Taking a break
As you’ve probably noticed over the past 18 months or so, The Pulp Companion has been on hiatus. Various events have delayed the next edition. (The items below were prepared for a Winter 2004 edition that stalled, so we thought we should go ahead and post them.) TPC will continue its hiatus. But don’t let that stop you from exploring the TPC archives. We’ve got some really interesting articles stockpiled there.
Mad about Mars
As the two rovers scurry about the surface of Mars, do you keep wondering when they will come across Helium? Or see a banth? Maybe that’s a sign for you to check out the Martian texts at the SpaceRef.com site. You’ll find versions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars” and several sequels, and H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” as well as a study guide to Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles.”
Pulp culture meets pop culture
What do you get when you cross a popular kids’ animated character with an Ancient One? How about Pokéthulhu (Archived). S. John Ross and John Kovalic put a Pokemon-Lovecraftian spin on role-playing games with this spoof. You’ll get information about ordering the rule book, “Pokéthulhu, The Adventure Game: The Monster in Your Pocket Is Cuddly, Evil and Itching for Action,” for $5.95. Then to help you name your “adorable eldritch monsters from the icey depths of space,” you can turn to Chris Pound’s Language Machine. It’s updated every 15 minutes or so with 500 new names, from Aforgodish (a luminescent/time-warping little onion) to Zharukazam (a sticky psychic-thing).
Victorian-vintage fun
Fans of Victorian-era pulps and steampunk novels should check out the Boilerplate site. This entertaining and innovative site is the brainchild of Paul Guinan, an amateur historian, artist, writer and Renaissance man. The site tells the story of the mechanical man Boilerplate, from his unveiling at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to his mysterious disappearance during the last days of World War I. There are plenty of illustrations, photos and anecdotes on the mechanical marvel, as well as a wealth of information on other robots of the Victorian Era. And if you want to learn even more about Boilerplate, check out this Portland Mercury story.
Pulp for your walls
Barnesandnoble.com offers a good selection of pulp magazine cover posters for sale. You can browse through science fiction, sports and wild west, as well as general, pulp covers. Titles include Amazing Stories, Sports Aces, Dime Sports, Weird Tales, Fantastic and Wild West Weekly. Poster sizes range from 20×29 inches on standard paper for $19.95 to 44×66 museum-size canvas prints for $595.
Pulp Q&A
I’m looking for Pulp price guides. Can you help?
There’s no “Overstreet Price Guide for the Pulps,” or anything considered the standard for pricing pulps. The closest would be Tim Cottrill’s “Bookery Fantasy’s Ultimate Guide to the Pulps and Related Magazines 1896-1959” (Bookery Press, 2001). It’s a pretty extensive listing of pulps, with suggested prices based on what he had seen on eBay and other dealers.
Pulp prices can vary widely, depending on when, where and who is selling a given pulp. There were some discussions on one of the newsgroups recently about the prices of pulp reprints on eBay and how widely they varied from day to day. The same holds true for pulps.
An updated book is available at the Bookery Fantasy website.
