{"id":119,"date":"2006-09-11T15:11:18","date_gmt":"2006-09-11T22:11:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thepulp.net\/PulpBlogs\/YellowedPerils_test\/?p=119"},"modified":"2006-09-11T15:11:18","modified_gmt":"2006-09-11T22:11:18","slug":"terrorism-and-the-pulps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/2006\/09\/11\/terrorism-and-the-pulps\/","title":{"rendered":"Terrorism and the pulps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today \u2013 five years after the appalling attacks of Sept. 11 \u2013 it\u2019s hard not to think of terrorism. Over the past few days, the idea of terrorism as depicted in fiction has been turning over in my mind.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The
The November 1939 number of The Avenger features terrorism as a key plot element.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

John Updike\u2019s recently published novel, Terrorist<\/em>, has gotten some<\/a> attention<\/a>. In 1975, Thomas Harris published Black Sunday<\/em>, made into a memorable movie about a terrorist strike on the Super Bowl. But the idea of terrorism in fiction isn\u2019t something that\u2019s come about because of recent events.<\/p>\n

Turn the clock back 70 years and you\u2019ll find that terrorism was a prime plot mover in many popular fiction stories.<\/p>\n

Whereas today\u2019s real-life \u201creligious\u201d terrorists are fueled by hate and bent on the destruction of Western society, the terrorists of the pulps were more often driven by greed or conquest. (Though hate was a motivator, too.)<\/p>\n

For instance, in the fall of 1939, the air above a major U.S. city was filled with the droning of an airplane, then a tall office building collapsed. The goal of \u201cThe Sky Walker\u201d was to terrorize the population of Chicago. That was in the November number of The Avenger<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Terrorism \u2013 acts of mass violence to frighten the populace \u2013 turns up in a variety of pulp titles, such as The Spider<\/a><\/em>, Operator #5<\/a><\/em> and, even, Doc Savage<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

But the sad and unfortunate aspect of this is that today\u2019s terrorism is real and not just the product of a fictioneer<\/a> hammering out story after story on a typewriter for a living.<\/p>\n

\u2013 William<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today \u2013 five years after the appalling attacks of Sept. 11 \u2013 it\u2019s hard not to think of terrorism. Over the past few days, the idea of terrorism as depicted in fiction has been turning over in my mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_has_post_settings":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-pulps"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2qgXO-1V","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/yellowedperils\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}