Slightly New and Most Likely Not Improved

I'm working on a new project, a longish erotic scienfornication novel mashup. You take something whose copyright hasn't been renewed and is in the public domain, then rewrite it adding in whatever extra crap you like--zombies, robots, ninjas, Jane Austen, etc. 

Mine unfortunately has a complete lack of zombies, robots, ninjas and Jane Austen, but it does have space pirates, a couple of excessively aroused Martians, and a Moon treasure.

I dug through Gutenberg's science fiction bookshelf and found a Ray Cummings serial published in Astounding Stories around 1930. It's a horribly clunky thing, with stilted, wooden dialogue and overstuffed descriptions that only prove the author was paid by the word. It's not one of his best works and it's so crammed with extraneous description and excessively tedious dialogue it's a painful chore to read. I've compressed some 8-page chapters into a page and a half without losing any information, if that tells you anything. No wonder the copyright ran out years ago.

It also has one of those dumb love-at-first-sight plotlines and a hero who tells his love interest in their very first conversation that she doesn't have to be a man to do great things--she can give birth to sons who will. His sons. He's hardly spoken to the woman and he's already trying to knock her up.

BARF.

Yeah, this story was just asking for it. Begging for it, even. You bad, bad story.