Pulp Fiction Recommendations; No Not The Movie

[CarlManvers2019]

As the title says, this is a thread for recommendations of pieces of fiction that are of the “Pulp Genre”

A genre I’m not sure how to best describe, but is mostly stuff made many decades ago and sounds and writes differently from most other pieces of fiction

Especially in how the characters’ text for how they think and speak, feel sorta simple yet dramatic

Anyway, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft’s works are pretty nice reads

 

[Bassoe]

Alright, recommending:

• The Bulletproof Adventures of Damian Stockwell by Benjamin Wallace. An affectionate parody of a pulp proto-superhero, complete with doomsday devices invented by Nikola Tesla, a pet eagle, an original fictitious martial art with the names of every attack being godawful puns and off-brand terminators with french rather than austrian accents.
• The Adventures of Lazarus Gray by Barry Reese. A massive (thirteen books so far) genre throwback to pulp proto-superheroism.
• Helping Them Take the Old Man Down by William Preston. A retired, elderly Doc Savage expy gets entangled with the post-911 security state and a sinister conspiracy attempting to frame him. AKA, "the original Deus Ex as starring Doc Savage".
• The Warlords of Jupiter: From the Adventures of Colt Corrigan by Luis Blasini. A combination of Robert Heinlein-style space adventure and Planetary Romance in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
• Allen Steele's Captain Future reboot. A modern reboot of the original series by Edmond Hamilton.
• First Wave by Brian Azzarello. An extremely pulp-inspired DC AU.
• The movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and its novelization by Kevin J. Anderson. Also the fanfic sequel Sky Captain and the Extinction Agenda.
• Atomic Robo by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener. A comic starring a sentient robot invented by Nikola Tesla.
• 1923, apparently. I've never actually watched it myself, but I read a review describing it as such.
• Pulp, Pipe, & Poetry, a substack full of amateur pulp writers. I especially recommend Steve and Captain Clint Face the Midnight Squadron by Zack Grafman.
• Matthew Reilly's Jack West series. Imagine Indiana Jones as directed by Michael Bay with artifacts and mysteries inspired by conspiracy theory literature.
• Lobster Johnson: The Satan Factory by Gregory Manchess and Thomas E. Sniegoski. Johnson is a pulp proto-superhero side character in Mike Mignola's Hellboy series. This is a novel focusing directly on him and his adventures.

Here's hoping this thread picks up, I've always quite liked Pulp as a genre.

 

[Skallagrim]

All right, pulp adventure on the big and small screen. Let's have a look at some highlights.

(Most of the original pulp serials from the 1920s and 1930s are... not very good. If you can get them at all, you'll find that they were cool for their time, but they don't hold up.)


Some classics that any fan of the old adventure tales may enjoy:

-- The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
-- Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
-- The Shadow (1940; 15-chapter serial film)
-- Drums of Fu Manchu (1940; 15-chapter serial film)
-- King Solomon's Mines (1950)
-- The African Queen (1951)
-- The Face of Fu Manchu (1965)


After the release of the first Indiana Jones, pulp adventure (predicatably) had a great big revival, and we got some good (or at least entertaining) stuff out of it:

-- Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982–1983)
-- Romancing the Stone (1984) and The Jewel of the Nile (1985)
-- The High Road to China (1985)
-- Sky Pirates (1986)
-- Sky Bandits (1986)

(Some notes. Tales of the Gold Monkey was very much an Indy cash-in, but mostly based in concept on the aforementioned film Only Angels Have Wings. The High Road to China was basically what Selleck did because he was pissed that he hadn't gotten the role of Indy. And yes, Sky Pirates and Sky Bandits are two different films, both VERY pulpy, both released the same year.)


The '90s were not lacking in pulp adventures, either:

-- The Rocketeer (1991)
-- The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles / The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (1992–1996)
-- The Phantom (1996)
-- The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001)

(Notes: the young Indy series was actually pulpier than the big screen films. And the Mummy remakes were also pulpier than the 1932 original, somehow. WARNING: people may tell you that there's a third Mummy remake, too. Avoid it at all costs.)



...Regrettably, pulp adventure (or at least good and non-parody pulp adventure) has completely died out on the screen. This is because the virtues of good pulp adventures pattern 1:1 onto the big list of DoublePlusUngood of the wokie crowd. Pulp adventure celebrates everything they hate, so none of it is getting made while their infestation of the media world persists.

 

[Typhonis]

You forgot

The Shadow (1994)

I would also say John Carter of Mars (2012) But it is more planetary romance.

 

[Husky_Khan]

You forgot

The Shadow (1994)

I would also say John Carter of Mars (2012) But it is more planetary romance.

John Carter seems pulpy enough, especially since the genre it normally resides in seems pretty sparse in contemporary pop culture awareness. Deserves to be on the list just as much as Lovecraftian Stuff!

And I'd actually hazard to say I think The Shadow is actually more watchable to me than either The Phantom or The Rocketeer. Sorry. Still gotta see that 90's version of Dick Tracy though.

-- The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles / The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (1992–1996)


(Notes: the young Indy series was actually pulpier than the big screen films. And the Mummy remakes were also pulpier than the 1932 original, somehow. WARNING: people may tell you that there's a third Mummy remake, too. Avoid it at all costs.)

Yes I really liked these TV shows and I read the Young Indiana Jones young adult novels when I was younger and liked those as well. They were actually a bit more in depth and detailed than even the pretty decent television shows. I haven't read them in a while but for my age then they seemed pretty comprehensive as young adult literature goes.

 

[Skallagrim]

You forgot

The Shadow (1994)

And I'd actually hazard to say I think The Shadow is actually more watchable to me than either The Phantom or The Rocketeer. Sorry.

When it comes to different "versions", I specifically picked the ones I consider best. In this case, the 1994 version just doesn't live up to the 1940 serial version in any way. It's more modern, but it's not actually very good. (Also, I'm just not a fan of Arec Bardwin.)

(The Phantom is indeed quite campy, but by now a "classic" of the genre. The Rocketeer is genuinely great, though.)

Yes I really liked these TV shows and I read the Young Indiana Jones young adult novels when I was younger and liked those as well. They were actually a bit more in depth and detailed than even the pretty decent television shows. I haven't read them in a while but for my age then they seemed pretty comprehensive as young adult literature goes.

I remember reading some of the books and liking them. I think I still have one or two in the attic somewhere. But they were pretty hard to come by, where I live. So I never really had the chance to get into reading them.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I'm about a third of the way through Junkyard Pirate and it's not perfectly pulpy but pretty pulp-adjacent, including the aesthetics since one alien is a huge fan of the 50s and frequently dresses up in things like a goldfish-bowl helmeted spacesuit with jetpack.

The story's been enjoyable too. Earth is being invaded by bodysnatching aliens. A second group of aliens is trying to compile a set of rules violations to get the Galactic Empire to put a stop to the invasion, but they get shot down.

The second group of aliens are only 405 nanometers tall so they need to hitch a ride with a human. Surprisingly, the advanced intellects don't bond with a Japanese NEET and instead wind up joining forces with a curmudgeonly septuagenarian Vietnam Vet who operates a junkyard for wrecked aircraft.

I haven't gotten to the space piracy yet but the groundwork has actually been rather cleverly laid.

Spoiler

The alien invasion is technically legal because humans haven't passed the required bureaucratic tests to be classed as sophonts, so they're technically protected by animal rights laws rather than sapients' rights. As the Vietnam Vet has noted to himself, you can't put a raccoon on trial for raiding your trashcans, so the Galactic Empire would either be forced to either recognize humans as sophonts to put him on trial if he commits a crime, or only be able to send Space!Animal Control after him to stop him from robbing other species.

 

[Bassoe]

Add the Gabriel Hunt series to the list of recent pulp novels. Basic Indiana Jones/Tintin shenanigans but very well-written.

Gabriel Hunt Series by Gabriel Hunt

Hunt at the Well of Eternity (Gabriel Hunt, #1), Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (Gabriel Hunt, #2), Hunt at World's End (Gabriel Hunt, #3), Hunt Beyond...

www.goodreads.com

 

[Bassoe]

The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez.
In a very zeerusty raygun gothic future, Mack Megaton was created as the prototype of Mad Scientist Professor Megalith's robot army, only for his unintended sentience and the professor's defeat to leave him out of a job.

Lorde of Chicago by G.Y. Riggs.
Genre throwback to interwar period detective pulp.

 

[Bassoe]

The Bulletproof Adventures of Damian Stockwell by Benjamin Wallace

Also Benjamin Wallace's Junkers series has Thorne, sword-and-sorcery barbarian hero! Except he's the only pulpy portion of the otherwise-cyberpunk series, because he's literally from a pulp story. In-setting, his adventures were a popular media franchise and thanks to an elaborate and unlikely series of events, an amusement park animatronic of him became self-aware and programmed with his memories and personality. And does surprisingly well with the realization his whole life and reality was a lie cause barbarian hero, going on to beat the nigh-indestructible legally-distinct-from-Adam Smasher villain (whose organic portions still needed to breath and whose cybernetics made them too heavy to swim) and getting the girl.

Additional recs:

• Empire State and its sequel The Age Atomic by Adam Christopher. The titular Empire State is a pocket dimension mirror of prohibition-era New York created by the simultaneous misfiring of the superweapons of proto-superhero the Skyguard and his archnemesis the Science Pirate breaking reality. They're really quite weird books, alternating between pulp noir detective adventure story and philip k dick-style philosophizing as characters realize they can't trust their own memories since their universe was created recently with them in it.
• Madame Atomos series by André Caroff. The adventures of a Fu Manchu-style villainess.

 

[ATP]

Forget title,but once i read pulp story about hero who in the end of chapter end tossed into ragging vulcano or sometching,but next issue always started ; "Thanks to herculean Strenghth of Will,X survived"
Dear authors - is very good idea to save your characters,if you decide to start writing !