New Series!

Presenting the cover of the first entry in my new series Racy Rocket Adventures. I'm going with a suggestive rocket theme for all the stories, like none of the original covers were ever suggestive.

Most of the action in this series will center on the Solar System. Lots of insane world building went on over the weekend, new characters named and turned loose, places vaguely mentioned in the previous series fleshed out. Heh, flesh. Anyhow, this smutty space opera adventure has planets, people, propulsion and poking. Lots and lots of poking.

Test pilot Colonel "Spurt" Jizzman from the story "All Aboard!" will return in "The Unmentionable Unknown" doing a lot of what you'd expect someone named "Jizzman" to do, mainly sticking his junk in anything that sits still long enough. He's another character who's fun to write because he's such a jackass. Not a major tool like Buck Nekkid but completely clueless and full of himself.   

I just need to wrap up the last two scenes and hammer out the linking bit at the end that leads to the next story and it'll go live in approximately three Earth Standard days.

And holy imps of Mars, my blog post font keeps defaulting to Comic Sans  when my connection is slow despite it being something completely fucking different. Dammit.

Mmmm, Pulpy

Not only did 1940s pulps try to sell you false teeth, eyeglasses and trusses by mail, they also made you poop. Observe Betty and Sally gleefully discussing bowel movements or lack thereof. Once Betty has an Ex-Lax or three she's so excited to finally take a dump she's inadvertently revealed herself to be a freaking Toon. 

 

Besides that troubling scene, Startling Stories, January 1940 also has Edmond Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, his space opera take on the Three Musketeers, and it has the beginnings of the world he filled out later in the Captain Future novels. I kept wondering why he kept referring to people as "planeteers" thinking maybe it had something to do with pioneers out in the frontier of space but since Captain Future obviously wasn't living on an asteroid in a log cabin plowing his land claim with a robot it didn't make any sense. Musketeers, duh.

  

On to Captain Future, The Comet Kings, whose cover has diddly-squat to do with the plot. I was hoping for some awesome giant bats but I'm disappointed yet again. Joan's creepy eyes show she's right on the verge of revealing that she's a Toon once she's popped a couple Ex-Lax. 

Anyway, someone or something has been snatching ships out of space and nobody can figure out who or why. The Planet Police also doesn't seem to know they should tell everyone not to fly through that part of space so they don't disappear but considering their past incompetence I'm not surprised. Of course Marshal Ezra Gurney and top agent Joan Randall investigate and go missing like everyone else. Because why the fuck not.

It's a wonder the whole solar system hasn't been stolen and sold for scrap.

Because the Planet Police are little more than interplanetary Keystone Kops they're forced to call in Captain Future. He figures out that anyone flying near Halley's Comet disappears so he goes to investigate and is sucked right into the comet. There he finds immortal glowy electrical people, everyone who'd gone missing imprisoned, and some evil race that electrified the Halley's Comet people against their wills for some reason I'm not remembering but isn't at all important for this synopsis. 

Once he finds Joan, who's now an immortal glowy electrical woman he can't touch, Curt gets all grabby and is immediately electrocuted. This should've been comedy fodder but it's played straight with, like, "hungry arms" that can't hold the woman he loves and all. 

Eww. I think I liked them better as a bickering non-couple, frankly.

Joan says there's no way to defeat the glowy electrical people and Curt should get electrified just like she has so they can live there forever which is a way more creative way to trap a guy than getting knocked up. Anyhow, he converts to electricity to fight the bad guys, which would've been hilarious if later they found out Curt was AC and Joan was DC and they were stuck with each other until the end of time, but I'm not writing this so we have to play the cards we're dealt.

The amusing part is that he's agreed to become an electrical glowy thing like her but he works his ass off to figure out how to undo it in a couple of days. He also makes an empty promise to Joan at the end that there's an asteroid with a garden they can live on...one day. Like, when he's defeated all the criminals and broken up all the monopolies in the solar system. So, never. Sorry Joan.

  

I like the Worlds of Tomorrow articles in this magazine which a lot of the pdf downloads don't bother with even though they add a lot to the world building in this series. This particular issue has a map of the Earth after 2027 when volcanic activity went nutso, new mountain ranges formed and earthquakes abounded. Looking at this map I'd advise everyone to sell that waterfront property in Florida right now. I also see digging the Chunnel was a complete waste of time since you'll be able to just walk over to France once the ground stops heaving.

  

The Captain Future pdf downloads also leave out the articles on the Futuremen from that issue, which is a shame because they have a lot of backstory on the characters and some are short adventures, mostly involving young Curt Newton making an ass of himself. This particular one has him turning 18 and leaving the moon for the first time, trying to break up a monopoly on Pluto and getting his clock cleaned. The guy should've visited a Jovian whorehouse instead and gotten his clock cleaned in a completely different way.

  

A couple days ago I found a zip file on the Capitaine Flam site that has all the Futuremen articles so you can read the whole thing without me having to photograph magazine pages. I'd somehow managed to miss it in all the non-English files.

I'll end this post with the tasty back cover of The Comet Kings whose horrific case of athlete's foot seems to have spread to the paper itself.

New Story Uploaded

I just uploaded the sixth and final installment in the Spicy Science Stories series "Some Ill Planet Reigns." Cover is the corrected one found here.

Available for download at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The threesome from "Three On An Asteroid" just took over the damn thing since they can't seem to keep their hands (or mouths or junk) off each other. Usually I have an idea what I want to happen in a story but I don't do an outline or make detailed notes because I kinda let the characters do what they want. There may be a particular thing I want the scenes to have but everything else is written as it happens. If the characters really click then there's no controlling them.

Filthy fictional space people! No wonder Colonel Lingus is so damn cranky all the time.

Hard Rocket

Finished with Spicy Science Stories no. 6, "Some Ill Planet Reigns" and I'll be giving it one last once-over before I upload it. I'm certain I'll find more typos and syntax errors when I read through the preview because I always do, goddammit.

I'm also going with Racy Rocket Adventures as the umbrella title of the new erotic space opera series. I won't be completely dropping the crew of the USS Mike Hunt since they inhabit the same universe as this new set of stories so they'll turn up in a story or two. Still have to work on some names for the main characters and decide on a logo for the covers.

I changed a blog font a couple days ago and suddenly everything defaulted to Comic Sans. I suspect that's a cruel joke perpetuated by the code monkeys working for Blogger. Some rummaging around in the HTML and everything seems to be straight for now though Comic Sans still pops up for a few seconds if your connection is slow. If I can find it hiding in the code I'll yank it out by its tiny little balls and stomp on it for a while. The good thing is that the HTML rummaging makes the blog's mobile version look more like the desktop one, as if anyone ever cared.

Cover Close-Up

This is one of my favorite covers, one that I bought specifically because of the amusing rocket crash. You can't really tell what exactly is going on because of the low-quality cover printing but with a little digital image enhancement we can now see the fine details of the rocket and its cargo. What was in it?

Turtles.

Hack, Hack, Hack Away

Spicy Science Story no. 6 "Some Ill Planet Reigns" is working up to be the filthiest of the lot somehow. I think it's because when fictional characters have good chemistry with each other they run away with your plot and do bad, bad things to it. Thus is the case with the triad from "Three On An Asteroid," Corporal Buck Nekkid and Ensigns Gemma Moorcock and I.P. Freely. They've gone at it like rabbits to the point that I'll have to turn the hose on them just to get back to my actual plot, the exploration of some weird planet or other which was originally where the real kinky stuff was meant to happen but to other crew members with ummm, something else.

I dunno what the deal is. Even though they're fun to write, like Dr. Miles Long and batshit-crazy Dr. Luscious O'Quim, Buck Nekkid's kind of a tool and not even a likeable tool so I have no idea how they've managed to take over the story. 

Spankings all around, then.

Now on to non-filthy stuff... Captain Future, Quest Beyond the Stars (Radio Archives link is working again). I bought this one because I thought the cover was cool, my other favorites being the one for The Seven Space Stones and Magic Moon, neither of which I've found an affordable copy of yet. This is the first one where the cover image has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual story plot. No monster men capture Joan since she's barely mentioned and there aren't even any monster men, Grag doesn't get busted up by monster men, and Captain Future doesn't wear this weird anti-grav floaty contraption to threaten monster men with his proton pistol. Dammit, I've really wanted to find out what the fuckity-fuck is going on ever since I saw the cover last year but that ain't gonna happen unless I reanimate the corpse of Earle Bergey and ask him what the hell he was doing when he painted it. 

I can do that, right? No? Lovecraft was lying? Balls.

Back to the novel. Otho doesn't mention the girl who died saving his life in The Lost World of Time, even though he was so pissed off he killed two people so he should've mentioned her at least once. Capt. Future decides to save the people of Mercury by taking off for a few months to the center of the universe because for some reason he thinks the way to save their planet is to go like a billion light-years away on a wild goose chase otherwise these Mercurians would all have to live on other planets. Seems nobody thinks there's enough room to spread them out on all the other planets in the system, their moons and all the asteroids which have breathable atmospheres. Really, Mercury isn't that big so it's not like these refugees will suck up all your air and eat all your food, you jerkass people. 

He also doesn't mention to anyone he's going, not even solar system President Carthew. Did he tell his good friend Planet Police Marshal Ezra Gurney? Nope. He'd just tell him it's too risky. Did he tell his imaginary girlfriend Joan Randall? Hell no, the pod people took Danger!Joan back and gave Curt a replacement Cardboard!Joan who doesn't do anything more than gush over Capt. Future. Danger!Joan would've called him a big red-headed idiot and gone with him because it sounded like a fun adventure.

Anyhow, he eventually reaches the birthplace of the universe and finds a machine that makes stuff out of nothing, supposedly by rearranging atoms to make matter or something so after preventing a war between two planets who both want this fantastical doodad so they can use it to kill each other he copies the machine to take back to help the people of Mercury since it can make the minerals they need to support their atmosphere generators. Like it somehow isn't a horrible idea to hand over a contraption that can literally whip up out of nothing all the weapons or riches or crack you'd ever want.

To continue, this crapola leads to the next novel, Outlaws of the Moon. Curt and his Futuremen have been away for six months saving Mercury so he's been declared dead and a mining company is digging up the moon looking for his secret moon base so they can steal all Captain Future's cool moon stuff. They find a hitherto unknown cache of radium that Future didn't want anyone to know about so it could be used when the system ran out, but the evil mine owner tells everyone Future has been hoarding it, which technically he has.

Isn't saving shit for later the raison d'être of a hoarder's very existence? "I'm saving that rotten meat for later!" screams the crazy lady on at least two-thirds of all the episodes of Hoarders. On the other third they're screaming that they're saving all those cats for later.

Whatever. Captain Future turns up to tell the President of the solar system he's not dead (and Joan gets her second weak-ass kiss) so they can stop digging up the moon but the mine owner convinces one of his lackeys that he'll be cut out of the radium profits unless he kills the President and frames Captain Future for it. Yup, it all comes down to assassination for radium profits so that means a radium monopoly for Capt. Future to bust up. I should start calling this series Captain Anti-Trust. 

Grag also calls the mine owner a "lying four-flusher" which if you didn't already know this was written in the early 1940s you certainly do now.

So Curt and the Futuremen are on the run from the law, blah blah blah, they sneak back to the moon and find Moon Men who've been hiding underground all this time and Curt and the guys never noticed. He clears his name yadda yadda yadda. The End.

The cover has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot, just the last couple pages after everything is tied up in a neat bow. Curt decides to go back home for a nice long rest, not bothering to say goodbye to Joan who goes on an expedition with Grag and Otho while goofing off from their job of relocating all the Moon Men to one of the moons of Jupiter. You know, one of those places that didn't want any of those filthy Mercurian refugees. They wind up trapped in a diving bell on the bottom of the ocean and he has to rescue them from Jovian sea people. I particularly love the expression on his face. It's the same one someone stoned out of their gourd has when they're concentrating really hard on appearing normal.

Weirdly, in the next novel that I just started, The Comet Kings, he suddenly loves Cardboard!Joan. You really gotta worry about these home schooled guys. Two kisses that barely add up to first base and suddenly he's in love. Jeez. Again, I have no idea when this happened since any time she's around he barely speaks to her except to argue and when he's sitting around with no monopolies to break up he doesn't call her up to go on another half-assed date. Two wimpy kisses do not equal any sort of expression of, well, anything. In The Comet Kings he rushes up to hug her, which he's never done, but he can't because she's electrified and he gets all morose about it. Y'know, like that hug he should've given her months ago when she turned up with the Futuremen that time he was stranded in another dimension but all he did was give her that pathetic light kiss, like he was afraid to get her girl cooties or something.

I'll end this with the very first description of synthetic rubbery man Otho from the unpublished original two chapters of the first Captain Future novel "The Horror on Jupiter," which was rewritten as Captain Future and the Space Emperor.

 

I'll also offer this comment about Simon Wright, otherwise known as the Brain, who raised Curt with the nekkid rubbery Otho and Grag the spanking robot. It may help to explain the romantically confused Captain Future.

 

Now back to writing some truly filthy comedy space porno. Heh-heh-heh.

New and Barely Improved Cover

Here's the new cover for Spicy Science Stories no. 6. Yaaay, now I can finish writing the goddamn thing and be done with this series.

The old cover was pretty much crap and this one has slightly less crap on it. At least there aren't any unnecessary Benday dots, though the pixilation on the background guy bothers the hell out of me.

Let's see, interrupted threesome, scary thing, badly-placed title bar with lame Shakespearean reference nobody cares about. Check, check, and check.

I've got some ideas for how I'll lay out the collected Spicy Science Stories for CreateSpace. If I'm going to bother doing a print version I may as well do an entire interior layout similar to 1940s pulps and play with the illustrations and throw in some old advertising parodies and letters and stuff. Don't tell me you never bought Wacky Packages and read old Mad Magazines as a kid and got way too into the fake ads.

If I can get the computer with my Adobe Suites running I can use InDesign for it, otherwise I'll have to download some open-source thing like Scribus. If I'm gonna crap it up I should crap it up big-time professional style.

When I'm done with Spicy Science Stories I've got two other planned erotica series (serieses?) that should run concurrent with each other, one the new space opera Something Rocket Whatever (title pending) and the other a cheesy one with 1940s co-eds who run afoul of tentacled things and swamp monsters and whatever else that runs loose in the woods near the college.

She Dood It

Finally figured out what to do with Truly Wetsnatch and her space crabs and that completely changes my idea for the cover of Spicy Space Stories No.6. I also hadn't intended on giving Ensign Wetsnatch any part in this story other than a mention but she got in there anyway, the skank. The original cover was scrapped, of course, but I was only going to find similar images instead of flushing the entire thing down the crapper.

The 67-452G Atomic Space Crapper, of course.

Plotto!

Ever wondered how those old pulp writers cranked out so many different stories? No? Well, me neither. I just assumed they had a small handful of well-worn tropes and with a little plaster and a couple coats of paint they could be recycled endlessly. A Western plot could be used in a co-ed romance story if you changed the cattle to fraternity pledges, and a space opera could be easily reworked as a detective novel or a Fu Manchu serial with some spray paint and a kicky new set of drawer pulls.

For those of you who failed woodshop here's your chance to do it up old school with William Wallace Cook's classic Plotto.

Not Plop or blotto, Plotto, the Master Book of All Plots. With a little figuring and cyphering you could generate thousands of complex plots or situations from what looks like mathematical gibberish. There are character combinations, master plots, lead-ups, conflicts, purposes and obstacles and god knows what else, all ready for you to shoehorn your own overwrought and hamfisted prose into.

Open Library has a scanned copy from 1928 in several different ebook formats though the paperback reissue from the 1940s would be easier to flip back and forth through than on an e-reader. In order for the damned thing to make any sense you'll also need the Plotto Instruction Book, something else that's been reissued.

Excuse me while I go and ruin some decent porno by shoving a bunch of useless plot into it.