Bruce Sterling — sometimes friend of ToM, sometimes critic, though we always adore him just the same — pointed out over on Beyond the Beyond this amazing post over on No Fear of the Future, full of fantastic 30's pulp covers and bizarre pulp facts and plotlines.
This detail on the history of German pulps I thought was particularly neat:
In the heldromans, the German version of the pulps, several authors, working for a variety of publishers, decided to create a shared pulp world (and what's more, seem not to have told their publishers about it), so that, throughout most of the decade (until the Nazis put the boot on the neck of the industry), you could demonstrate, via published crossovers, that everyone from Captain Mors, Der Luftpirat to Sun Koh, the Nazi Doc Savage, existed in the same world.
The post ends with this self-answering question:
Now, be honest. Which would you rather watch and read: the ritual humiliation that is American Idol, the celebration of bad writing, bad acting, and appallingly unlikable characters that is Grey's Anatomy, and the fetishistic investigation porn of CSI, or stories about chimpanzees enforcing the law on the streets of London, zombie sheriffs, and dead men telling their daughters about what their next case is going to be?
If you're reading ToM, it's got to be the latter. Although I don't think a pistol-packing monkey is completely out of the scope of CSI's subscription to the realistic.
Back in my day, we had *really* fantastic stories. [No Fear Of The Future]
