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.

Free Book Promotion

Free Book Promotion for Racy Rocket Adventures "Security Level 2" runs for five days from June 13, 2016 to June 17, 2016.

Download it and add it to all the other free stuff cluttering up your Kindle.

More of the Same

Here we go again. I've been too lazy to post these synopses when I'm done reading so I'm throwing them out there in a huge pile. It also means I've forgotten a lot of plot, planned punchlines and sad jokes. Dammit.

Captain Future, Worlds to Come, Spring 1943. This is the first one not written by Edmond Hamilton. He was afraid he was going to be drafted and contracted Joseph Samachson who wrote this one under the house name Brett Sterling. Later Hamilton would write a couple under that name though I'm not recalling why exactly, though it might've been because he wasn't being taken seriously when he was writing space opera which was rapidly becoming outdated and considered juvenile. Really, all he needed to do was to porn it up a little. Sheesh.

We haven't had Curt and Joan on a lame date in a while, at least not since they got stuck on a dying planet together for two months with like a hundred convicts and I'm pretty certain they didn't have soap or toothpaste. You'd think they'd be sick of each other after that since it'd sort of be like seeing someone you like with the flu or food poisoning. Imagine them all scroungy and smelly after digging up ore for two months building a fucking spaceship.

Anyhow, Curt invites Joan and Ezra Gurney to visit him on the Moon and what does he do? He leaves his girlfriend inside with her boss and a cranky old man's brain in a box while he and Otho and Grag are outside on the Moon's surface being jackasses to each other. They have a Plutonian slug-horse, something they've never mentioned having ever, and they're daring each other to ride it and when somebody winds up face-planting in the Moon dust they all laugh like jackass guys do when their friends get hurt.

Curt hasn't learned that the best (meaning worst) way to impress a girl is to let her watch you do stupid shit with your stupid friends so really, he should've told her to put on her spacesuit and come up to the surface to watch the injuries pile up.

Simon whips up a mind-meld crystal deus ex machina thingy out of nowhere so Joan and Curt can communicate by thought waves which is seriously creepy. No way do I want some guy knowing what I'm thinking, though it would save a lot of arguments in the end if I could think you suck so much ass you stupid motherfucker at them really hard. This doodad becomes totally mega-important for the last half of the book, then it's never mentioned again.

Back to Jackasses on the Moon. Now if this slug-horse comes from Pluto, which in Hamilton's space opera universe has a breathable atmosphere, how is it breathing on the Moon which Hamilton has only given a limited underground atmosphere for the Moon Men? Does it just not need to breathe, like Moon wolves? When the Jackass Trio is done with the slug-horse do they just leave it on the Moon's surface to suffocate? Do they pour a couple hundred pounds of salt on it? Like the mind-meld crystal it's never mentioned again.

Anyhow, after Grag sits on the slug-horse and flattens it (Otho thinks this is hysterical but he's a jerkass) Ezra tells them there's a Planet Police emergency where a ship is hurtling towards the Sun and of course they can't do anything about it. I'm not sure why anyone bothers to call the Planet Police unless it's to ask them if their refrigerator is running. So the guys head out in the Comet, leaving the now forgotten slug-horse to be eaten by Moon wolves I guess (really I think I'm the only one who cares about the foul thing at this point), and they manage to stop the ship before it crashes into the Sun.

The three guys on board have come through dimensions looking for Captain Future since their own government can't solve their own problems, much like the Solar System's President, so they put the dimensional drive doodad from the scuttled ship onto the Comet and away they go. Partway there they break a rocket tube and Curt goes outside the ship to switch it out like he's changing a goddamn tire and his magnetic boots fail and he falls off and they leave him. When they finally realize he's gone they turn around but can't find him and so they assume he's dead for, like, maybe the third or fourth time in this series and continue on to the system that needs their help.

Anyone else would've written this as a jackass guy practical joke gone wrong. You know, they leave him floating in space and forget to come back for him or something.

So Curt floats in space and by using his proton pistol he creates some momentum to get to a planet where he plans to build another fucking spaceship from scratch but instead of a hundred convicts to dig up ore for him he only has a handful of primitive people who he can't even teach how to use a shovel. After few days of (hopefully) screaming and cursing at smelly grunting cave people Curt finally realizes he has the mind-meld crystal thingy and contacts Joan through dimensions or something and he tells her how to use a machine in his Moon lab to switch bodies with one of the smelly grunting cave people so he can build this fucking spaceship.

I don't recall if this was a mind-switch machine recently invented by Curt and Simon or if it's the mind-switch machine from that earlier novel where a bad guy uses a Neptunian mind-switch machine to swap Curt's mind with a Neptunian fish-man, whatever story that was. It made total sense in context but sounds like something stupid I just now made up.

Ahh, Captain Future's Challenge, Summer 1940.

Back to Worlds to Come, when Joan and the smelly cave woman switch bodies Curt tries to kiss her then suddenly decides he'd rather not, even though technically it's Joan, but I guess the real Joan knows what toothpaste and soap are. He doesn't say Cave!Joan is smelly, just that she doesn't look right. That's the blue woman wearing the leopard skin on the cover. You'd think he'd be all over that but this is Captain Future who sadly isn't all over anything. Sorry, Joan.

Anyhow, blah blah blah they don't have to build a spaceship since the bad guys invading the planet of those three guys from the beginning I'd forgotten about have landed nearby and Curt and Joan stow away on it. Blah blah blah, they defeat the bad guys and everybody's happy. The End.

This installment is by Edmond Hamilton writing as Brett Sterling. The Star of Dread, Captain Future Summer 1943. The only Captain Future magazine cover that doesn't even have Captain Future on it has Joan Randall being menaced by the Cosmo Kramerbird. "Yo yo ma," it shrieks. "Yo yo ma!"

This one has some what-the-fuckery going on but not in the plotting. There are some mutant creatures called man-horses, man-dogs, man-birds and man-tigers which are all regular animals but with human faces. Eww. Reminds me too much of that brief scene in the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers where that freaky-ass dog with the human face runs up to the camera. I don't wanna be anywhere near these things.

shivers

On my world a man-beaver is called a mangina.

These man-beasts were mutants made by the evil scientists as slaves on one of the first worlds. A running storyline in Hamilton's novels is that an ancient race has seeded the universe with various human species mutated to survive on whatever planet they've been dumped onto. This is the quick and dirty explanation for why all the different humanoid species in the Solar System can interbreed with one another, and towards the end of the series Captain Future sort of abandons his raison d'être of fighting bad people who use science for bad shit and goes hunting for the birthplace of all humanity.

There's also an interesting bit that didn't get used often enough in this series where bad guys kidnap Joan and instead of torturing her to make her tell where the fancy science doodad is hidden they tell her they'll kill Curt instead. This might've been a nice excuse for them to keep whatever sad non-relationship they have a secret which would make it way more exciting and they might actually kiss more than once every six months, but that would've been way too icky for the kiddies.

Here's another one whose cover I like but I don't yet own an original copy. Captain Future, Magic Moon, Winter 1944. Curt and Joan are menaced by a Swallower, which is a huge flat swimming thing with a big mouth that lives in the oceans of Neptune. In the story only Captain Future is attacked by one but I guess Earle Bergey thought the cover needed a screaming braless girl in shorts.

I love how Captain Future's gloves never match his space suit. Teal blue and red with brown leather? It's like he's colorblind or something.

This is another Edmond Hamilton as Brett Sterling novel and it's one of those fun WTF ones that's worth reading so I won't ruin the plot. A rich financier wants, hey whadayaknow, the diamond mining monopoly of Pluto's moon Styx so his movie company sets out to make a movie about some of Captain Future's adventures called The Ace of Space. Total crapshit name but whatever. It'll be filmed completely on location on whatever planet Future did whatever he did and the financier's plan is to take over Styx when they start filming there using some movie asshattery to defeat the natives.

They put out a call for tall redhaired guys to be in this movie instead of hiring real actors and putting makeup on them. Yeah, awesome! So Curt disguises himself slightly and pretends to be a drygoods clerk. Drygoods. They'll still have those in the future? Is this some kinda futuristic curly-mustached hipster kinda shit? I couldn't tell you when was the last time I went into a drygoods store that wasn't in some sort of gold mining Bug Tussle theme park kind of a place. I don't know why they couldn't have made him something vaguely futuristic like a spacesuit salesman or a vacuum tube polisher or a food-cube clerk. 

He acts like a total space-sick wuss, whines a lot, screws up his lines and drops his prop pistol constantly, coming across as such a loser that Joan doesn't even recognize him. She's been a pain in the ass following this film crew all over the System just to make sure they get the details of Future's heroic shit right and she thinks this Chan Carson dweeb isn't worthy of cleaning up the dessicated remains of Captain Future's squashed Plutonian slug-horse. You'd think she would've memorized every detail of the guy's face, every pore, even that weird eyebrow hair that always grows the wrong way. You know, from all those years of being a creepy fangirl. But you'd be totally wrong.

Poor Curt. If he was to suddenly stop being a big hero Joan would dump his ass in a heartbeat.

sad trombone

Startling!

Oh yeah, here's another one I bought because I liked the cover, Startling Stories May 1950. Where do I start in all the what-the-fuckery going on here? Come to think of it, there's also some serious what-the-fuckery going on inside too and I haven't even looked at the ads.

Dang it, is it freezing cold out there on the launch pad or is it pleasantly balmy? You certainly can't tell by what the couple's wearing since she's barely dressed and he's got on mittens. Mittens, on a grown man. I keep looking for the little string that keeps him from losing them but it must be up his sleeves.

Of course there's a weirdly toy-like rocket crash with guys on parachutes flinging themselves out the airlock right into the rocket's flaming exhaust. I would've bought it for that even if it didn't have the Captain Future story "Children of the Sun" which I already had in a paperback reprint of all the Startling Stories short Futures. I guess 1950 was the point when they finally gave up writing honking big space opera novels for pulp mags because people were laughing at them. In the space of a couple of years they went from 100 page novels to 20 page stories.

But the paperback reprint doesn't have the illustrations which meant I would've missed out on this weird flaming nekkid freakout. 

Really, I haven't got the foggiest what's going on here since I'm reading Captain Future stories in order and I've still got a handful to go before I get to this one. The only thing I can say for certain is that Curt is inexplicably nekkid and equally inexplicably on fire. There's also a flaming nekkid woman at the top which I'll assume isn't Joan Randall.

See, this is what happens when you go camping and take brownies from hippies.

It's upset Simon so much that it's wrecked his ability to fly upright. And no, this isn't the first time some layout monkey put the Brain's drawing in upside down. I mean really, you should know nobody ever puts their deely-bobbers on under their mouth.

Just to balance things out, here's another nekkid woman, though she's in a completely different story I also haven't read.

New Smut

Behold the horribly juvenile cover to my new short, "Security Level 2" which goes more into the smutty details of Colonel Spurt Jizzman's encounter with a security officer right before his meeting with Solar System President Gamahuche in "The Unmentionable Unknown." I'd kept it short in the original story for comedic timing, mostly because I thought it was hilarious that Spurt kept the President waiting just so he could bang some girl he'd just met. Last week I decided to extend it way longer than it really had any right to be and voila! a new short.

Anything shorter than ten pages seems to have a totally sucky preview with just the cover and title page. The link is live but since there'll be a free download of this story my sucky preview won't make any difference. I thought I could make it permanently free but that no longer seems to be the case, or maybe that was never the case. 

Whatever.

Behold, Racy Rocket Adventures!

I think I finally got Comic Sans exterminated from my blog fonts, dammit.

My newest scienfornication story "The Unmentionable Unknown" is now live on Amazon. Check the new preview thingy in the above image. For some reason it'll only let me do left justification and that empty space to the right is going to bug the living crap out of me.

It's a good deal longer than my longest story "Science With Benefits," maybe 30 pages total. It also has something resembling a real space opera plot that'll be part of the series' story arc with tons of world-building and suchlike. See, it'll be like real SF but with porno. So, so much porno.

I mean erotica, just so it sounds all classy.

Also, I know I said way back here that I wasn't going to use Colonel "Spurt" Jizzman but he wound up in the story anyway, even though he wasn't as dumb as what I needed for the plot. I was originally going to have one big stupid hero who wasn't exactly sure how girls worked, then later I thought it would be better to have different heroes in each story. Spurt's character was already laid out in "All Aboard!" so rather than use a new guy for the first scienfornication tale I recruited him. He seemed to have enjoyed himself and made some women happy along the way.

The second story will have the Space Marines, in case you were wondering. My previously mentioned Ming the Merciless kinda bad guy is set up for the third story. That's what I'm saving the spanking robots for.

Unlike all the others, this series will be exclusive to Amazon--I'm trying out the KDP Select program to see where that gets me.

For anyone who cares, here's the plot synopsis:

For the past six Earth Standard months an inexplicable crime was being perpetrated on travelers daring to venture off the Solar System's busy spaceways. Ships taking a less-traveled route through the asteroid belt would later be found adrift in space, all passengers and crew onboard found in a coma-like sleep with their unmentionables dematerialized off their bodies. Valuables were ignored; it seemed the culprit was only after underpants, skidmarked or clean. What's Solar System President Dirk Gamahuche to do?

To the rescue comes Colonel Burt “Spurt” Jizzman, a former Space Brigade test pilot now working for System Gov as a special agent. Blond, space-tanned and handsome, with a cocksure swagger and a dazzling smile made for a recruiting poster, anyone meeting him either wound up in bed with him or wanted to punch him. Sometimes both.

Colonel Jizzman had never gone undercover before and assumed it must have something to do with bedsheets, perhaps as a perk of being a special agent, and his first encounter with Space Police Constable M'adteats didn't do anything to change that wrongheaded notion. Spurt had tried his sexiest smile, flexed his muscles and strapped his atom-pistol holster to his thigh so it pulled his spacesuit across his crotch just right but nothing seemed to work. He found her disinterest to be completely incomprehensible; most women would've at least undone their tops long before now.

Despite that, he had decided this Constable M'adteats had to be hot for him since she had rare flame-colored eyes and everyone in the System knew Jovian women with flame-colored eyes were sexually dominant and completely insatiable, even if they'd never actually met one. Colonel Jizzman didn't care if Constable M'adteats was dominant or not, he just wanted a crack at a real flame-eyed Jovian.

Will Colonel Jizzman and Constable M'adteats stop this panty thief or will there be too many distractions?

The Unmentionable Unknown is the first installment in the new retro erotic space opera series Racy Rocket Adventures. Expect raunchy Stateroom scenes, kinky alien group activities, panty fetishism and solitary vices. 

Procrastination!

Currently fighting with a chase scene and a pathetic excuse for a gun battle, then "The Unmentionable Unknown" can be uploaded, or at least that's the huge fib I'm telling myself. I also think I have to shoehorn in a tiny bit more porn but I could probably be very wrong about that. These characters should put probably their damn pants back on and go home.

And now for a word from our sponsor! I haven't quite seen the hell of having a stuffy nose portrayed so accurately in an ad before. Startling Stories, January 1940.

On to yet another Captain Future, Planets in Peril. When I first saw this one I thought that was Joan on the cover and she'd been mistakenly portrayed as a blond or maybe she wanted to change her look but that's actually Shiri, a scientist who's come through dimensions from a dying universe with her brother asking for help. Everybody on their world is apparently platinum blond so they make a big deal out of redheaded Captain Future and decide he's got to come back with them to save their world. Joan, of course doesn't want him to go without her. "Do you think I'd let you go off without me to a universe where all the women are platinum blondes?" Nice try. Curt says it's too dangerous and leaves her behind anyway, even after actually showing some sort of half-assed affection for her at the beginning. Sadly, this only involves tossing her up in the air and no making out.

Anyway, the platinum peoples' last big-deal scientist Kaffir was also a redhead and they think their citizens will be stupid enough to believe he's come back from being in suspended animation for like a million years if they drag Future back with them. Because science. See, if they don't get help the Cold Ones will sterilize the population so their race dies out and since it's 1942 we can't have a whole planet of lily-white honkies going extinct. Who are the Cold Ones? They're a mutant race that looks like living skeletons.

A nice return to skull-crushing in this novel, with exposed brains that look like cartilage when their skulls get stomped on.

Mmmm, pulped cartilage brain. Decent story, especially in comparison to the next novel which is a total Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

I'm just going to say up front that I hate this cover. The ship is sinking into lava, people are barely escaping with their lives, Joan is screaming like she's being carried away by Leatherface, and Captain Future is totally all Ridiculously Photogenic Guy. He also looks about 15 years older than he should. WTF Curt? Saving the Solar System wearing you out?

I'm sorry to say the cover isn't the only thing wonky about The Face of the Deep. The plot will make you wish you'd never heard of Captain Future and it's not even an amusingly convoluted stupid-fun plot like The Seven Space Stones. Oh god the plot. I didn't think I'd be begging for a space monopoly.

The Planet Police have a cruise ship that's been converted to transfer prisoners to the big prison on Pluto's moon Cerebus. This is the same prison moon where a bunch of prisoners Captain Future put away escaped from like it was nothing in one of the first books, maybe Captain Future and the Space Emperor, and in The Magician of Mars where Ul Quorn and his band of white-collar felons somehow smuggled weapons in and massacred all the guards. 

Instead of putting these dangerous prisoners into suspended animation or having more guards or a better locking system on this ship they're only using a handful of guards and they've called in Joan Randall as a guard since there's some sort of problem somewhere else in the system that uses up all the competent officers. Captain Future gets all het up about it and demands that she stay home because it's dangerous and she's his woman and all and she tells him off since doing cop stuff (no matter how incompetently) is her job. Grag offers to drag her off and hold her until the ship leaves and this inexplicable line turns up:

Treat women rough? Was Grag offering to spank her? He hasn't mentioned spanking Curt in a while so perhaps he's itching to put his metal hands on some bare human bottom.

Whatever. Curt and the Futuremen decide to go along on the prison ship because he has a bad feeling something's going to happen, which it does otherwise we'd only have a lame travelogue of all the prisons they pick up bad guys from and three pages later they'd reach Cerebus. The rest of the magazine would be false teeth by mail ads.

OK, the bad guys escape, kill the ship's captain and a bunch of guards, lock up everybody they didn't kill and they head out of the Solar System to Alpha Centauri but they hit an unknown planet on the way and wind up in a lava bed which melts the ship leaving no way to get back home.

Whatayado, Captain? You build a new ship big enough for like a hundred escaped convicts. Really, they build a new ship. From scratch. They mine ore, build an atomic smelter and smelt shit, and build a new fucking space ship from dirt and rocks. There's really no way I can envision this without picturing some sort of Gilligan's Island kinda contraption. I would've believed building a transmitter but not a whole fucking space ship. Oh yeah, they also have to make tools first so they can mine the ore and build the fucking smelter and whatever.

Eventually one of the convicts realizes there's only one woman on the whole entire planet (for some reason there are no lady convicts) and he offers to give her something to hang her towels on. Curt doesn't like this and beats the guy up a couple times. I think he also offers to beat up the engineer who evacuates from the ship with a case of prunes instead of tools. This guy is so prune obsessed I swear he must be based on some guy whose miserable prune-filled guts Edmond Hamilton hated worse than life itself.

Blah blah blah something keeps eating the convicts during the night, cubic caterpillars help them mine ore, they make steel, build a ship and fly away, oh god you just have to read it for yourself. The best part are the letters in a later Captain Future magazine where readers are practically having a stroke over the plot, and Sgt. Saturn, the drunken crank who answers the letters column in Captain Future and Startling Stories, amuses himself by abusing anyone who writes in.

Here's one where the reader seems to be happy with The Face of the Deep except for the apparent existence of Joan Randall so Sgt. Saturn decides to take a potshot at Captain Future instead. "...there isn't enough love interest in Curt Newton's life to excite Mahatma Gandhi..." Wow, somebody call the burn unit. This is from the guy's own magazine for crap's sake.

One thing the readers forgot to shriek about is where is Curt's atomic-powered ring? This is the first magazine where it isn't mentioned. He uses it to identify himself in the early novels since in the future apparently nobody has photos of anyone nor can anyone remember what their big hero looks like, he can hypnotize people with it, and occasionally he takes it apart and makes some atomic-powered doodad out of it. In The Face of the Deep he certainly could've used an atomic-powered doodad at the end instead of dismantling Simon's brain case.

I think I might've preferred reading a hundred pages of false teeth ads.