take on some more recent anthologies.

Broadswords and Blasters

If you’ve been reading closely, you’ll no doubt have noticed that my posts have all been about older characters and writers, most of which are in the public domain. My experience with pulp has mostly been with the original era. However, there have been several anthologies since the beginning of the 21st Century that have caught my eye.

In the early 2000s Michael Chabon, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, saw a need to collect modern short stories in the pulp tradition. His influences in his earlier novels clearly included pulp authors, and Chabon said as much in interviews. The result of his push to bring about more appreciation for pulp literature was 2003’s McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Chabon collected works from pulp-y authors like Stephen King, Michael Moorcock, and more literary elites like Dave Eggers and…

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Pulp Appeal: H. Rider Haggard

A great piece on the highly influential H. Rider Haggard.

Broadswords and Blasters

Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress – http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.06516/

H. Rider Haggard was not really a pulp fiction author, having been a “respectable” author of Victorian literature whose first stories were published in literary magazines in the late 1870s. He was a lawyer but paid more attention to his writing, probably for the best as he was an excellent writer. So you may ask yourself why I’m talking about a Victorian author who was published in the slicks, whose work predates the height of pulp fiction as a trend. Like Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Allan Poe, it’s because his work had an outsized impact not only on pulp fiction, but fiction in general.

His most famous creation, the English explorer Allan Quatermain, was introduced in the 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines. While there are earlier examples of Lost World fiction, including Journey to the Center of…

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Pulp Appeal: Jirel of Joiry

A quick recap on the golden age hero, Jirel of Joiry.

Broadswords and Blasters

C.L. Moore, stands out as one of the godparents of sword and sorcery and science-fiction, and nowhere is this more apparent than in her creation, Jirel of Joiry. Jirel stands out for several reasons as a character of the Golden Age of Pulp. She is a female character being written by a female writer, a rarity for the time. (While there were other women writing for the pulps at the time, a large percentage of them were writing hard-boiled detective stories, not fantasy). She is a creature of her passions, frequently overcome with rage that dictate her actions. She is also placed in a historic setting, in this case medieval France[1].

Jirel is a noblewoman, to be sure, but one that is more likely to don armor and meet her foes head-on then to sit behind her castle walls and busy herself with embroidery. In the…

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