Memoirs of pulpster

23 Thursday Jan 2020

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New on Archive.org, “A Penny A Word”, being the detailed and lively memoir of an anonymous pulp writer who entered the field circa 1924-26 and spent a decade in it. The memoir appeared in The American Mercury, March 1936.

Who knew Submarine Stories was ever a real title? It appeared early 1929, but six months later ran into the teeth of the Great Depression and is said to have folded after 13 shaky issues. As such, it can’t have appealed to H.P. Lovecraft as a market, even though he had tried his hand at submarine tales in “The Temple”.

Milan Machinima Festival 2020: “The Weird, the Eerie, and the Unreal”

22 Wednesday Jan 2020

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The 2020 theme of the Milan Machinima Festival is to be “The Weird, the Eerie, and the Unreal”. This is the third Italian festival on machinima, celebrating animations and films made with real-time rendering engines (videogame engines, mostly) and bringing the best of such work to the big screen in Milan as part of its Digital Week. The dates are 9th-13th March 2020 in Milan, Italy.

The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne

21 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Films & trailers, Odd scratchings

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I’m pleased to discover The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, a 22-hour series which was the flagship series for HD TV, back in 1998-2000 when HD was a new thing. They cast well, spent $2m an episode, had lots of VFX, and superb and inventive scripts. Judging by the first few episodes it seems it paid off, and is a welcome reminder of the days when TV stories were stories, not an excuse for a string of political lectures.

But who knew there was such a thing, in steampunk? I’d never heard of the show before, despite it being loved by a hardcore of (rather quiet) fans. Part of the reason for that is that the show has never been released on DVD. Comments in old Starlog magazines suggest there was a very poorly promoted HD showing, and one gets the impression that most sci-fi fans had no clue it was even running. Then it was badly converted to film (too dark and muddy), for showing on the American TV channels. At that point the channels could not handle HD, and the result looked disappointing to many. Thus it appears that the old VHS TV captures are all the fans have in 2020. Not ideal, with the sumptuous costumes being an especially regrettable loss — they get smudged into down into a dark haze. But appears to be quite watchable. A very fractious set of investors apparently prevent any new HD release in the 2020s, with the HD masters presumably crumbling away in a vault somewhere.

Starlog #287 (2001) has the best extended magazine article on the series and what it was trying to do.

New book: Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery

21 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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A new article on “Why I Wrote Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery”, by the author. The article opens with some useful signposting to previous worthy attempts at such.

I definitely don’t care for book’s front cover, with a skeleton-warrior seen sporting a curious pose. He looks likes he’s been caught by a flash-photograph at the moment of passing a chalk-turd. But Flame and Crimson is a welcome 290-page book, and it’s published today. The author states that…

Flame and Crimson is an academic study of the genre, principally on its literary antecedents and key contributors. It’s heavily referenced with a lengthy ‘works cited’. I wanted to publish something authoritative and not (solely) opinion-based, that readers could use as a springboard for further research or pleasant Saturday afternoon of Internet searches. [Yet] I didn’t want to write something dry and pedantic. One of my goals was to try and tell an exciting tale of non-fiction. Sword-and-sorcery has a story of its own to tell, of a confluence of pulp talent, a mercurial renaissance, a staggering commercial fall, and a second life in the popular culture. I wanted to write the kind of academic study that I’d want to read — informative, but also entertaining.

Currently only in paperback, and let’s hope the eventual ebook will have a front cover that’s more mighty-thewed and appealing to the masses. As for the contents, here’s the TOC…

The Xothic Cycle in ebook

21 Tuesday Jan 2020

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Amazon lists a new £3.99 ebook edition of The Xothic Cycle by Lin Carter, for publication 26th March 2020. It’s from Gateway, ebook re-publishers of the Gollancz yellow-covers of yesteryear. It’s possibly not completist, though, as the blurb calls it the first such book…

This is the first collection of Lin Carter’s Mythos tales; it includes his intended novel, The Terror Out of Time.

“First” of two or three? As such I suspect this is not to be confused with the Chaosium title The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter, edited by Robert M. Price. If you can’t wait for the 2020 ebook, then the Price collection can currently be picked up in paperback for £10 inc. shipping, and has an introduction by Price to each story. According to a Table of Contents kindly posted by the late W.H. Pugmire it doesn’t, however, include the “intended novel, The Terror Out of Time” — which the ebook apparently does.

Was Carter any good as a Mythos writer? It’s not all that easy to quickly find out. He was a pro, and yet S.T. Joshi has little to say about Lin Carter as a fiction writer (rather than a scholar and critic) in the book The Rise and Fall. One has to snuffle around in the sparse online comments to get a sense that Carter was post-Derlethian in his free-wheeling and name-spawning approach to the Mythos. I don’t get the sense he was going reverently back to the master and trying to fill in the gaps, in manner that was both relatively seamless and stylistically congruent.

W.H. Pugmire was rather more helpful in giving an opinion, remarking in an Amazon review of the Price book that…

The writing in this book may not be first class, but dang if this isn’t an amazingly FUN book to read.”

He also implied there was no attempt to mimic Lovecraft, with Carter’s…

style being that of a story-teller, plain and simple. I find the writing style in this book extremely pleasant, and the narratives flow easily.

Thus it sounds like a fun book for completists. But don’t expect to encounter Lovecraft’s style, or a Mythos with the Derlethian accretions chiselled off.

Also from Carter, A Look Behind the Lovecraft Mythos seen here in the Panther paperback edition…

Lovecraft’s devices

20 Monday Jan 2020

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Propnomicon creates the Tillinghast Device from Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”.

Lovecraft’s devices are perhaps an under-considered part of his work. Off the top of my head I can think of…

* The time travel device and camera-like ray weapons in “Shadow out of Time”.

* The devices of Curwen (“Never before or since had he seen such instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust and cobwebs of a century and a half”).

* The ‘mechanical’ and ‘canister’ aspects of the ending of “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

* The machines in “Cool Air”.

* The ray-projector in “The Evil Clergyman”.

* The cosmic telepathy device in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”.

And probably there are others I forget now, and still more that are less central to the plots or to be inferred from the Commonplace Book or even the letters. I don’t recall ever seeing a pure Lovecraft RPG book (as opposed to a ‘Derlethian/wider-Mythos Lovecraft’ RPG book) collecting such things in one volume and giving them gamer stats etc.

Illustrated Call of Cthulhu

20 Monday Jan 2020

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New on The HPLHS Store, and thus able to combine nicely with other orders, the English version of The Illustrated Call of Cthulhu…

Every now and then we find a product that’s so fantastically great we must have it for our store. For some time we’ve been following online the progress of this illustrated version of The Call of Cthulhu by the French illustrator Francois Baranger. His illustrated book is finally done and is, quite simply, spectacular. We are delighted to share with you this new English edition by Fria Ligan and Design Studio Press.

It’s an oversized illustrated version with painted illustrations.

The same artist also has an “At the Mountains of Madness” book, done in the same format… but when last noticed here it was in French only. There’s also an interview with him in the recent book, Lovecraft: Au coeur du cauchemar, which could possibly be translated into English by someone at some point.

College Hill in the snow

19 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Night in Providence

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An evocative picture of Prospect Street at night, after a snow-storm…

A Lovecraft-alike man seen walking through the Brown University gates…

There appears to have been very light snow or frost in this winter picture of 32 George Street, College Hill, the picture evoking some of the livelier houses that Lovecraft would have passed on his night-walks…

The glowing dials of a clock tower can be seen on the left through the trees.

Also, here’s a heavily over-painted card from out of Lovecraft’s area, but indicative of the trollies (trams on rails) which ran down the residential streets of the city in his time…

Alton H. Blackington

19 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works

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Bret Kramer of Sentinel Hill Press has noticed that a few of a series of “Yankee Yarns” New England folklore radio-broadcasts are now on Archive.org. They’re from Boston’s Alton H. Blackington, who broadcast 1933-53 and who would drive thousands of miles and interview many people to get his tales and get them straight. He also made such trips pay by being a newspaper photographer and running a New England stock-photo company. After finishing with radio he continued as a popular stage lecturer and published the best of the Tales in print as several volumes under the titles Yankee Yarns and More Yankee Yarns…

A mine of ideas for the region’s fiction writers, as well as a repository of folk-life, I’d suggest. Perhaps even more importantly, a large chunk of his photography collection survived…

“[the core of] the collection is the dozens of images of typically eccentric New England characters and human interest stories. Most of the images were taken by Blackington on 4×5″ dry plate negatives, however many of the later images are made on flexible acetate stock and the collection includes several images by other (unidentified) photographers distributed by the Blackington News Service. … His photographic vision extended to include hermits and eccentrics, skilled craftspeople, and the living relics of old traditions, including lighthouse keepers, whalers, and the last living town crier. … Blackington [had a] narrative eye and appreciation for the eccentricities of New Englanders and the vestiges of its long past”

… which raises the possibility of using some of it to help produce a new “Lovecraft’s places and faces” book, by pairing images related to or evoking Lovecraft’s travels with his letters and public-domain maps. Or perhaps a Ken Burns-style documentary made along the same lines, “panning and scanning” across such pictures.