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.