Thoughts on Appendix N

Full disclosure: In January I began contributing a column on vintage SFF and genre literary history for the Castalia House blog, at +Jeffro Johnson ’s invitation.  The below is my own thoughts on Jeffro’s Appendix N project. I receive no payment from CH, nor have I been asked or encouraged to promote Jeffro’s book beyond a friendly thanks from the author for what little I’ve done to support his project and his hope that I’ll talk about it. 

And I will. 

I’ve been engaged with what has come to be called #pulprevolution since long before it became a thing. My ongoing mission[1] has been to learn more about the roots of SFF, and to bring back some of the amazing aesthetic that was dominant in the pre-Campbell era. Part of that is a matter of developing my own writing – to learn from proven classics how it’s done. Part of it is to delve deep and learn about the social and cultural contexts in which my mentors[2] were working.

So, when I stumbled on Jeffro a couple of years ago[3] imagine my surprise – and pleasure – to discover that he had decided to undertake a project:

The Pulp Aesthetic

Misha Burnett recently joined the ongoing conversation about pulps, to which a fellow blogger Rampant Coyote[1] responded – and Misha responds again here. There are some excellent points in both blog posts.

Too often, I come across supposed "pulp revivals" that seem to think the defining feature of the pulp era[2] was "B list schlock." To be sure, there was a lot of poor work printed in the scramble to get a piece of the action in a market suddenly bursting with appetite for literary periodicals, but to say that's what made the pulp era different is deeply unjust. In fact, the pulps drew their appeal from three things: