There’s been a lot of talk lately about a “magical” device that delivers “perfect” juice, and is destined to revolutionize the way people drink juice in just the same way Keurig revolutionized coffee.
I have no idea about this device other than what has been in the news
and so will refrain from more than a brief comment about money[1]
and coffee[2]
but I will use it as an excuse to talk
about pulp.
There has been a lot of talk about the pulp aesthetic in fiction among
the people in my circles. Not merely in the Pulp
Revolution community over on G+ but elsewhere as well. Not a great deal of
what is being said is particularly innovative – I suppose this is a natural
consequence of the fact we’re mostly discussing styles of writing that are at
least a century old – but a great deal of it is interesting, and exciting enough to have triggered a little nest
of activity in writing and publishing.
This isn’t the first time a revival of the pulp aesthetic has started
up – in fact it seems to have been coming more or less at 5 year intervals for
a while now – but I think this may well be the first time I’ve seen it actually
getting traction in a big way. This might be an illusion caused by the fact I
seem to have been sucked into the center of the maelstrom, of course. My fingers
are crossed that it’s more than that, and to be honest I think the
circumstances are quite different now than they have been in the past.
One reason the pulp vibe is coming back, I think, is technological: the
last big wave of enthusiasm[3]
seems to have petered out largely because it was too soon to take advantages of
the various ebook and archive resources currently available.
With the meteoric rise of
self-publishing platforms such as Amazon, Smashwords, and others – with the
explosion of highly affordable print on demand services in the last few years –
with the emergence of alternative financial tools such as the various crowd
funding platforms – and with the growing ubiquity of social media communication
platforms – it’s easier than ever to get a conversation started, to generate
enthusiasm, and to keep the momentum rolling.
I think this is enormously significant.
When you look back to the golden age of the pulps, you see a slowly
building momentum that – by the time of pulp’s peak in the 30s and 40s – had
generated a truly incredible range of magazines. And when I say incredible, I
mean incredible: take a look at this photo of a street-side magazine display
from 1935.
The market was bulging with magazines. Significant publishers and
little fly by night operations were all jostling for space on the shelves. Offset
printing technology was getting cheaper, and advances in paper manufacturing
were making printing a much cheaper industry than it had ever been before.
Small-shop printing houses sprang up all over the place, and taking advantage
of this new infrastructure people threw money at new magazines as business
speculation or even just because what they wanted to see on the shelves wasn’t
there yet.
And that’s not even considering the underground
publishing industry.
The Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA) founded in 1937 is the
oldest fan APA for science fiction, but the APA model goes back into the 19th
Century and there were little APAs all over the place. Many of these were hobby
oriented, and quite a few were focused on some variety of creative work. But
what happened in the early decades of the 20th Century was an
enormous shift in thinking that added to the boiling industry.
Certainly, many fanzines of the era orbited around fans who – by some
means – had access to one of the smaller shop presses and were able to buy,
negotiate, wheedle, or simply steal time at the press when it wasn’t in
ordinary operation. But this still
limited the number of people who could get in on the activity.
APAs already existed, as I mentioned, but for the most part they
operated via carbon copy or laborious retyping – naturally, this significantly
limits the range and size of audience.
But hectograph and mimeograph technologies were plummeting in price as
well, and this made a huge difference: suddenly, a fairly normal middle-class
fan could reasonably buy or borrow a new or used mimeo or hecto and churn out
dozens of copies of a ‘zine. Suddenly, the conversation wasn’t limited to the
people an enthusiastic fan could talk to in person, or the handful he or she could
contact by carbon copy letters.[4]
Even before the establishment of FAPA suddenly connected fans were
talking: through the letters columns in print magazines, in letters to what we
might call semi-pro magazines (the fanzines being produced at pro presses), and
now in hectoed and mimeoed pages being churned out in people’s cellars and
garages and kitchens.
Overnight, the conversation went from being an excited murmur to a
veritable roar.
Why is this significant? Because I strongly believe we are looking at a
similar kind of sea change in publishing.
E-books have been around for a while of course, but over the last few
years it has been getting easier and cheaper to produce astoundingly
professional products that are available not only in e-book format but also in
print, thanks to POD services. Approaches and techniques that were once sneered
at as “mere vanity” are now viable business models, particularly for what
amount to fan works with attitude.
Combined with crowd funding to ensure a regular flow of capital even in
cycles where breaking even is difficult just about anyone can notice a gap in
the market, conceive a way to fill it, and launch the product in the course of
just a few months.
Look at the success of Cirsova Magazine,
now going into its second year.
Look at Bryce
Beattie’s StoryHack, which went from a call for submissions at the
beginning of March to being nearly ready for its first issue to go to print in
May.
Look at the explosion of collaborative anthologies.
Look at the growing number of blogs and the increased volume of chatter
about self-publishing on social media.
As always happens when there’s a technological “singularity event”
bringing together interest and enthusiasm with a sudden decrease in the cost of
artistic expression, we’re seeing the boom beginning right now. This is nothing
new: it’s happened every time a new technology makes the headlong dash into
everyday commodity level prices. It happened with hector/mimeo in the 30s, it
happened with 8mm film in the 60s, it happened with cassette tapes in the late
70s and 80s, and it’s happening now with the convergence of e-books and the
tools to produce them.
And the thing is, #pulprevolution is really just one facet of the
explosion, the one I happen to be seeing most clearly because of location.
It’s really been bubbling for the last few years with the
erotica/romance e-book boom, with the extreme horror movements, and of course
with wave after wave of amateur book publication in nearly every genre
imaginable.
This brings us back to the juicerino or whatever the stupid thing is called:
It's not just a metaphor for the over-produced slicks, it's also a metaphor for publishing more generally.
Sure, I could pay too much for an electric motor and some rollers, and slap in a squeeze-bottle of processed juice. Or I could just grab some fruit and veggies - maybe even out of my own garden - and smash the juice out of them myself.
Yeah, I might get pulp in my teeth. I might even get a healthy dose of caterpillars along with my kale smoothie.
But man will it taste good!
#pulprevolution - not just good, but good for you!
It’s an exciting time, people. It's a time when if you long for a certain flavour of fiction then it’s probably time to heed the clarion call:
This brings us back to the juicerino or whatever the stupid thing is called:
It's not just a metaphor for the over-produced slicks, it's also a metaphor for publishing more generally.
Sure, I could pay too much for an electric motor and some rollers, and slap in a squeeze-bottle of processed juice. Or I could just grab some fruit and veggies - maybe even out of my own garden - and smash the juice out of them myself.
Yeah, I might get pulp in my teeth. I might even get a healthy dose of caterpillars along with my kale smoothie.
But man will it taste good!
#pulprevolution - not just good, but good for you!
It’s an exciting time, people. It's a time when if you long for a certain flavour of fiction then it’s probably time to heed the clarion call:
#Writeit!
Get pulp in your teeth!
Join the revolution!
[1]
And the fools from whom it is soon parted.
[2]
And the terrible sins that the unwashed commit against it
[3]
See The Cimmerian Blog (shuttered since
2009), the Grognardia blog (likewise
since 2012) and the Robert E Howard
Foundation (still active, and – significantly – actively producing their
own imprints of REH’s work)
[4]
Carbon copy letter circles were certainly common enough – Lovecraft’s is of
course the most famous.
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