It should come as a wild galloping shock to absolutely no one that I love pulp fiction. The genre, not the movie.* You can keep your poignant tales of ennui and evocative period dramas; give me the spacemen and cowboys, the monsters and robots, the gruff detective and the dumb-ass high school kids who go parking in the wrong place every fucking time.
While my lovely and intellectual grad school colleagues were going to see moving films about ballerinas in Chernobyl, I was burying myself in cheap paperbacks covered in intrepid explorers, destructive machines, and busty redheads with chain mail bikinis.
I’m not what one would describe as ‘tasteful’.
But, by Loki, I love those things. I love the unapologetic brashness**. And, with the advent of New Pulp and the rise of some very interesting authors, I get to see that shit come back in a big way. There’s even a new take on the quintessential chain-mail bikini heroine, Red Sonja.
Monday Challenge, hobgoblins: write the plot synopsis for one of these randomly generated*** pulp titles:
Assault Of The Titanic Bee-People
Cannibal Wednesday
The Chromatic Kid
Nuns Of Fear
Android Breaker: The Return
I Was An Atom-Age Caligula!
Go forth and write something that would have had parents of 1958 worried about the hearts and minds of their children.
*Though the movie’s not bad. Not great. but not bad.
**This also explains my love of hair metal, punk rock, giant robots, and Jack Daniels.
***This generator, along with other fine random generators, can be found at The Seventh Sanctum. The fan fiction generators are particularly recommended for those with neither qualms nor taste.