/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2707402]

Hey /lit/, are there any pulp novels, magazines or penny dreadfuls actually good enough to bother checking out?

Pic related, I'm interested in characters like John Carter, Doc Savage, Buck Rogers, Solomon Kane and Tarzan but have no idea where to start.

[Anonymous No.2707734]

Not OP, but bump for interest.

[Anonymous No.2707739]

i like black mask.

[Anonymous No.2707740]

>>2707402

No.

[Anonymous No.2707746]

Oh man. I watched John Carter a little while ago. Boring as fuck. Oh my god, they're on mars, how did they make the movie so tedious?

On Manybooks there's an entire Pulp section. Can't help beyond that.

[Anonymous No.2707852]

they are not literary masterpieces, but they are fun to read. start at the beginning of each series. pulp series tend to get bogged down in cliches and repetition as the series goes on.

[Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ No.2708094]

>>2707746
"Boring?"
You did not watch the same film, you boring assfuck. It was action flick cliché, certainly, and PG-13 sanitized (Not sure how much since I never read the source material, but I hear Mars has no cotton so people wear jewelry. Nudity sadly missing from the film) but hardly dull or boring.

OP. It is all schlock, but fun pop culture of yester-year. Google around for more nerdly in depth reviews. I haven't read all that much, but years ago I read a portion of Allan Quatermain, but that came out in 1887. (Funfact: John Carter of Mars came out in 1912, a hundred years ago. And this passed May, when the film came out, Mars and Venus appeared to pass each other in the evening sky. How cool! Too bad it singled no portents for a successful film)

I thoroughly enjoyed Philip José Farmer's Doc Savage treatments too.
Also; James Bernard. Master composer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KMmQ5WOI4M

[Anonymous No.2708195]

Some mystery/detective pulps like Black Mask and Dime Detective are notable for featuring stories by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

[Anonymous No.2708633]

>>2708094

I wrote a poem for my high school english class thgis year on this very subject! And if you want to read a really good homage to the martian pulp stories, including burroughs and ray bradbury, read Larry Niven's "Rainbow Mars" it's amazing.

Elegy for a Dead World
By , Poet Princess of Mars

Orion paused above the moon,
And pausing turned, and turning fell,
And, I upon a moonlit path paused too,
to count the vesper bell
Orion strode the twilight haze
stalwart in silence to ignore
The sleepless and unseeing gaze
of the red eye of the god of war,
I thought then of the many nights
Of freezing in some country yard
I’d borne far from the city lights
The stress of that aloof regard.
I saw again majestic realms
By soaring minds, with legends fed
The dire and ancient denizens
The souls imagination bred
To populate those shores and glens
Now slaughtered by the callous stroke
Of caliper, spectroscope and lens;
But memory within me spoke
Of blameless hypotheticals
Cyclopean or frail, and green
That left those pastures tenantless
And fled into the might-have-been
The truth of your mute testaments
Mans emissaries, wise machines
That penetrate the firmament
Indifferently limn your scenes
A desert plain that never ends
Beneath a cloud-untroubled sky
The playhouse of the dervish winds
That rise and fail and silent lie.
Your seas unwatered, rivers sere
And salt and silt choke mere and tarn
No spire, canal, or minaret
No déjà thoris, thark, or tharn
No soft astronomers search the skies
With envious unsympathetic eyes.

[Anonymous No.2708639]

Perhaps it is just vanity
To mourn a place that never was
Some failing of humanity
To pile hopes on the frailest cause
Neglecting, maybe worthier
Rivals apt to speculate
That nightly wander past the stars
That rise up early, and stay up late
A lesser light of night and morn
Shines on us from the hoary skull
Of infant world that died unborn
It stands before me, nearly full
And in the hour before the dawn,
Like horus’ herald from afar
Behold the pale and crescent eye
Of Lucifer, the morning star.
We hurl a metal sentience
Up from the planet of our birth
With wise and certain instruments
We shed the surly bonds of earth
Dismiss the frozen hulk of mars
To seek fresh fields and pastures new
Among the cold uncaring stars
A panoply invites our view.
Still, I confess a moments doubt.
Why, as the galaxy unfolds
The tales of billion living worlds
Of billion, billion living souls,
Strayed out like lost sheep in the wild
To cluster round their shepherd stars
The author of each dreaming child
Could not have spared a few for mars?
Orion paused above the trees,
And pausing faded, and was gone
And I chilled by some rising breeze,
Closed up my coat and walked alone.
As we alone must always walk
Until we find our grave at last
And learn the language of the dead,
And join the townsmen of the past.
And you, unhappy derelict
Once home to so much hope and dread,
Drift on beside your satellites
Silent still, and cold and dead.
But mars, though barren yet will live
As all the homes of legends must
And déjà thoris seek her throne
When I and mine are less than dust.
Tars Tarkas to his daughter croons
In shadows cast by Martian moons.

[Anonymous No.2708761]

the science fiction pulps were the best. And the best writer to come out of them was probably Max Brand, though you could count Tennessee Williams, I guess...

[Anonymous No.2708879]

Well, the consensus seems to be that they're not well written but fun to read. Cheers everybody for your input.

>>2707746
>On ManyBooks there's a pulp section
Thanks anon, I'll check that out.

>>2708633
Cool poem.

[Anonymous No.2708887]

You might as well just watch Pulp series if they're available. Hate to say it, but reading might not be the answer here. You're not gonna find stunning prose in any of these, so it might cut time out just to watch a series.

My personal favorite, and I might seem like a weeabo, but fuck you....Outlaw Star

[Anonymous No.2708909]

http://www.avclub.com/features/box-of-paperbacks-book-club/

The author found a big box of pulp novels at a yard sale and reviewed each one over the course of several years. Some of the books seem really interesting.

[Anonymous No.2708942]

>>2708887
I don't think it's just the setting of these stories that I enjoy - it's the whole 20s-50s Pulp atmosphere, and I'm not sure that an anime or cartoon will be able to convey that.

[Anonymous No.2708946]

>>2708909
Thanks for the link.

[Anonymous No.2709051]

I'm not OP or >>2707734, but I'm kind of interested in this stuff as well.

I have to know, in long-running serials like John Carter and Tarzan, how do the sequels compare to the initial novel?

[Anonymous No.2709072]

>>2708942

Well, it's more about the style than the setting that makes Outlaw Star pulp...but if you're looking for that type of feel, sorta rediculous 20's-50's...read old comics from that time or later, not penny dreadfuls and novels..

[Anonymous No.2709077]

>>2708887
>Outlaw Star
One of the only two anime shows I ever liked, the other being Cowboy Bebop

[Anonymous No.2709081]

>>2709077
I'm so happy.

[Anonymous No.2709087]

Read wiki articles, and secondary materials you find on the internet.

You will be seriously disappointed if you check out the actual books, unless you are a huge fan of the so-bad-it's-good canon of taste.

[Anonymous No.2709095]

>>2709072
Oh, I already do read lots of comic books. I'm interested in penny dreadfuls and pulp magazines because they were sort of the precursor to comic books as we know them. They were hugely influential on some of the sci-fi, adventure and horror tropes that we know today.

[married oldfag !VqaXcWQC4Q No.2709125]

I am a big fan of the Barsoom series and like Smith's 'Skylark of Space' stuff. I just re-read the collected Fu Manchu and Spider stories and recommend them, as well. I have little exposure to Doc Savage (oddly), so can't comment. I have all the Tarzan works and also recommend Burroughs' Outlaw of Torn.
The thing to remember is what the pulps are and what they aren't. They are like Die Hard; they aren't like Remains of the Day. You want a fast-paced fun read where you and your willing suspension of disbelief can have a great time? Grab a pulp. Are you looking for 400 pages of dialog exploring the tortured souls of imperfect characters as you discovertheir back story through their own unreliable narration? Then look elsewhere. Don't get me wrong, some of the pulps have some surprising depths (Howard examining the negative impact of civilization; Smith exploring the effect of technology on relationships; Burroughs discussing the corrosive effect of fame on the young; Rohmer inverting Asian stereotypes; etc.) but they are for entertainment.

>>2709051
Tarzan does become formulaic after, oh, the 12th novel, although WWII did liven things up a bit. The Barsoom series is interesting in that John Carter isn't always the main character and is barely in 2 or 3 of them; they stay good (although skip the 11th) because he often changed viewpoints.

>>2709087
IMO, the 'so-bad-its-good' genre is personified in the Destroyer series. In the army my room mate and I used to laugh through the entire books, almost as much as with Pratchett.

[Anonymous No.2709164]

>>2707402
I was looking at scifi/fantasy pulps to read because ive never tried them, and i just looked up every book cover Boris did
http://www.paperbackfantasies.jjelmquist.com/boris.htm
might find some cool stuff in here, not sure what though

[Anonymous No.2709223]

John Carter was way better than befits The Biggest Bomb Ever but way worse than befits a Stanton/Riggins joint

[Anonymous No.2709821]

All of the Doc Savage books are available on Kindle for free because the copyright's expired. It's obvious that they were being pumped out to meet a deadline, and the dialogue is pretty bad, but the action is good and the books are a lot of fun to read. Lester Dent had a good imagination. I'd check it out, OP.

I haven't read Barsoom or Tarzan but there's a reason they're popular. I think most of those are in the public domain too.

[Anonymous No.2709858]

Gotta agree with everyone else in this thread, OP. Pulp stories are awesome, campy fun but mostly shallow reading.

[Anonymous No.2709862]

>>2708094
>hardly dull or boring
>action flick cliché
Action flick cliches are fucking boring, you toad, especially when stretched out into a shitty movie that's as long as John Carter was.

[Anonymous No.2709867]

OP here, I decided to download a whole lot of pulp stories and I'm in the process of reading through The Man of Bronze, the first Doc Savage story. I'm really enjoying it so far, thanks /lit/.

[Anonymous No.2709874]

>>2709862
It was cliched, yes, but you don't fucking realize it CREATED THE FUCKING CLICHES A HUNDRED MOTHERFUCKING YEARS AGO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous No.2709904]

>>2709874
that guy is talking about the movie this year not the series

[Anonymous No.2710913]

Absolutely, 100% this. It's a giant collection of crime/detective/mystery pulps, and the best ones at that. It's over a thousand pages with two columns per page. After checking this book out of the library I went through a period of time where I was obsessed with pulps, but turns out that most aren't as good as the ones in this collection.

[Anonymous No.2711631]

>>2710913
Looks swell, I'll see if my library has it.

[Anonymous No.2712125]

Wow, just recently I was thinking about this exact topic. This thread was a lucky find.

How is Solomon Kane?

[Anonymous No.2712690]

>>2712125
About the same quality as the other pulps. Definitely light reading.

[Anonymous No.2713464]

>>2707402
>Wants to know if the 20s equivalent of Alex Rider is worth reading