The Return Of The Pulps… And What I’m Going To Do About It
Earlier today, I was looking through the Webscriptions catalogue of ebooks. Webscriptions is both a great site and an annoying one. It sells DRM-free, multi-format science fiction ebooks – and it gives them away free to disabled readers. It sells them cheaply – average price is $6.
The problem is, for every one good book on there (and there are some astonishingly good ones, like Greg Egan’s most recent three novels or the two Dangerous Visions collections), there is an entire metric shitton of right-wing sub-Heinleinery, mostly published by Baen (who run Webscriptions) on there that reads like:
“Goddammit!”
Trooper Jones’ sinewy thews glistened with the strain as he threw his blaster-rifle aside. It was jamming again. He pushed his manly hands through his crewcut blond hair, as he scrunched up his bright blue eyes and tightened his chiselled jaw.
“Goddam beancounter faggots back on Earth won’t give us the money to do the job they sent us here for!”
Since Barry O’Bama had wormed his way to the top of Earth’s government the previous year, the funding for the Space Marine Corps – the only body that stood between the earth and total annihilation by a swarm of stinking lizard men from the desert planet Qari – had been slashed, in order to pay for free medical care for pedophile serial killers.
Now as the fiendish Qarabians approached, wielding their laser-scimitars to finish him off, Jones knew that only good old-fashioned moxie, of the kind his old dad had shown on his farm in Iowa, would be enough to see him through.
But moxie, of course, was something Jones had in spades.
“All right, you bastards, come and get me.” he grunted, and ran toward them.
And so on, for 500 pages.
So after looking through some of these, I tweeted, rather stroppily – “Wish I had less self-respect. I could turn out hack genre novels by the dozens if I could bring myself to do it…”
But then I started thinking. I could never write that kind of thing and live with myself, but looking at the successes in e-publishing, a clear pattern appears:
They all write ‘genre’ books, whether that be thriller, horror, ‘paranormal romance’, or whatever.
The books are short – 200 pages or less – not huge blockbusters.
They’re mostly stand-alone novels, but featuring recurring characters.
They’re cheap – 99 cents to three dollars.
And they’re written very quickly (see for example writer Dean Wesley Smith, who when he publishes short stories as ebooks notes down on his blog the time in hours it took him to write them).
These are books as pure entertainment, rarely if ever actually *about* anything. In other words, what we’re really seeing with self-published ebooks is the return of the pulps in all but name.
Now, while I can’t write *crap* for money, I think I *can* write entertainment for money. I think I could do that, have fun doing it, and write something that people would enjoy. And there’s a grand tradition of writing quickie pulp adventures – see this by Michael Moorcock on how to write a novel in three days.
So what I’m going to do is write a series of cheap, short, ebook-only pulp-adventure novellas in parallel with the other books I’m writing. These won’t be serialised here, because this blog is where I talk about ideas, and those books won’t have many ideas as such – they’ll just be adventure and entertainment. Pulp. I will, however, let everyone know when they’re out.
And I’m going to write them under a pseudonym – I’ll be using the name Olsen Bloom (the name I use for my music).
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with this.
And then there’s stuff like this – http://www.amazon.com/False-Barnyard-Todd-Van-Buskirk/dp/1466304693/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1317064715&sr=1-1
That’s just… wow… consider my mind well and truly blown.
you should go down the harry stephen keeler route as well
http://home.williampoundstone.net/Keeler/Home.html
Sadly I don’t think I’m capable of Keeler’s inspired levels of lunacy.
I’ve often thought it would be amusing to see more “Liberal pulp”–something that had the same simplistic entertainment value as the “Heinleinery” (heh) you complain about but a different set of values. Is it smug of me to note that you don’t usually get pandering Liberal entertainment of this nature?
To the extent that’s true (I don’t know that it is, but I’m almost completely cut off from pop culture) I suspect it’s for the same reasons Orwell noted in his Boys’ Weeklys essay – that the rich owners of the media conglomerates don’t think it’s in their interests.
Perhaps I’m being generous…or ungenerous?…but I’m not sure there’s any conspiracy involved. There is, after all, lots of liberalism touted in the media, though it’s often of a superficial or conflicting sort. I think it’s simply that, as a default value, the standard action-adventure story tends to lean somewhat towards small-c conservative values: violent action, uncomplicatedly evil villains, an enforcement of the status quo. Of course, there are also Frank Miller-style stories where the lone hero has to fight The Corrupt System, and that always seems to rely on the system being run by liberals who have turned over funding to pedophile serial killers, as you say. When the stories take a more liberal bent about railing against The Man, they rarely seem to use pulp-style storytelling; I guess the idea of taking the law into your own hands is kind of inherently illiberal, as is using force to solve problems, and those are pulp fundamentals. When you tell a story about the rule of law being used to save the day, or pacifism triumphing, you automatically seem to be moving away from pulp storytelling.
The only really pulpy strain I can think of that may inherently endorse liberal values is the inherent socialist streak in the superhero genre, and even then that’s a pretty authoritarian socialism. Morrison’s Action Comics is arguably trying to forge a path away from this, and there have been anarchist action/superheroes in the past. So it’s not that I don’t think you can’t possibly do pulp liberalism, but part of the nature of pulp is, as you say, its rather knee-jerk, slapdash mentality–what I believe is being called “thrill power” ’round these parts–which tends towards established rules and structures. And for pulp, I’d argue those have been codified around somewhat illiberal values.
Of course, I could be REALLY ungenerous and say that the kind of neanderthals to which the most simplistic pulp stories appeal are also the ones most likely to have these kinds of politics…
Star Trek? Honestly anything with a scientist hero is probably pretty liberal. And the *good* military sci fi is all dominated by solid reds like Banks and MacLeod, I don’t know off hand of any socialist mil-sci-fi* on the level of what Baen puts out, but how hard can it be to do the Spanish Civil War/Easter Uprising, only in space and the good guys win? (Well I can’t think of a book, there’s always Code Geass R1, which asks the age old question “What if James Connolly were an unstable telepathic schoolboy in a giant robot” and is crying out for a fan dub where everyone calls each other comrade and quotes mao all the time)
*I’ll grant you that liberals are not so inclined to the but-a-war-would-be-so-much-simpler impulse which drives this kinda stuff, the V for Vendetta adaption is a rare example.
Anyway my point was going to be that right wing sci-fi is notable for going against the general attitude of the genre, to match it’s obnoxiousness the left wing equivalent would be have to take place in the John Ringo/Tom Clancy near future, mil-surplus technothriller genre. Um, so basically the A-Team/Leverage….
Maybe the problem is that once you’ve set up your plucky little underdogs and your big bad bullies you’re already in the Left’s territory anyway, right wing author’s usually have to make explicit links between the villains in the books and their perceived enemies, whereas leftist authors don’t really need to explain who The Man is.
Well, it depends on exactly what flavour of conservativism and liberalism you’re talking about. The conservative rejection of science is a relatively new phenomenon; if you go back to, say, the Victorian era, the paternalistic imperial mindset was pretty big on science and reason (supposedly). Likewise, here in North America most people associate the postwar fascination with technology and the era of the Space Race with a highly small-c conservative mindset. Of course that went hand in hand with a very strong welfare state, by American standards (even if you’re NEVER EVER allowed to point that out these days). So is that conservative or liberal? I think you could spin it either way; Star Trek definitely evolved from that mindset, and it had a very strong conservative streak, for all its Utopian socialism, though it depended on who was writing which episode. Star Trek: The Next Generation makes a stronger case for being solidly liberal, but then it also takes some long strides away from being “pulp” as well. The new Battlestar Galactica has the same issue. That’s the thing, the more the story becomes about the complexity of a given problem and the fact that there’s no simple solution–which I’d argue is a fundamental aspect of liberalism–the less like “pulp” it becomes. I don’t personally think that fistfights and explosions automatically categorize something as “pulp”, but your mileage may vary.
As for the “underdog” thing…well, the whole problem in NA right now is that we have people on the right, often the far right, believing that they’re the underdogs, and arguing for anarcho-libertarian views (which would essentially put corporations in charge, but they haven’t bothered to think it through that far.) This seems to be the mindset that breeds the kind of stories Andrew’s complaining about in this post, and sadly, there seems to be a significant overlap with the SF/”geek” crowd.
As long as we’re talking about Michael Moorcock, he wrote an essay called “Starship Stormtroopers” (http://www.christiebooks.com/PDFs/StarshipStormTroopers.pdf –sorry, I can only find it online in PDF form) which is disturbingly on-point on this subject. Just insert “the tea party” into that essay a few times and it could have been written yesterday. (I think he goes, uh, a tad overboard in comparing Tolkien to Mein Kampf, but you hopefully can see his general point…)
What I mean to say is that the devil has all the best tunes anyway so we can rely on the generic stuff to be on message and focus on the innovators, whereas the right must carefully scrub even the blandest country pop ballads and angsty teenage rock anthems of all flavour and mention Jesus every other line.