There She Goes Again

Bored, bored, bored. Bored enough to make more inane derogatory comments about everyone's favorite artificial jerkass Futureman Otho.

Here he is, nekkid as the day he came out of a test tube and already he's blasting a hole in somebody. But sometimes he wears clothes.

...except when he doesn't. Everyone should be thankful he's carrying Brain Guy in front of him. The Brain is somehow looking completely horrified even though he doesn't have a face to speak of.

He can occasionally be seen scampering around in a skintight leotard, which is only barely less awful than being nekkid. The odd choice of loafers over say, knee-high space boots leaves something to be desired.

This attractive ensemble from The Comet Kings is reminiscent of that weird neighbor whose yard the police just dug up with a backhoe looking for human remains.

Still no explanation of what purpose the strange antenna array serves. It was mentioned in the first two or three novels but nothing since. The first few magazines in the series had biographies of each of the characters but I'm missing the one with Otho's bio so I'm sure there's some backstory there that was never brought up in the novels. That leaves me no choice but to make stupid shit up. Really, I'm forced to do this.

Let's see, maybe Otho uses his antenna doohickey to suck energy out of the air to survive and occasionally uses it to dry underpants on. We're not certain exactly whose underpants they are, just rest assured that they are in fact underpants.

Happy? I'm not.

I just recently polished off two more Captain Future stories, Magician of Mars and The Lost World of Time, both of which were severely disappointing. Here I was looking forward to more Ul Quorn if only because if Captain Future didn't have an arch enemy he'd have to go back to breaking up space monopolies and we really don't want to have to read any more of that.

If you want to read just one Capt. Future I'd go for The Seven Space Stones just for the sheer amount of wacko plot crammed into one little 95-or-so-page novel. In order to capture bad guy Ul Quorn, Curt Newton and his Futuremen put on disguises, join the circus and follow him around trying to catch him committing a crime; the guys think Curt's dead and bury an impostor then plot sweet, sweet revenge; Curt builds a transmitter out of I dunno dirt and leaves or something; Curt and Ul Quorn cheat at atomic space roulette on the Pleasure Planet so they can win one of the Space Stones, etc. etc. etc. It's cheesy as fuck but it's a good kind of cheesy, like nacho cheese Doritos with Velveeta melted on top and a side order of that cheese dip you bought at the 7-11 at 2 am when you had the munchies but completely forgot about once you got home.

On the other hand, Ul Quorn's return in Magician of Mars was the most anticlimactic sleeping pill I've ever had the misfortune to swallow. Cheesy? Hell no. It was about as un-cheesy as something without cheese on it, like a fireplace log or a Siamese cat. There was none of the chin-stroking, "Well played, Captain Future," like arch enemies are supposed to quip when they'd really rather not be bothered killing or capturing one another. It's as though the editor handed author Hamilton the plot and he just started banging his head on the typewriter and said that was good enough.

Ul Quorn inexplicably gathers up a group of the most pathetic henchmen I've ever seen this side of a Donald Duck comic. They're all criminals who had been put in prison by Captain Future so they're all pretty pissed off, but rather than being murderers and dope smugglers Quorn's got a mine owner from whatever novel that was about the mining monopoly, and the evil rocket manufacturer from Star Trail to Glory which was about a rocket manufacturer destroying his competition and creating a monopoly. It's as though Ul Quorn only broke white-collar felons out of prison and wound up with the future equivalent of Bernie Madoff and the guys who ran Enron.

These low-rent henchmen also die like flies. Hell, even Scrappy-Doo, I mean Johnny Kirk kills one.

Really, the only thing worth mentioning in Magician of Mars is Captain Future finally kisses Joan Randall and it's an indifferent kiss, the sort a nephew would give the elderly aunt who controls his inheritance. "He lightly kissed her." Wow, get a room guys. He was stranded on a strange planet (again) like a million miles from the solar system and in another dimension when Ul Quorn leaves him floating in space. You'd think he'd be way more excited than a "light kiss" when the Futuremen find him. He also doesn't bother to say goodbye to her when he takes off for the moon again, the big jackass.

You'd think this lust-filled scene never happened by the way he behaves in The Lost World of Time. Curt's on the moon, bored, and does he even think about going to Earth to hang out with this woman he finally kissed even if it was pretty lame? Nope. He plays rocketball with his friends then goes off on some random adventure a guy he's never seen before tells him about. He does think about her for one sentence, but that was only to say he was glad she was home safe and I guess not in the Comet getting in the way of guys doing guy stuff.

Anyhow, the Futuremen go back in time a million years to save an ancient civilization nobody's ever heard of and while Curt's there he...dun-dun-dun...kisses some other girl. It's like he just now figured out what to do with women and he's gone all horndog with it. Joan isn't mentioned again, not even as a guilty feeling or his being glad that this other chick is a million years in the past so the two women would never accidentally meet or whatever it is buttheaded guys think.

Oh, and jerkass Otho is less of a jerkass than usual and meets a girl who gets killed saving his life because nobody wants to read about artificial jerky guys getting it on with primitive dinosaur-herding alien women. You know this will mean wall-to-wall jerkassedness in the next novel, right? Hopefully Otho's brand of morose jerkassedness doesn't involve emo crap like poetry.

Hacking Away at Part 6

Hacking away because yes, I am a hack.

Cover to part 6 scrapped due to general lousiness. Feh. Despite that, the plot is chugging along nicely, though I wish I'd started earlier in the weekend so I could spend today editing it instead of wasting a day and a half on a primo sucky cover. I've lazily only gotten about 5 of the planed 25 pages done so boo hiss.

New character, the eternally disgusted-by-life Dr. Will B. Hard, an atmospheric expert newly arrived onboard for the expedition to unexplored planet 956-UX. He'll be part of one group with some other crew members I haven't decided on yet. Probably not important who they are since he won't be interacting with them.

Also exploring the planet, or more specifically exploring each other, are the threesome from "Three on an Asteroid." They're fun to write for no reason I can think of and I guarantee they won't get anything scientific accomplished whatsoever. 

I've figured out what to do with Colonel Lingus but not Truly Wetsnatch. I'm pretty sure an amusing plot twist will pop into my head while I'm at work and I'll be choking on coffee. No point in explaining this to my employer because she would not be amused in the least by my moonlighting as a porno writer. 

shrugs

Yeah, whatever dude. 

 

In other news nobody cares about, I've discovered the Comet has acceleration and brake pedals which I find hilarious. It was described a great deal in Captain Future, Star Trail to Glory but I only just now found this diagram. I should totally steal this idea since I'd already written in "All Aboard!" that Colonel "Spurt" Jizzman prefers flying ships with a manual transmission but I didn't have any idea that was a serious thing in old-timey SF.

Looks like Captain Future flies an automatic, which in 1941 would've branded him a total girly-man.

Next space opera to read when I'm done with the Captain Future series will be Edward E. "Doc" Smith's epic The Skylark of Space which is supposed to be, like, so totally crammed with super-science. I found the first book free on Gutenberg so let's see how that works out. Seems like I had part of his Lensman series downloaded but I must've dreamed it or it leaked out of my Kindle into the aether of space.

I've considered reading some of the Buck Rogers strips and Flash Gordon but I don't have any patience with reading comics on the bus. Flash Gordon also doesn't wear pants so I'd just be sniggering at the poor guy, like one does whenever grown men scamper around in their Underoos.

Spicy Science Stories no. 6 Cover Preview

I think I've got the elements and the general layout of this cover right, just not the exact images. The girl doesn't look happy enough and I'm really hating on that low-rez control panel thingy. I'm also not sure why I picked an exaggerated Benday dots background for the viewscreen.

Fuck it, lets scrap the whole thing. Happier nudie chick and new control panel. Lose the Benday dots. The grope-y plant can stay as well as the guy who's not certain whether what he's seeing is exciting in a good way or a bad way. I could probably even ditch the window and control panel altogether.

Cursing at LibreOffice while it almost downloads and then doesn't, and wondering where my wifi hotspot went for about two hours isn't helping me like this one at all. Besides having  a despised cover, it's also the last story in the series and I don't have a good ending. Like, what do I finally do about Ensign Truly Wetsnatch's sentient space crabs? How do I resolve Colonel Lingus's emotional dilemma? Crap crap crappity crap. Writing porn shouldn't be this hard.

Hard. Heh. Maybe that's the problem. Nobody's hard.

So long as we're hating on stuff why don't we focus that hate on the Scrappy Doo of the Captain Future series, Johnny Kirk. This annoying brat stowed away on Future's ship at the beginning of Magician of Mars and Curt doesn't seem to be able to comprehend that if he simply locked the fucking doors he wouldn't have had to to deal with this smug little monster. Really.

One day Curt's going to park the Comet in New York because the president of the solar system can't solve his own problems, then when he goes back out to the lot it'll be stripped clean and sitting on cinder blocks, all because he never locks the damn thing. Or somebody'll take it joyriding and he'll find it parked sideways in an alley, the hull covered in that lame graffiti only suburban white kids do.

Thankfully Johnny Kirk's only in one episode so maybe Grag crushes his skull at the end like he used to do at the beginning of the series. I miss the skull crushing.

Pulp Mag Resources

The next time I'm in the market for a pet please tell me to get an anteater because cats just plain don't earn their keep this time of year.

Since my kitchen is officially dead to me now and I have all this non-cooking time on my hands I'll waste a little bandwidth on links to some online pulp magazine archives that have collections available for download. These sites have pdfs, epubs and facsimile reprints of classic magazines. I now have copies of some of my collection on the Kindle so I can read them without taking them out of their plastic bags.

See, there's the Catch-22. If pulps are in good enough condition to read without falling apart they're way too nice to ever cram in a messenger bag to read on the bus.

Free downloads:

The Pulp Magazine Archive The Internet Archive has a nice collection of stuff, just not completely organized. Slap a title in the search and see what comes up.

The Pulp Magazines Project Tons of stuff to read here in online flipbook form or pdf download.

Project Gutenberg Check out the Science Fiction Bookshelf.

PulpGen Pulp Tons of pulp stories to download, mostly detective stuff.

Pulp Covers Total time-suck. Click a category like "Dead Body" or "Alien Attack" and just try and yank yourself away, I dare you.

Le Site du Capitaine Flam Worth running through Google Translate. French Captain Future site, tons of stuff on the late 70s anime series and Japanese comics but also has free pdf downloads in English of most of the original 1940s-50s pulps with the illustrations.

Luminist Periodical Archives Giant collection of pdfs. Everything from detective magazines to girlie mags and a huge pile of science fiction. Seems to now be a very attractive collection of dead MediaFire links. Booooo.

Reprints and Epubs for sale:

Adventure House Epubs for sale as well as facsimile reprints of pulp magazines. Stuff like Planet Stories, Captain Future, The Shadow and Doc Savage.

Altus Press Huge selection of detective and adventure pulp epubs and reprints.

Radio Archives The Spider, Operator #5, Captain Future and a buttload of other pulp epubs as well as a nice collection of Old Time Radio shows.

Vintage Library Pulp magazine reprints of detective magazines, Doc Savage, Westerns.

No Ants in Space

Space! No ants up here, unless maybe they're moon ants. Giant, chittering bastards that I just now scribbled down as a plotline even though nobody in their right mind wants ants in their porno.

Remember when I said Futureman Otho is usually described as wearing nothing but a belt? Well, I was wrong. I flipped through the first story Captain Future and the Space Emperor and the exact description is a "metal harness," for what purpose I can't fathom. It looks vaguely electrical and I'm picturing it being used as some sort of kinky fetish gear.

Captain Future Star Trail to Glory is shaping up with a more exciting plot, despite the return to "suspects gathered in a room" formula. I'm liking the world-building. They've been previous mentions of types of spacecraft as though they're car models and in this novel we get to meet the big manufacturers, though I groaned a bit since we already had big magnates of some industry creating a monopoly by destroying each others' businesses at least twice already. At this rate I'll be cheering when Ul Quorn comes back in Magician of Mars though if he tries to create a monopoly in that story I may go all kaiju on my neighborhood.

We meet a group of test pilots called Rocketeers and I have a feeling there's some sort of spin-off series with these guys because there seems to be a lot more backstory than with some of the other characters. They're trained, given their comet emblems and sent off in a ship to make sure it works properly before it's sold and of course some guy blows up first thing and the new Rocketeers get yelled at for being upset about it. It's like they didn't know they were disposable when they signed up.

We also have the strange development of Joan Randall suddenly becoming Action Girl, determined to go on whatever dangerous mission that comes up, so long as Capt. Future is involved. She also somehow knows how to fly his fancy ship. Apparently Danger!Joan must've escaped from the pod people and done in Cardboard!Joan.

Anyhow, they now bicker and argue like they're in some first-season episode of Cheers I've seen a million times already and at one point she insists there's a romance, though his reaction was the same as mine, namely he just goes, "Whuh?" Don't worry Capt, I don't know how it happened either; none of us do. It's as though he'd picked up some weird chick in a bar and after a couple "dates" he finds a box of tampons under the bathroom sink and she's telling everyone she's his girlfriend and he has no idea when in hell this happened but he decides to roll with it.

Soon he'll find her handmade doilies everywhere because the Brain's case scratches up the furniture something fierce and Grag will be sent to the garage with the ship and the rest of the machinery. She'll also find a way to put pants on Otho...

Run for your life, Captain.

Ehhhhh

Cinnamon is piled up in the kitchen window like snowdrifts and the ants are now gleefully slaloming down it. Everything reeks of cinnamon and I'm ready to board up the kitchen and live on takeout and Doritos.

Since I'm so totally through with that room altogether, let's pay a visit to Captain Future's secret moonbase and meet The Brain. Simon Wright was a scientist friend of Future's father, What's-his-name Newton, and together they developed Grag and Otho. Simon was elderly with some sort of terminal disease and everyone thought he needed to live, like, hundreds of years longer than he deserved so Newton took out his brain and put it in this hilarious see-through case with what looks like wind-up joke teeth on the front.

Eventually Capt. Future puts magnetic doodads on this comedy brain case so he can fly around, probably because he's secretly sick of Simon's passive-aggressive insistence on being carried everywhere because if he had a body that would just waste energy he could be using to think. Asshat.

"Carry me," he whines electronically, plastic teeth chattering in sync with his voice. "Don't think you're too big for Grag to spank, you ungrateful whippersnapper!"

Curt chokes back a laugh because really, those joke teeth never get old. They're almost as funny as the antenna Simon uses that somehow looks like an arrow shot through his brain case or that soft air cushion that makes unfortunate fart noises. Don't even ask about those deely-bobber eyestalks.

Meanwhile, Captain Future shoots some monkey men.

Live Collection

I'm on an ant-murdering rampage. I've been spraying them and mashing them one by one and now the kitchen window is piled an inch deep in cinnamon to keep new ones out. They've been stubbornly crawling up three stories just to be disappointed in my cooking and there are fewer ants outside than are in my kitchen at this moment.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to decide whether to do a dual boot of Linux and Windows or Linux only and Virtual Box on the newish notebook. For those who don't give a Jovian rat's ass about that here's some non-nerd news:

Spicy Science Stories Quickies Collection is now live on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

"Yaaay," you say sarcastically, giving me the mega-stinkeye. "Now go write something better."

Bah.

I just noticed B&N doesn't allow web addresses in their Meet the Author blurb so I'll have to change all those. Why didn't I notice that a month ago? I was probably napping.

Quickies Collection

First collection just uploaded, all previously published stuff. If you already bought the three stories separately there's no difference in this other than some formatting changes and a fancy new cover.

Now I see I should've bumped the line "Quickies Collection" down a couple notches. My only excuse was that "3 Complete Stories" was originally a lot higher and the font was a few points bigger at one point. I wanted to stick "Reissue" on there somewhere like on the Amazing Stories cover but there wasn't a good place for it.

Here's the inspiration for the cover. I'm getting pretty tired of the gold and red of the Spicy Science Stories series and am looking forward to something a little more off-kilter like this monochromatic one. I was trying to make the stories in the series relate to each other with a similar title font and color scheme but I got tired of it by the third one. I've got some ideas for the next series covers.

Something Rocket Whatever is gonna rule! Maybe!

Scientifiction, pt. 2

Here I go picking on Otho the rubbery artificial Futureman again, though if he wasn't such a colossal jerkass I'd leave him alone. He's horrible to Grag the robot and they both argue constantly over who's more human despite both being made in a lab by Capt. Future's dad, What's-his-name Newton. It's worse than Data and Lore, except Otho doesn't kill entire colonies for the hell of it.

Here's a badly reproduced illustration from Adventure House's facsimile edition of Captain Future, Star Trail to Glory and we see Otho has been captured by somebody's robot henchmen. Belt? Check! Loafers? Of course! Pants? Hell, no!

I thought he was wearing a kicky pair of cuffed socks but those are manacles. I am disappoint.

To make things so, so much worse there's this rather disturbing exchange which explains way too much about the Captain.

That's also not the first time he'd ever reminisced about being spanked by a robot. Notice the typo where they left out the word "embarrassed" right before "silence."

Spanking robots. I am so stealing that.

Scientifiction, Away!

I've been getting a few too many ideas for my upcoming smutty space opera series Something Rocket Whatever (real name pending), one being a Ming the Merciless bad guy I thought up a month or so ago but I hadn't gotten any further than thinking he'd be fun to write. I've decided he needs a robot army, some useless henchmen and a big dumb hero to foil his evil plans. Colonel "Spurt" Jizzman from the Quickie "All Aboard!" was meant to be the big dumb hero until he flatly stated he didn't want to be that guy because it would mean he didn't know how girls worked, then he flipped me off, got drunk and tried to ride a Bru-mu'tkl. Stupid fictional spaceman.

Anyhow, the two loudmouthed Space Marines from the USS Priapus barely mentioned in "Science With Benefits" will return, complete with stupid porny names, and there'll be a little bit of overlap with the USS Mike Hunt in a story or two. I kinda want to see Olgotha the Terrible and ex space copper Tony Queef again, along with racketeer Dick B. Swellen but they may wind up in another series.

I polished off Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones yesterday and I won't wreck the ending by mocking every plot twist, like the part where he was stranded on an asteroid and built a transmitter out of gravel and space grubs or something, so you'll just have to read it for yourself. You can download a free pdf copy at the Internet Archive but it won't have the two non-Capt. Future short stories each issue normally has. The epub versions are also missing those but there are a few paper reprints of a limited number of issues of the magazine that have everything, just not reproduced very well. 

The only place I've found downloads for every issue of Captain Future Magazine, as well as the Startling Stories magazines that picked up the series after the original magazine folded during WWII, is Radio Archives. They don't have the illustrations, extra short stories, letters or the special features that tell you things about the Futuremen you were probably better off not knowing, but you can read them on the bus without leaving crumbs of pulp paper on the seat. They also appear to be OCR scans that have insanely weird typos, almost as though the person who made them just ran the resulting text through spellcheck and didn't actually read them one last time before uploading. Amusingly, OCR substituted "anal" for "and" in Triumph of Captain Future. "A door opened, anal she stepped hesitantly into a lighted room."

Anal She Stepped. It's like the name of a really crap indie band.

The original magazine was ostensibly aimed at the younger crowd and while this explains the simplistic plots, Marty Stu main character and all the fightin' and killin' this doesn't explain the ads. Oh blasted imps of Saturn, the ads. I have yet to find a single kid-aimed ad in these damnable things beyond the blurb begging everyone to join the Futuremen club, unless they really thought there was a teen market for Mr. Boston's Rocking Chair Blended Whiskey. There aren't even any ads for Grit, X-Ray Specs or live squirrel monkeys by mail. I'm taking this personally because I totally need an X-Ray Specs-wearing squirrel monkey right now to deliver this stack of Grit I stupidly signed up for.

Take this issue of Capt. Future, for instance. Quest Beyond the Stars, Winter 1942, whatever number that is. I'm too lazy to drag it out of the plastic bag again to check. I haven't read this one yet since I'm going through them in order and I still have Star Trail to Glory, Magician of Mars and The Lost World of Time to read first. 

You see on the cover Joan has gotten captured again for fuck's sake, though this time it might just be a desperate bid for Captain Future's attention since that faint looks straight-up fake.

On page 9, right after the ubiquitous Charles Atlas 97-pound weakling ad, we find this disturbing entry, and no, it isn't the only false teeth by mail ad in here. There are two more small ones and another for that gunk you stick them in with.

You get to test-drive these bad boys for 60 days so if you need to impress the new in-laws at your daughter's wedding you can borrow a set of store teeth like they came from a dental library.

I'm thinking one of the worst jobs on the planet would've been opening the boxes of returned teeth. I'm imagining a dank mailroom smelling like halitosis and sadness.

"don't Worry about Rupture." I'm not, really. I'm way more concerned about your capitalization skills or lack thereof.

There isn't a picture of this air-cushioned contraption so I'm picturing some ungodly inflatable trouser thing like from the Monty Python Trim Jeans Theatre skit. Maybe you hook it up to a vacuum cleaner or an air compressor (compressor not included), then try and hide it under your voluminous 1940s slacks. Oh, the misunderstandings when your Brooks Appliance has a sudden decompression when you take that special lady out to dinner. I doubt a simple "scuse me" will suffice.

Blast jets, Futuremen!

Corrected Cover Upload

New cover upload, though it isn't that much different than the original except for the change in the bottom banner, which I wouldn't have had to slap on there if I could've found some decent laboratory equipment to hide the figures' non-existent legs. That red text block also could've been smaller.

The two blocks busy it up a bit, though a lot of old pulp mags also have way too much going on with all the story titles and stuff exploding and screaming ladies.

I probably won't be able to correct the Nook version until tomorrow night since it takes B&N a couple days longer to publish than Amazon.

I've had entirely too much coffee this morning and should be picking away at some other project.

11:45 am  Ahhh, nutsack, I just found three typos in the story text I missed when I had read through it, like, a bazillion times yesterday. They're minor but to me each one is a vast bowl of pus. New upload of that once the cover goes live.

April 12, 2016  All versions, cover and text, now uploaded, corrected and beaten vigorously with a stick until they screamed for mercy.

New Story Now Live

The fifth in the Spicy Science Stories series (try saying that three times fast) Too Much to Handle is now live on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Looking at the cover I see again I totally failed to put "scienfornication" anywhere on it or in the text like I'd planned. The bottom banner should read "A Thrilling New Scienfornication Story" instead of the lackluster "A Thrilling Story of Science Gone Wrong." So, meh. I also inexplicably left out the "Buy Dirty Books For Victory" banner I wasted a whole ten minutes making. I haven't decided whether to fix the first problem yet, or more correctly, I've decided to fix it but I can't be bothered to pull up Gimp and re-upload the cover image.

Anyhow, this entry finishes up the Landica Station arc, though I doubt it's actually an arc if you only have two stories so let's just say it's a straight line between two fixed points instead. Furthermore, isn't "Landica" a pretty name?  Name something fancy after it, like a country club or a golf course or your new baby, then Google it. Heh.

Because I continue to be a terrible person I'm giving you something else to snigger at, this cover which could double as the sales catalog for an interstellar marital aid store, probably called something like The Pleasure Planet.

Coincidentally, the Pleasure Planet is the next stop in Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones, though it's only a huge casino on an asteroid that's been pushed out beyond the jurisdiction of the Planet Police by means of giant rockets, rather than an intergalactic whorehouse which sounds more like a half-remembered episode of Lexx.

 

The Pleasure Planet looks like the kind of place where a guy could stare all day at a table-mounted disco ball while stuffing himself at the all-you-can-eat Junior Mints bar.

Ahh, I see Dr. Yueh comes clear across the galaxy just for the Pleasure Planet's Junior Mints.

Because I amuse easily, here's a bit more on Otho, the jerkass artificial rubbery guy. If you look at the covers he's featured on you'll notice he's always behind something. Why? Because he's NEKKID. He's usually described as wearing only a belt, which holds his proton pistol so he can kill people. Lots and lots of people.

So on Captain Future's first date with Joan Randall he brings along a jerkass artificial rubbery nekkid guy. Even Miss Manners would say you should wait until at least the second date before suggesting a threesome.

I'll see myself out.

Captain Future Does Stuff

I'm currently reading this particular pulp series, though I'm not quite halfway through Captain Future and the Seven Space Stones, Winter 1941. The eponymous Space Stones in this story each hold part of a secret technology formulated by an ancient Martian scientist whose name I can't be arsed to look up and one man, the amusingly named Ul Quorn, wants that secret so he can take over the solar system.

Thankfully author Edmond Hamilton dropped his usual formula of having the bad guy wear some sort of alien-looking disguise forcing Captain Future to have to pick from four suspects, and yes it's been exactly four suspects in all the previous issues, and usually the bad guy kills a couple of the others saving Future the effort of muddling through a lot of deduction. Oh, did I mention Curt Newton, alias Capt. Future, is a Wizard of Science? Not much real science in these things and what he usually does is MacGyver himself out of whatever jam he's in using the non-scientific stuff I have in my closet right now even though he has a space ship laboratory full of all kinds of science gadgets and doodads.

Future's love interest is a fairly soppy fangirl named Joan Randall, an alleged crack Planet Police agent who's usually captured in every issue more than once. Really, she's the worst agent there is. She also gushes over Future a lot, much like nice girls in 1940s sci-fi do, and he broods about her for all of one sentence and then completely fails to say goodbye to her at the end of the story with a big, sloppy snog. 

Future, you're such a shlemiel.

This issue they actually go on what might be considered a date if you're dead inside. They go to a carnival and he brings along one of the Futuremen, the really jerkass one, thus ensuring absolutely nothing romantic will happen. Did I mention he was raised by a robot, a jerkass artificial rubbery man and a cranky old scientist's brain in a case after his parents were killed by evil scientists? Well, I think none of the three bothered to tell young Curt what grownups do when they like each other.

Hamilton's plot in this issue is a familiar one that gives Future an arch enemy, the half-Martian Ul Quorn who's just as much a scientific genius as Future though he does way cooler stuff with it, like robbing and killing and plotting to take over the solar system. They do a lot of "I know you're up to something" and "I know you know I'm up to something" and "I know you know I know" but neither stops the other. This guy is also in issue #7 The Magician of Mars so he'll be Future's dime store Ming the Merciless for a while which sounds way better than some rich guy screaming, "Somebody blew up my stuff!" and having three other guys say they didn't because anyway the first guy did it to create a monopoly of whatever it is he's producing or mining.

This is also the first issue with an amusingly evil female character, or any female character who isn't soppy Joan Randall. N'rala is a Martian femme fatale, claims to have killed men and seems to be screwing Ul Quorn so long as he's going to take over the solar system, though she'd drop him like a hot rock once somebody more powerful comes along. You can tell she's a bad girl because she hides her proton gun in her bodice, probably between her boobs, and her skirt has a slit in it. 

Partway through the story N'rala sees through Captain Future's crap disguise as easily as if he bought it at the last minute from a drugstore Halloween sale rack. They scuffle and there's some stilted insinuation that this is vaguely sexy, with "the subtle, alien perfume of her midnight hair" though Future turns her down leading to this hilarious exchange.

"You're cold as the robots who reared you!" Ohhh, snap! You want some ointment on that burn, Captain?

I shouldn't have been surprised because the heroes in these things always wind up with the soppy girl who'll gladly stay home on his secret moon base cranking out his babies, darning his space suit and cooking dinners that'll sit in the atomic oven drying out because he's late coming home from saving the solar system again. 

Meanwhile N'rala would've boinked his brains out and left claw marks on his back, broken all the dishes throwing them at his head during an argument, then as a parting shot when they break up for the nth time she'll stand out in the street screaming at the top of her lungs that he really sucked in bed. The neighbors love that. He'll brood about it for all of one sentence before he buys her something expensive and begs for her to come back and they have really loud make-up sex. Neighbors also love that.

Any writer worth his salt would be setting this up for a jealous girlfight later in the story but I'm not expecting anything that exciting. I'm also not holding my breath for Joan to finally give Curt a lukewarm grandma kiss on the cheek before he flies back to the moon.

Update and a Preview

Back in business with my favorite IBM notebook, though what I thought was a hard drive issue turns out to be a dying backlight in the screen. It would randomly black out and I'd force a shutdown, unplug it in disgust, then work on something else. I hadn't really been using this particular one since the middle of last year because I've been too chintzy to buy another hard drive since I'd already replaced this one about a year ago.

Last weekend I had the screen at just the right angle to where I could see a faint screen image so I did a search on the ThinkPad forums and found the issue as well as a temporary workaround. I've disabled a couple settings and though it still boots up pinkish it no longer permanently shuts the screen down so I can continue to write amusing awfulness with it until I get a replacement LCD screen on eBay. It's a cheap fix, less than $20, and looks easy to do, once you get the plastic screen bezel out without cracking it, which I'm pretty sure I'll do but I can conveniently scrounge another one of those on eBay as well.

Oddly, the issue I was having last week with LibreOffice's disappearing spell check and thesaurus has inexplicably fixed itself.  Dunno what's up with that but so long as it works until I can upgrade Xubuntu I'm happy. Happy-ish. Not angry anyway.

I was going to leave what's on the screen visible in the photo but it's the mega-lousy original start to the beginning of the story. Now it starts only partially lousy.

The laptop that suddenly died a couple weeks ago hasn't revived itself no matter how many times I hold down the power button like the internets say to do so rather than a polyfuse resetting itself it looks like it's the power supply doodad. Since it's an Asus and I'm not familiar with the innards of those I'm grabbing yet another ThinkPad notebook on eBay, though one just a couple years old instead of over a decade so I'll have something that will run my Adobe suites since Linux doesn't play well at all with InDesign. The hard drive of the Asus will go into one of those case dealies and will function as storage, or at least it will until I drop it and kill it.

Here's the preview cover of Too Much to Handle. I've been writing this particular story for entirely too long, starting it last Thursday then getting stuck and spending the rest of my weekend angrily knitting because I had my hilarious (to me) ending but I didn't feel like writing the bits in the middle. I was pretty bored with the storyline a week ago but I'm insanely thrilled with how it came out yesterday during the final draft. Dr. Luscious O'Quim is especially batshit crazy this time around.

This particular cover took about four hours of crippling cut-and-paste with a mouse and fiddling and fumbling and cursing before I was reasonably happy with it. It also uses images from at least six different pulp covers and some half-assed lightning. Dr. O'Quim alone took two separate images. I also found another handful of retro mid-century fonts free for commercial use and the cover is gradually transitioning in style over to what I'll use for the Spicy Science Stories collection. Something Rocket Whatever will have a different style cover, maybe with a dorky rocket logo like the old Super Science Stories pulp mag.

I'm completely certain this'll get adult flagged even though she's got on something vaguely resembling a neon bikini underneath all that crap lightning.

I'm totally hating on the cover to All Aboard! right now but I can't be bothered to do anything about it.