Wardrobe Change

For anyone that cares, I was digging around on eBay recently and found a Bergey cover I knew I had but it looked odd so I went to my collection to see why.

The one on the left was a magazine I'd had for a while, Fantastic Story summer 1950, the right was the recent eBay find, Thrilling Wonder Stories winter 1946. This means the story the cover is illustrating is in the older mag so I can find out if the guy is yanking the wires apart or jamming them together.

Note also the smaller size of the paper-rationed 1940s issue as compared to the newer publication. My wartime and post-war Startling Stories pulps have the same size change as well as lower page counts. They compensated by using smaller print so the amount of stuff in each issue wasn't much changed but there were fewer issues per year.

Startling Stories would start out as a bi-monthly magazine (1939-42), switch to quarterly from 1943-45, go back to a bi-monthly (1946-51), before attempting to go to a monthly starting in 1952. They had switched to a digest-sized magazine in mid-1952. By the end of 1953 (pulps were dropping like flies) they switched back to a quarterly before ceasing publication in the winter of 1955.

Random fact: According to Edmond Hamilton, the only reason Captain Future magazine was missing the Fall 1944 issue wasn't because of wartime paper shortages. He'd gone to Mexico for a few months and wrote Magic Moon and the "Worlds of Tomorrow" story about one of the handful of planets the plot took place in and when he tried to go through customs they confiscated all his manuscripts and sent them to Washington, all because there was a map of where the novel took place. Apparently they really needed to get cracking on that Nazi base on Neptune. Since it would be months before he got his manuscript back and he didn't have time to write another novel they just skipped that one and printed Magic Moon in the Winter 1944 issue.

Anyway, I had no idea Earle Bergey recycled his covers, but since he'd done literally hundreds of covers in his career there's no way I could ever see all of them. Maybe the brass bras and miniskirts of the 1940s were completely out of fashion by the 1950s and no self-respecting space woman would be caught dead in an asteroid storm wearing a getup like this. Really, her outfit is the only thing changed on the entire cover.

Note to self: In scienfornication stories without characters in Space Brigade uniforms I need to put somebody in a damn brass bra. What the hell's wrong with me?

Bergey died in late 1952 so Startling's covers went from fun and goofy with brass bras, thrusting nipples and plenty of BEMs (Bug Eyed Monsters), to staid and realistic. Sort of like what was being published in SF at the time.

Kind of like this. Startling Stories, May 1953. I totally bought this one for the cover. In the future they appear to have solved the impracticality of strapless bras in spacesuits but not guys sneaking a look while they ostensibly "help" you in or out of your unwieldy gear. I'm pretty sure he signed up for astronaut school because of what happens to boobs in low gravity.

Here's the response to a reader who complained the cover of Startling Stories January 1950 had nothing to do with the story "The Return of Captain Future." It did, sort of. Grag holds Joan back for all of one sentence. Anyhow, it mentions both brass bras and BEMs in one crap verse.

No, I haven't got this issue and unless I look for dealers who don't sell on eBay I most likely will only be able to afford it if it has no cover and half the pages have been eaten by beetles. I didn't even think this was Joan Randall since her hair is the wrong color. I was all ready to say she was some dangerously nipply space queen. You also have to remember Grag is supposed to be seven feet tall and the cover shows Joan to be a stilt-legged Amazon who'd probably tower over him by a good three feet.

Yeah, anyway, I've got two more Capt. Future stories to ruin before I get to this one so I'll leave it hanging like a damp, abandoned wino's overcoat on a park bench.

Brass bras just naturally segue into the cover of the next Captain Future novel, Outlaw World, Startling Stories winter 1946. Another Bergey brass-bra and miniskirt cover. If you're wondering, yes, her bra is attached to her helmet which means there was always the chance of Captain Future getting an eyeful when Joan ditches that oddly-positioned bubble helmet so she can actually face forward. This cover scene does take place in the novel. They escape from bad guy Ru Ghur's space ship and rocket away using hand-held impellers.

Ru Ghur is an evil scientist who has invented a "lethe ray" that people use to have hyper-realistic dreams they become addicted to and Curt discovers his base on the planet Vulcan.

Remember Vulcan, it'll become important in the story "Children of the Sun." It's an unexplored planet closest to the Sun that nobody bothers with since you need a ship with special shielding to get anywhere near it and everyone thinks it's covered in molten lava. Vulcan is hollow, Curt finds the way in and blah blah blah discovers the natives speak the same root language most of the primitive natives he's encountered do, since they all had the same origins mentioned in earlier stories and that he goes looking for in "The Return of Captain Future."

I'll leave the rest of the story but here's an amusing passage early on when Curt is captured by Ru Ghur and connected up to the lethe ray. His dream involves that house with the garden he half-assedly promised Joan, like, years ago and it all goes depressingly pear-shaped, at least for poor Joan, when we find out he's also brought along the Futuremen to live with them. So Joan's finally alone with the man of her dreams but he's brought along his entire family. Sorry, Joan. 

Unfortunately we don't get to see what Joan dreams when she's connected to this machine but I'm guessing whatever it was it wasn't cluttered up by a pack of Futuremen.

To make things so much worse, Otho disguises himself as Joan while she's still drugged by the lethe ray and Curt doesn't realize it isn't her. It isn't spelled out that Otho is wearing her clothes but just wearing a brown wig isn't going to do it. Otho and Curt both have a habit of knocking someone out, changing their appearance with makeup, then swiping the unconscious person's clothes to complete the disguise. Curt has also taken a dead guy's clothes, ew. So Otho seems to have gotten further with Joan than Curt has. Damn.

Nearly forgot, for some reason Hamilton keeps pushing "ten years ago" in this story. Ten years ago Curt invented the vibration-drive that he used in Quest Beyond the Stars (Winter 1942), ten years ago he did blabbity blah blah. It was mentioned enough times that I believe he wanted to age the character a bit, since he'd become less the two-dimensional swashbuckling douche from the first novel who comes bounding in through President Carthew's window like some obnoxious hennaed Errol Flynn, punching bad guys in the name of science. 

Science! 

Hey, another edit: I also forgot to mention Outlaw World recycled the asteroid belt pirates from The Three Planeteers, though I liked them better in the earlier novel but I can't really recall why. Brigands of the Moon sucked away much of the memory of this Cap Future before I could properly write about it. Dammit.

There would be only one more novel before Captain Future was put on hiatus for a couple of years. After that, the stories got a little depressing. Those are short, like 20 pages each so it'll be easier just to do them all in one big chunk, as though they're part of a disjointed novel.

Next time: The worst Captain Future novel ever!

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

New Scienfornication Story Preview

The word "scienfornication" is a play on Amazing Stories' awesome "Scientifiction" logo ("scientifiction" was the term used before "science fiction"). Why not? There's science. There's fornication. No reason why I shouldn't cram both words together into an ungodly portmanteau.

I remembered to put "scienfornication" on the cover of The Empress of Orgazma, then forgot to put it on any of the others. Go me!

Here's a preview of the cover of Quickie no. 3: All Aboard! which should go live by the 21st.

"A Thrilling New Scienfornication Story."  Yeah, this cover's totally getting flagged as "adult" despite having her naughty bits covered by text and whatnot, though her whatnots aren't completely hidden.

Science!