Better Tasting and Good For You

Spicy Science Stories Collection is now live as are the new covers on all the old titles, or at least they'd better be. The stories in the collection are the same as the previously-published shorts but with the formatting cleaned up and a shmancy cover.

Now back to the soul-sucking nightmare that is Brigands of the Moon which is looking like it'll be about 250 Kindle pages when it's all said and done, about a third of which is my own input. The next time I think I want to porn up a public domain novel the original had better only be about 40 pages total, goddammit.

EDIT: While procrastinating on Brigands I made this NOOK button thingy for my book list.

Hacked Apart

Nearly done crapping up Brigands of the Moon. I've got a couple more chapters, then I can make a new cover and hopefully I'll be done with it this weekend so I can get back to the Space Marines and their strange quest for the missing Moon Pope.

The worst of Brigands was whittling things down to a more manageable size, things like distilling a three-page fight scene down to a half a page and completely taking out the same exact goddamn fight scene but told from a different person's perspective and at least two pages longer. I'm all like, fuck that shit, I can't make this funny twice. I'm having a hard enough time making it funny one time.

If I've learned anything from this exercise it's how to pork up a decent 30-page story to make a snoozy four-part epic. Jiminy fucking crickets.

Just uploaded the Spicy Science Stories Collection, complete with a fancy new cover design which then made all the rest of the Spicy Science Stories look like ass what with their lame pixilated bullshit fonts and everything.

I'm thinking of doing a print version of this one using Amazon's CreateSpace but I haven't bothered to click on the link to see the specs yet. I want altered illustrations and fake ads and a fancy table of contents. We'll see. 

Here's the inspiration for the design. Of course it's a magazine series I don't have any issues of. I've been too lazy to look for that one on eBay but I'm kind of intrigued by a 720 page magazine. That's closer to a Sears catalog than a pulp mag. Obviously paper shortages weren't yet in effect in 1943.

Just for shiggles, here's one super crappy old cover and the new version whose floating doodads and such could use some tweaking but I'm going to say it's done. I have no idea what's up with the title banner for the one on the left. I think I liked the Startling Stories font for about a week, then persisted in using it to keep the covers consistent even though I hated its stinking guts by then. Really, it was like I thought I wasn't allowed to change a goddamn cover midway through a series.

The older ones were done in a lame graphics program on a very old Windows laptop since I hadn't figured out how to load my three bazillion fonts in Linux at the time. Really, what's the point of having cool fonts if you can't use them? Once I found out how to do that the new covers were easily fixed up in GIMP, which I should've been using in the first place since the old graphics program had some serious issues with scaling a pasted image like the title and making it look bad.

The Spicy Science Stories series all looks like this now, or it will once all the new uploaded covers go live, and since some covers only had one version saved the conversion was a little clumsy. Others I still had the image saved one step before I started throwing up text all over it.

My new blog banner was also done in GIMP one afternoon a couple weeks ago when I was pretending to work on Brigands of the Moon. For some reason it blurs a little in the mobile version of the blog, like the resolution goes squirrely, but if I reduce the image size so it looks good on mobile it doesn't center at all on the web version. I default to the web version so the hell with mobile.

The original image came from the Letters section of Fantastic Story, Summer 1950. Fantastic Story reprinted older fiction from Wonder Stories magazine when it was sold to Beacon Publications and renamed Thrilling Wonder Stories. This particular illustration has a goofy 1940s SF feel to it so I had to appropriate it for my own nefarious uses, though I really should've done hand-lettered text. Shame I have no idea where my old lettering manuals are and I can only find the box of nibs for my lettering pen but no fucking pen.

Next up: Two new Captain Future synopses and some impressions of the first chunk of Triplanetary, the first book of the Lensman epic by E.E. Smith.

F This

I'm taking down part 1 of Brigands of the Moon--it'll be one long 100-150 page novel instead of a serial because the original is so effin' tedious to edit. The last three installments would work far better as one part.

That also means I can fix the cover.

So there.

Fan-Freakin'-Tastic

Halfway through part 2 of my ruination of Brigands of the Moon. I thought if I went out of town for a week I'd get all the editing done but all I managed was the first 23 out of 47 pages. Ehhh.

Since I haven't yet read anything in this Fantastic Story I can't decide if this guy is yanking the wires apart or jamming them together. He does somehow look pretty incompetent at whatever it is he's up to which is why I used him as a Spicy Science Stories cover version of Dr. Miles Long.

Judging by those out-of-control nipples it must be awful cold on that spaceship. Perhaps that guy's jerry-rigging the heating system.

Science fiction fans must be plenty willing to sell nylons to make a little extra cash to buy more science fiction. Or hamsters.

The new wonder animal! Delightful! Disposable! Buy 'em by the bag!

This mysterious ad must be aimed at victims of industrial accidents who want to work for "Uncle Sam." Maybe this faceless creeper will come to your house personally for "Examinations." "I Want You," he wheezes through his face-hole.

Red Sun of Different

I forgot the best part of Red Sun of Danger where Marshal Gurney lectures Joan for still being involved with Captain Future since, like, forever.

Hey, he's got the monopoly on being different from the rest of us! I guess that's what happens when a guy's been spanked by a robot.

Pulpity-Pulp-Pulp

Took a break from Captain Future and read Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, Startling Stories, Jan. 1940. Pretty entertaining, as far as lightweight space opera pulp stuff goes. It takes place a couple hundred years after men first went into space and all the planets are populated not by old civilizations like in the Captain Future stories (which take place only a generation after spaceflight was developed) but by Earthmen who have evolved to cope with that planet's conditions. A high gravity makes the people short and squatty, minerals in the atmosphere makes skin yellow, etc. Not as much stupid, goofy fun as when the populations are non-Earth humanoids with civilizations older than Earth's, but still worth a read.

The Three Planeteers are Earthman John Thorn, Venusian Sual Av and Mercurian Gunner Welk, who are wanted for the thefts of stuff all over the system, but not really. They're actually undercover spies--robbing ships and such gets them access to all sorts of information they couldn't have gotten otherwise. The only person who knows what they're really up to is the Chairman of the Earth Government who's been sending them out to spy on the League of Cold Worlds (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus) since they're plotting to take over the Inner Alliance (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars). Apparently nobody wants Pluto.

"You take it!" 
"No, you take it!"
Rejected Pluto makes sadface.

The Inner Alliance has a honking big secret weapon to use against the League's invading ships, since the Alliance couldn't be bothered to build up their defenses even though they knew full well something was brewing, and decided to throw everything into this fancy weapon they haven't even tested. Whatever. It also uses a shit-ton of radite (an isotope of radium, old-timey SF's favorite thing) and they can only get huge quantities of the stuff on Erebus, the tenth planet, so the Planeteers volunteer to go. 

The problem with Erebus is that only one explorer has come back from there and nobody knows why. Martin Cain has been dead for years and never told anyone but his daughter Lana how he escaped. She's now the leader of a community of pirates called the Companions of Space who use the asteroid belt as their hideout and base of operations. Hamilton will recycle these pirates and how they're able to hide and navigate in the asteroids in the fairly juvenile Captain Future novel Outlaw World.

Since this one is actually worth reading, if only for Erebus and what happened to the disappeared explorers, I'll stop here and ruin another story later.

On to the last Captain Future magazine put out before the magazine went under without warning due to wartime paper shortages. I thought there'd be a mention in the Startling Stories that picked up the novel meant for the Summer 1944 issue but I've flipped through my ratty Spring 1945 copy and haven't seen anything. Balls. Of course it's in an earlier 1944 Startling Stories I don't have.

Yeah, whatever. After a couple of "ehh" entries we have a pretty good one, Days of Creation, Spring 1944, a story full of the kind of goofy stuff you'd find in Outlaws of the Moon or in half of The Seven Space Stones, so no plot spoilers for this one. No major ones anyway.

The Solar System is overpopulated like all of a sudden and so Captain Future proposes they build a whole new planet (completely ignoring all those countless asteroids in the system with atmospheres people could go live on) using that fancy matter-creating doodad from Quest Beyond the Stars. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, right?

This plan is opposed by sleazy Hartley Brooks, who has the--wait for it--monopoly on all the slum towers on all the planets in the system and he'd rather not have his slumlord empire ruined by some damn-fool science dink. Not like he couldn't get the contract to throw together some slum towers for this new planet or anything.

Anyhow, he decides to have Future and the guys killed when they're off putzing around on an archaeological expedition but only manages to bury the Futuremen and give Curt amnesia. Another random criminal guy steals Curt's atomic-powered ring and the Comet and thinks it'd be awesome to hire some Futuremen impersonators and pretend to be their assistant so he could whoosh around space in this whiz-bang hotrod spaceship.

Don't worry, pirates pick up amnesiac Curt and a random prospector finds the Futuremen when they dig themselves out of the dirt like a month later. You were worried, right? No?

Joan also gets to make out with three guys in this story but two of them are Captain Future. One is scraggly grabby pirate Curt with amnesia, one is normal boring Curt after the brain surgery shown on the cover, and the third guy is an actor paid to impersonate Captain Future but he's kind of stupid and also a lush so everyone says it's a shame he hit his head in that explosion. Good times.

You really want to read it now, right? Especially the grabby pirate bit? No? Not even the part at the end where Curt gets his memory back and Joan tells him she liked things about scraggly Curt but won't say what but we all know it's the grabby pirate stuff?

As expected neither the Plutonian slug-horse nor the mind-meld crystal deus ex machina thingy from Worlds to Come are mentioned. Maybe Joan said the hell with Curt being able to read her mind so the crystal is in whatever passes for a junk drawer in the future and the slug-horse is just dead.

This is a Planet Police uniform, by the way. You can tell that room is really cold because of Joan's pointy . . . gloves.

Now for the first Startling Stories Captain Future, Red Sun of Danger, Spring 1945, by Edmond Hamilton writing as Brett Sterling. Not one of my favorites, mostly because there's a planet called Roo and an ancient people called Kangas. Damned distracting if you ask me. Despite that it's not a bad story even though it has yet another monopoly for Captain Future to break up, this time it's a chemical called vitron which combats the poisons that cause the human body to age.

Vitron is only grown on the planet Roo way out in another star system. The human colonists are worried about the native Roons going wacko and killing colonists, and meanwhile somebody's stirring up the Roons so they go wacko and kill colonists. They believe if the colonists don't leave Roo then the Old Ones (Kangas) will destroy the universe. Meanwhile, the colonists don't believe there really are Old Ones, especially the guy who's stirring up the Roons so he can have the vitron production all to himself.

Captain Future sneaks to Roo by pretending to be a criminal who shoots Future who's really Otho in disguise, instead of just dressing up like somebody else like he always does, then the rest of the Futuremen turn up in disguise, as do Joan and Marshal Gurney. Really, they all should've taken the same spaceship and saved some space bucks.

It turns out there really are Old Ones, vaguely Lovecraftian black blobby things that had been defeated by the ancient Denebians with a psycho-amplifier that amplifies brain waves so they've been sleeping for thousands of years until somebody disturbs them--like that guy who wants the vitiron monopoly, so he stirs up the natives by blowing up the Kangas' resting place. Nice.

That deely-bobber psycho-amplifier's a great look, Curt. You should make that a permanent part of your Captain Future outfit. You should also pay way more attention to your half-dressed girlfriend. Her pointy . . . boots . . . tell me it's a little cold there on Roo.

Captain Sensible

I've now got a copy of my favorite Captain Future cover/magazine in my filthy, sweaty hands and I'm thrilled that it has an embarrassing full-page ad for some dubious health product on the back. I'd have been disappointed if it didn't.

I love that it's called "Pyro." I'm pretty sure that means it burns like fuck when you pour it in your mouth, but back in the olden days if a treatment didn't hurt when you used it or burn your eyes when you smelled it that meant it wasn't working. I wouldn't have been surprised if the doctors back then offered to give you a Hurtz Donut when you came to the office.

Remember, if Pyro doesn't save your teeth you get your money back which you can use to buy false teeth by mail from one of the convenient ads inside.

Now, this has always bugged me about pulps, this sloppy cover flapping around. They're always lined up on the top edge but the bottom usually wraps around the pages. I know I'd be trimming the stupid thing when I got it home from the newsstand like way back in 1941 because I'm weird like that. Seems like I've got one some obsessive teenager trimmed up all nice back in the day but I'll be damned if I can find it. Maybe I considered buying it instead of actually buying it.

To recap, this issue is the one where the Futuremen joined the circus and the plot was totally batshit crazy. Curt goes on a lame date with Joan and Otho, the guys think Captain Future is dead and bury somebody else, there's all kinds of goofy disguises, Curt builds a transmitter out of leaves or something, and they go to the Pleasure Planet which disappointingly is only a casino where nobody wins anything. This was one of the few original novels that wasn't reprinted as a paperback in the 60s, though it didn't make any sense to leave out the best one with Ul Quorn and reprint the yawn-enducing Magician of Mars. I haven't read the third Ul Quorn story, The Solar Invasion, yet but the consensus seems to be that Manly Wade Wellman did a mondo sucky job at it.

Anyhow, here's this awesome drawing of circus Curt in a cage full of wild Venusian swamp tigers which, honestly, looks like what happens when I come home from work but it's just the one cat.

Even though nobody asked, Otho's still nekkid.

Hacking Away

EDIT: 7-13-2016. After reading the last couple parts of the original Brigands of the Moon I realized just how tedious this damn thing is, so I decided to take down part 1 of my porn mashup version and condense the next three installments into one chunk, then republish the whole thing as one 100-150 page novel. I can fix the cover I've been hating on and be done with this fool's exercise so I can get back to the Space Marines and the Moon Pope.

Part 1 of my horrifically filthy mashup Brigands of the Moon, the Secret Confessions of Gregg Haljan is now live. 

I keep wanting to yell at the couple on the cover to open their damn mouths when they kiss but that ain't gonna happen. Really, it looks like a goddamn Captain Future novel. Besides that, I'm not very happy at how bottom-heavy and unbalanced the cover is--I probably should've put the secondary title up at top right instead of the tiny Victory banner or lightened up the bottom half so it was the same value as the faded-out couple. I might just leave it as is and complain about it endlessly until I finish the second installment.

Part 1 wound up being 49 pages in LibreOffice, compared to 17 for my longest story The Unmentionable Unknown so I was forced to keep it in its serialized format because I've read no one wants to buy a 200 page porn novel. I expect each of the four parts to be around 40-50 pages, whatever that translates to in a Kindle, like 65-75 pages. I could've chopped out most of it but I was enjoying the plot a bit too much and the erotic elements just plopped easily into it without much of a struggle. Yeah, this serial just gave it up like that. Slut.

Anyhow, here's a synopsis-type thingy.

Mutiny and brigandage stalk the Space-ship Planetara as she speeds to the Moon to pick up a fabulously rich cache of radium-ore! But while danger looms, the passengers and crew are found with their pants down—literally. Brigands of the Moon, the Secret Confessions of Gregg Haljan purports to be the true story of what really went on behinds the scenes of this notorious mutiny, in the words of the Planetara's third officer.

“I'll introduce myself. My name, Gregg Haljan. My age, twenty-five years. My original narrative of the mutiny and brigandage of the Planetara, the one suitable for family viewing, was broadcast with a fair success but my publishers have suggested that I record the true story, the one more suited for late-night reading with a scantily-clad friend of your choosing––the secret confessions whose sordid details have been scrawled upon washroom walls, whispered by naughty schoolboys, and whose scenes have been recreated, photographed and sold by enterprising salesmen of the back alley sort. It is my wish that these confessions be told properly and any erroneous details corrected––especially those concerning length and girth.”