Review essay: PULP!
Lots of people throw around “pulp” or “pulp fiction” (not the film!) as though it were obvious what it means. In scifi-fantasy writing (I gather I’m supposed to call it SFF now), everyone wants to claim that they’re writing pulp, inspired by the pulps, and so on. But what almost nobody is willing to admit is that a great deal of pulp fiction from the grand old days of the actual pulps—magazines like Weird Tales or Black Mask, for instance—was pretty mediocre. Sure, Robert E. Howard or H. P. Lovecraft or Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lester Dent were good—on a good day. Lovecraft wrote some stinkers, I’m afraid; and one time I actually sat down and read some original Doc Savage stories (Dent’s creation), and you know what? They were terrible. And that’s not even mentioning all the people who managed to get a couple stories published and dropped from sight for good reason! So let’s not go overboard.
Setting quality aside for a moment, it seems to me that “pulp” is often misused to mean action-adventure with certain signature tropes, particularly in the fantasy field. I disagree. Mighty thews and panther-like reflexes do not make pulp. They appear in a lot of pulp, inspired by Howard, but that’s not what makes the Conan stories.
What makes pulp work is, above all, brevity.
According to Lester Dent, who ought to know (despite those awful stories), the basic pulp tale is 6000 words. In that space, you have to create a world, establish a hero and at least one villain, heap a great deal of grief on the hero, set up and resolve some kind of mystery, and have the hero smash the villain at the end with a massive fist and a light quip (in the Roger Moore-James Bond mode). Obviously there can be other sorts of stories (viz. Lovecraft), but this is sort of the baseline. And if you’re going to pull this off, you’ve got to move quickly.
Pulp is structure first.
At the same time, you’ve got to use a prose style appropriate to your genre. Sword-and-sorcery uses dialogue like “None shall escape! The Cretan shall be a victory offering to mighty Molech!” that would embarrass hard-boiled gumshoes on the mean streets of Chicago, whereas no self-respecting half-naked barbarian with an axe ever called a girl “toots.”
Pulp is diction and voice second.
Once you’ve nailed structure, diction, and voice, you can write about anything you want—romance, mystery, aliens, and yes, mighty-thewed barbarians with panther-like reflexes.
Pulp is plot and content last.
Now I’m delighted to say that I’m not the only person in the world to have realized these fundamental truths, as is demonstrated by a bunch of “pulp-inspired” fiction being produced today. Some of the most faithful to the originals comes out of DMR Press, including their free-for-signing-up volume The Infernal Bargain.
The Infernal Bargain and Other Stories is a collection of stories in the Weird Tales vein, drawing heavily on Howard and with a touch, here and there, of Burroughs, Lovecraft, and others. There are recent stories by D.M. Ritzlin, Howie K. Bentley, Byron A. Roberts, Gael DeRoane, Schuyler Hernstrom, Mark Taverna, and Geoff Blackwell, along with little-known stories by lesser-known classic pulp writers Harry Piper, Nictzin Dyalhis, Clifford Ball, Frederick Arnold Kummer, Jr. If you like sword-and-sorcery pulp, you’re bound to find something here you’ll enjoy.
The contemporary writers clearly love this material and have gone to considerable lengths to emulate it, generally quite successfully. I do think a few of these entries are over-long and could use a thorough trimming, but there’s such pleasure in reading full-throated pulp fantasy that it’s hard to carp.
Rather than list off each story, I’d like to draw attention to a few passages here and there, a few stylistic elements that show these writers’ dedication to the craft. To begin with, here’s the opening of Howie K. Bentley’s “Thannhausefeer’s Guest”:
The wine-dark sea swallowed the remains of the scattered wreck and retched up a lone figure too strong to die just yet. Breakers rolled in under the gray sunless sky and cast the man face down on the snowy shore. All about him lay bleached human skulls and assorted bones scattered alongside desolate rocks and boulders.
Who could ask for more? Very much in the Howard vein, Bentley eschews the verb ‘to be’ in order to inject life. He also sidesteps transitional phrases wherever possible, creating a pell-mell, almost jerky pace that sweeps its reader along. But the best pulp fantasy wasn’t all action: we sometimes forget that it wasn’t just Lovecraft who gave us page after page of exposition with strange names and so forth. Gael DeRoane’s “Grumfobbler,” a chapter of a longer work, gives an excellent demonstration of florid exposition in classic style:
“In my recent travels,” said Aran, “I have encountered many animals that are able to use language. Your beast Valvos is an excellent example. But not all have this capacity. Just yesterday, for instance, I met a certain tree lizard that wished to communicate with me, but was unable to do so except for the telepathic transmission of murky images. How is it that some animals talk while others do not? In the land of the Blessed Circle, only the hybrids that roam in the forests, the satyrs and such, speak to us. Our pets merely bark, meow, and chirp. Why does the discrepancy exist?”
Ixian replied. “Purely by chance do some animals speak while others remain mute. It is said that in the era of prehistory only humans had the power of language. When certain wizards began tinkering with the genetic makeup of the lower creatures, their ability to speak flowered forth, and it continues today, but only in those that descend from the creatures first experimented upon. But your question strikes me as jejune. Surely you are aware of the general imperfections, imbalances, and subtle chaos that lie at the heart of what we call reality. I myself would not be surprised if tomorrow a dung beetle were elevated to the status of World Emperor.”
Nobody is bothered by the heavy, speechifying tendency of such dialogue. This is just how characters like this talk sometimes! And not surprisingly, there’s even a warrior-type (this being recent work, a woman) to disdain it all:
Wanjihar gave a snort of contempt. “I have heard much nonsense from you, Ixian, but now you surpass yourself.”
I suspect that Conan would have been more curt, of course, if not actually violent.
Of the earlier stories, “The Sapphire Goddess,” an old story by Nictzin Dyalhis (1873-1942), is a much longer piece, properly a pulp novella at about 15,000 words or so. At times it drags or seems to lose its way, as most of those longer tales do, but how can I disregard the joy of encountering Burroughs’ favorite device, the earth-man mysteriously transported to fantasy world where he turns into (or turns out to be) master swordsman, king, and lover? I am of the opinion that Dyalhis ought to have listened to Lester Dent and avoided undercutting his own story, because in the end the hero succeeds through no merit or strength of his own. But a pulp writer who uses diction like “an icy wind o’ nights,” “surprize,” “hardihood,” and “for aught,” and hurls around demons and sorcerers and betrayals willy-nilly? This is lovely stuff, classic pulp through and through.
I could certainly go on. The title story itself, by D.M. Ritzlin, provides two shipwrecks, three desperate escapes, an evil sorcerer, a demon, and a horde of one-eyed bird-men—all well within the classic bounding-limit of 6000 words or less. To be sure, some stories go a little overboard about elaborate verbiage—we’re all familiar with rugose cones and Cyclopean masonry, but “rutilant”? Oh well, pulp isn’t about perfection.
Let’s be clear. I don’t think any of these stories is a masterpiece. They’re all fun to read, and if you like classic pulp, you’ll like this volume. But for me, the crucial point is that it’s remarkably difficult to tell the difference between original contributions to Weird Tales and new pieces written in the last couple of decades. The modern writers insist on strict fidelity to pulp fantasy—its conventions, its manners, and even its weaknesses—and they show admirable dedication to their craft. If you’re going to write pulp, this is most definitely a great way to do it. As for the older stories, well, there’s a reason most of us don’t know the authors’ names, but they are all enjoyable on their own terms.
One problem with the pulp style is that it really doesn’t lend itself to full-length novels. In the old days, a full-length novel was about 60,000 words; now a fantasy novel under 100k seems vaguely skimpy, and if possible you’re supposed to have multiple volumes to boot. This is unfortunate when it comes to the pulp-inspired, because it means you’re pulled in very different directions as an author.
D.H. Dunn has written three volumes of a series called “Fractured Everest,” which draws heavily on pulp traditions—more in the Indiana Jones vein than Conan, but pulp all the same. The first book, Under Everest, is described at Amazon like this:
HIGH ADVENTURE. HIGH FANTASY. HIGH ALTITUDE.
Nima never intended to be a climber, an explorer, or a hero. She never expected to see magical wonders or nightmarish abominations. She was simply a Sherpa trying to save her family, a quest which sends her higher and deeper into Everest’s icy grip.
When she falls through a mystical portal, Nima finds herself caught in a magical war raging beneath the highest mountain on Earth. Accompanied by her friend Drew Adley, she will have to contend with mad sorcerers, monsters out of legend, and the great mountain itself.
With their only route home blocked and with dangers coming from every side, Nima and Drew will have to use all their skill and bravery if they are ever to escape the horrors that lie in the depths UNDER EVEREST.
The pulp inspiration is obvious enough, but from the beginning of the sample I was worried. How can you possibly keep the headlong rush of pulp working across this many pages? The first volume is 350-odd pages, and based on the sample that’s got to be something like 200k words! That’s not easy to handle in any style, but in pulp this is a serious structural problem. And while I like the inspiration, the sample doesn’t convince me that Dunn has quite solved this tricky puzzle.
The broad gist of Under Everest is clear enough from this description. Nima is a young Sherpa woman who agrees to do some guide work because she needs money to pay off a local warlord type. At the start, Nima and her American friend Drew race up an icy slope to rescue a Polish woman, Wanda, from the clutches of a yeti. Turns out Wanda’s father left a mysterious notebook which turns up without warning, leading her to ask Nima and Drew to guide her up Everest to find some mysterious and powerful occult gateway. Thus the sample; not surprisingly, the description suggests that they find the gate and there’s lots of weird stuff under or inside Everest itself.
But remember about brevity? About going fast? In the course of a roughly 15000-word sample, they don’t get to Mt. Everest at all!
When I look under the hood, as it were, I think where the sample trips up for me is in Dunn’s use of free indirect discourse. This is something I see a lot in contemporary fantasy and thriller fiction, which tends to be heavy on representing interior perspectives: “George wondered if he should punch the guy. But what would Martha say? He started to make a fist, but—no, he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. Slowly, he relaxed the fist.” It has its uses, because you can really flesh out characters’ interiority, but it does drastically violate the old “show, don’t tell” principle—and what’s more, it slows down the action. To me, as I say, pulp starts with speed, and the rest comes later. (The pulp version: “His mighty fist clenched in white-knuckled rage, then uncurled.”) By contrast to the stories in The Infernal Bargain, the narrative of Under Everest seems slow-moving, principally consisting of internal monologue constructed through free indirect discourse. How Nima feels, what she wants.
I don’t mean to trash the book. It’s certainly professional enough, and after all I have only read less than 10%. I’m just saying that it’s not really pulp, despite the inspiration. And to be fair, I’m not kidding about the structural problem: you can’t just string together fifteen or so 6000-word pulp stories and expect them to stand as a novel! Think about Raiders of the Lost Ark, the way it goes back and forth between breakneck-speed action sequences and slow exposition (and a teeny bit of development). I think if you’re really going to pull off a contemporary full-length pulp novel—something I’ve not ever seen done terribly well since Burroughs, but I’m open to suggestions—you’ve got to figure out a way to handle these violent shifts of pace and gear.
I’ve read a lot less of pulp science fiction as such (Howard’s alien elephant doesn’t count, while John Carter might just as well have been in Lemuria as on Mars for all the difference it made), but Martin Swinford’s Thus Falls the Shadow is billed as “fun, fast-paced space opera,” so I figure I’m in familiar territory. Here’s the Amazon description:
Betrayal is just the beginning...
Welcome to the Kwa system, where the light of three suns falls upon twenty worlds, and a giant cloud nebula dominates the skies.
Where Will is just trying to make a living - until someone pushes him too far.
Where everything and everyone can be bought and sold...
...until now.
Ex-smuggler Will scratches out a living piloting a deep-space fishing boat over the vast sea of dust, but trouble is stirring in the outer reaches of the system and soon Will and his motley crew find themselves dragged into a conflict that could engulf every one of the Kwa worlds. Caught between the in-fighting gangsters who run the system and a rebellion by the native Kwa, Will has to balance his obsessive search for one man with his love for another.
With great characters, snappy dialogue and plenty of humour, Thus Falls the Shadow is an action packed, free-wheeling adventure that you will love to read, likened by some reviewers to the adventures of Han Solo.
Thus Falls the Shadow is set in an imagined future where swearing and violence are common, same-sex relationships are nothing unusual, and people still listen to the Spice Girls.
So definitely familiar territory. Notice the flags: “snappy dialogue,” “action-packed,” “free-wheeling adventure.” Buck Rogers behaving badly—got it!
Since I’m focusing on brevity and speed, let’s start by noting that this Thus Falls the Shadow is something on the order of 75k words. The sample is a prologue (apparently a necessity in modern SFF) plus two chapters and the very opening of a third. In each chapter, we get a little setup, then some headlong action. The action sequences aren’t fabulous set-pieces, as you’d expect in a brief sample like this, but the description bits set the tone effectively:
The third bar along was named ‘The Rocking Horse’ which sounded cute until you realised that it referred to the music and the ready availability of hard drugs. Still, they did a good meal for a low price, so I slipped in among the crowd. It was dark inside. Smoke filtered through the rays of light from the games racked up along the wall. I squeezed onto a stool at the far end of the bar between a skinny old guy mumbling into his drink and a big Kwa-doon wearing the uniform of a dockworker. He’d pulled the suit down off his shoulders and the empty sleeve slapped at me every time he moved. It was annoying but not so much that I felt like complaining, not in the kind of bar where you didn’t want to draw attention to yourself.
This kind of language tells me just who my narrator is, and what kind of world I’m dealing with. I’m sure some critics would take issue with the clichés here, but cliché is where pulp lives. What would the original Star Wars or Raiders be without clichés? And I love the tactile detail of the slapping empty sleeve, the hero’s reaction to which nicely signals that this place, while it might not be the cantina in Mos Eisely, is also not exactly the French Laundry.
I raced through the sample. With my eye tuned to small details, I noted a few places I’d have phrased differently, a few places I didn’t like the comma usage, but every one of them was trivial and arguable. Besides, Swinford is clearly British (realise, humour, etc.), and you have to allow a little license for our less-fortunate Anglophone brethren. (Just kidding, but pulp is an exceedingly American style.) Ultimately, to be quite honest, I couldn’t find much to cavil at.
Thus Falls the Shadow is clearly a ripping yarn told professionally by someone who knows his business. I’m probably going to buy the book—it certainly shows a heck of a lot of promise. I doubt it’ll be anything stunningly original, but who reads pulp for originality? We read for an exciting, fast-paced tale, and in my book Swinford’s sample ticks every box.
After all that, I’m starting to think I ought to try my hand at some pure pulp….