Consider this paperback cover.
No, it's not the Beast Rabban, Harkonnen dictator of Dune. It's not James "Rhodey" Rhodes, aka War Machine, Ironman's best friend. It's not even Juan "Johnny" Rico of Starship Troopers fame.
No, gentle readers, this is Kimball Kinnison, hero of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series of novels and short stories. Brown of hair, gray of eye, strong of body, and pure of heart, Kim Kinnison is the male culmination of a millenia-long breeding program instituted by the good aliens of Arisia to produce the ultimate living weapon that will defeat the evil aliens of Eddore. Kim, a psychic of enormous power thanks to the mental focusing and enhancing device called the Lens, has various adventures, loses and regains most of his limbs, writes a bestselling novel under what we would now call a sockpuppet (Sybly Whyte, whose masterful prose can be sampled below), and eventually marries his female counterpart, Clarissa McDougall. Their children, the greatest psychics in human history, eventually carry out their destiny and obliterate Eddore and its allies, making the universe safe for truth, justice, eugenically enhanced humans, and the Arisian way! all things good and true.
If this sounds like a very old, very primitive, and very silly sci-fi plot, why, that would be correct.
Kim Kinnison, Clarissa McDougall, Arisia, and Eddore were all creations of the fertile brain of Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith, a chemist and food engineer by training. Smith, who kept body and soul together creating doughnut mixes for grain mills, was quite possibly the most influential science fiction writer in American history.
You think I jest? Consider the tropes found in the Lensman series alone, and recent variations in popular science fiction:
- A titanic, millennia-long battle between good aliens and bad aliens, with humans caught in the middle (the Vorlons and the Shadows using humans, Minbari, Narns, and Centauri as their proxies on Babylon-5).
- A genetically superior person/family that is the culmination of a long, long, conscious breeding program (the Cetagandans in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books).
- Enormous psychic powers that are instrumental to a vast cultural change (Paul Muad'Dib in Dune).
- A multiracial galactic security force in charge of defense and exploration (Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek)
If that weren't enough, "Doc" Smith also wrote the very first "space opera," that subgenre of science fiction involving impossibly perfect heroes tootling about the galaxy having adventures and fighting evil in their personal starships. The Skylark of Space, written while Smith was in graduate school but not published until 1928, is a tale of derring-do, whizbang science, a brilliant and unselfish hero (Dick Seaton), an amoral rich villain (Blackie DuQuesne), a moral rich sidekick (Martin Crane), plucky girls (Dorothy Vaneman and Peg Spencer), and faster than light travel to exotic worlds. Three sequels followed, one of which, in an early example of what's now known as "fan service," featured a reformed Blackie DuQuesne. Even now, nearly a century after "Doc" Smith first started writing his first saga of star-spanning excitement, superscience, and general mayhem, it's way too easy to pick up a new science fiction novel and see his influence.
It's also way too easy to see why even now, with writers like Vernor Vinge, Connie Willis, and Lois McMaster Bujold dominating American SF, serious literary critics dismiss science fiction as inconsequential stuff. Fantasy at least has JRR Tolkien as its literary progenitor, but any genre that traces its roots to The Skylark of Space, even in part, surely isn't worth the pulp it's printed on.
And therein lies the problem. For all the archetypal characters, all the grand and glorious plots and incidents, all the serious questions about aliens meddling with humanity, destiny, and free will, all the action and adventure and superscience...
For all these elements that shaped American science fiction and continue to shape it to this day, Doc Smith's work is at its core nothing more than pure, unadulterated, vastly entertaining but questionably valuable pulp fiction.
The term "pulp fiction" may be most familiar to modern audiences as the title of Quentin Tarantino's film about Jules, Vincent, and a briefcase, but it originally referred to a huge, popular, and now vanished form of magazine fiction that flourished between the McKinley and Eisenhower administrations. These magazines, including legendary titles like Argosy, Spicy Detective, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Blue Book, were the successor to the dime novel and the serialized penny dreadful as the preferred cheap entertainment of the masses, and enjoyed just as much critical acclaim and respect.
Some of this scorn was richly deserved; pulp stories were written quickly and sold for a few pennies a word (if that), and emphasized slam bang action, wild plots, and broadly drawn characters over serious themes, polished prose, and a penetrating look at the human condition. Series characters, especially master detectives, boy inventors, millionaire playboys with a secret life as a daring hero, and scientist/adventurers, were particularly popular, which may be why the genres most influenced by the pulps (hard boiled detective stories, thrillers, and science fiction) run so strongly to series characters even now.
That's not to say that pulp writers and their works were nothing more than throwaways; early pulps often featured stories by the likes of Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and O. Henry, while later authors ranging from Robert E. Howard and Leigh Brackett to Dashiell Hammett and John D. MacDonald to Louis L'Amour and Ray Bradbury got their start writing for the flourishing pulp market. American literature simply would not be what it is today if it hadn't been for magazines like Black Mask, Weird Tales, and Astounding Science Fiction.
And what a market it was! Love stories, sexy stories, science fiction, horror, mystery, adventure, humor, titles devoted to a single heroic character, titles devoted to a single esoteric subject like zeppelins or UFOs, war stories - all could, and were, the subject of dedicated pulp magazines. The largest pulps, like Argosy, sold upwards of a million copies per month, and if a writer had even the slightest crumb of talent and could make a deadline, s/he could be reasonably sure of at least a few sales to the New York pulps.
The pulps, alas, did not survive the triple blow of World War II, which severely restricted the supply of cheap paper, the advent of the paperback book, which paid better than the pulps and allowed for longer, more developed plots, and television, which paid much better than the pulps and was based in warm, sunny, beautiful California instead of cold and gloomy New York. Soon all but the very best pulps were gone, and those had shifted to the smaller, less expensive digest size.
Today the only remnants of the pulps are a handful of confession titles, two mystery magazines, and three SF/fantasy digests. The older titles are highly collectible and much beloved by cultural figures such as Quentin Tarantino and Michael Chabon, but even the best efforts of contemporary houses like McSweeney's to revive the pulp style have done nothing more than produce pastiche that lacks the zip of the original.
Tonight's offerings are two prime examples of the pulp series character during the wild and woolly heyday of the vanished form. One, a rare female lead, began as nothing special but was reworked into a uniquely British pulp hero, while the second is a hard boiled PI who fights, loves, and narrates his way through a Hollywood that bears as much resemblance to the real thing as Barney Google and Spark Plug do to Ron Turcotte and Secretariat:
The Golden Amazon, by "Thornton Ayre" (John Russell Fearn) - John Russell Fearn was not the typical pulp writer. He was British, for one thing, so how he initially got the idea of writing for the American markets is not clear. His pen names reflect this dual allegiance; some (Thornton Ayre, Polton Cross, Dennis Clive) sound as if they could belong to the curate in a cozy little Agatha Christie knock off, but others (Spike Gordon, Clayton Drew, Laurence F. Rose) were much more American.
Fearn was also unusual in that his best remembered series character was a woman.
This may not seem remarkable in an era where tough, kick-ass women like Buffy Summers, Sydney Bristow, and Emma Peel have anchored TV programs, reformed rogue Modesty Blaise enjoyed a five decade run in the comics, and female superheroes like the Black Widow, Storm, and Wonder Woman have been popular for generations. However, the 1930s were a different time, when the best a female character could hope for was being the hero's plucky girlfriend, or maybe a menacing Oriental villainess with chopsticks in her hair and very long nails. The adventure, hard boiled mystery, and SF pulps were aimed at men and teenage boys, after all, and the very few women who wrote for these markets all adopted ambiguous pseudonyms like Leigh Brackett or CL Moore to get published.
Just why Fearn decided to write about a woman in 1939 is not clear; he was a fan favorite at Amazing Stories, and often won the $50 bonus offered to the most popular story in each issue. Amazing's editor Ray Palmer was starting a new magazine with a $75 bonus for favorite story, so it's understandable why Fearn would create a new character (postage from Britain was not cheap), but why a woman?
Regardless of motives, Fearn started writing, and in July of 1939 introduced Violet Ray, the Golden Amazon, to the readers of Fantastic Adventures. Violet's origin bore a startling resemblance to that of another popular pulp character, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan. Like Tarzan, she was an orphan, shipwrecked in a jungle and raised by the locals as their own. Violet even had taught herself about human civilization by reading the books her parents had left behind, just like Tarzan.
The main difference was that unlike John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, Violet Ray was shipwrecked on Venus.
The idea of jungles on Venus sounds ridiculous today, but back in the 1930s all that was known about the second planet was that it was covered by thick clouds. One popular scientific theory held that the clouds were produced by a moist, humid, tropical climate, and SF writers from Robert A. Heinlein on down eagerly seized on the idea. An extraterrestrial jungle could be the home of a raft of exotic creatures and peoples, but close enough to South America or Darkest Africa that a clever writer could use some of the same plots and dangers found in adventure stories and explorers' accounts of going down the Amazon with gun and camera.
Fearn was no exception. Violet's upbringing on Venus, closer to the sun than Earth but shielded by those lovely clouds, had given her an advanced metabolism, immense strength, and the ability to heal quickly. She matured into a tough, independent, and utterly ruthless adventuress determined to avenge her parents' deaths at the hands of space pirates. At the same time she was a gorgeous, busty blonde with a vulnerable heart, which of course led to plenty of entertaining complications as she fell in love, married, and had two children, all the while still having adventures and zipping about the Solar System.
Alas for the Golden Amazon, Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, and Fearn was conscripted soon after. He hadn't been happy writing for Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing and Fantastic, and even though he was turned down by the military on medical grounds, his work for the war effort gave him a steady enough income that he decided to stop writing for the American markets. He started working on longer, less extravagantly pulpy novels, and by 1944 Fearn was an established genre author in his native land.
He had never stopped thinking about Violet Ray, though, and by 1944 had decided to treat the character with the seriousness she deserved. He wrote a new origin for the Golden Amazon (orphaned during the Blitz, she is adopted by an endocrinologist whose experiments transform her into into a superhuman intended to put an end to war), and began having new adventures. These adventures, conducted with her trademark ruthlessness and determination, eventually resulted in the Golden Amazon becoming a sort of peaceful dictator who becomes so unpopular that she fakes her own death to avoid being overthrown.
Eventually she matures into a benevolent protector of Earth, starring in two dozen short novels published in Canada by the Toronto Star Weekly. Weirdly enough, at least one of these adventures was republished by, of all places, Harlequin, best known today for category romances. I've been unable to discover how this happened, but the idea of a tough, kick-ass female lead in a Harlequin book in the 1950s is no sillier than a female Tarzan emerging from the great swampy rain forests of Venus, so why not?
Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, by Robert Leslie Bellem. Dan Turner, private eye extraordinaire, cut a swath through the criminals and ladies of Hollywood in over 300 hundred adventures in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. His creator, Robert Leslie Bellem, had been a reporter and film extra before turning to writing, and allegedly drew on his alleged knowledge of the seamier side of Tinsel Town in his work.
Turner began as a series character in, God help us all, Spicy Detective. This was part of a line of "sexy pulps" put out by Culture Publications. These featured descriptions of sexual activity that are more amusing than arousing to jaded modern eyes, with titles such as Spicy Detective, Spicy Adventure, Spicy Western and Spicy Mystery (alas for posterity, no Spicy Spices or Spicy Zeppelin). Alas for the prurient, the spiciest these stories ever get is a great deal of grappling, a few ridiculous descriptions of breasts usually involving "ivory" and "globes," and a fade out just before anything fun actually happens.
Dan Turner was of course no exception to this rule. Every one of his adventures involved a gorgeous, lethal "frail," "dame," or "tomato, usually with "ivory globes" and a startling eagerness to bed our hero, and all too many of these hot mamas ended up dead, either in their own apartments or Turner's. Turner had to solve these mysteries, turn over the real killer to his buddies on the LAPD, and then sashay into his next encounter with a gorgeous, lethal lady who....
Even allowing for the sex, this formula was nothing special. So why did Turner rise to such heights of popularity that he headlined his own magazine in the 1940s? Why did Bill Pronzini devote an entire chapter in his Gun in Cheek to Robert Leslie Bellem? Why did humorist SJ Perelman write a loving tribute to Bellem's work?
Perhaps these excerpts will provide a clue:
She was a hell of a sweet number. Her skin was as warm and smooth as new cream, and she had what it takes to drive a man utsnay.
"Utsnay"?
The McBride ham crossed the stage with assault and bashery in his slitted peepers; his maulies were balled for action and his kisser was a thin slash in the hard granite of his map as he barged to the camera setup and planted his bulk firmly ferninst the director, a dyspeptic little sourball.
"Ferninst?"
It's a damned screwy feeling to reach for pajamas and find a cadaver instead.
No argument from me on this one.
My roscoe sneezed "Ka-chee!"
Um...what?
She's deader than a Nazi's conscience!
Ooookay.
As one might gather from the above, Turner's adventures were chronicled in perhaps the slangiest prose ever committed to paper. Pig Latin (most of it terrible even for that exalted language) appears so frequently one almost needs a dictionary to figure out what Bellem actually meant. Guns are almost always "roscoes," and they never fire, they "spit" or "sneeze" their "lethal load" into a villain's "tripes" or "ellybays." People live in "wickiups," not apartments or houses. Turner gets conked on the head with disturbing regularity (often by a frail whose ivory globes have driven him utsnay), and calls in murders to the cops under a variety of joking names, like General Patton or the Secretary of State. And he never, ever talks to anyone - oh no, Dan Turner "bumps gums" or "chins" his way through his cases, and "ankles" if he needs to use his legs to propel himself over to a wickiup to meet a tomato for some gum bumping and globe groping
Best of all for lovers of terrible prose, despite the ridiculous prose and even more ridiculous plots, Bellem played it absolutely straight. If these stories were parodies of the hard boiled form, one would never know it from reading them.
Alas, even Dan Turner's style of detecting succumbed to the ka-cheeing roscoe of television. Bellem was nothing if not a survivor, though, and after the demise of the Hollywood Detective's eponymous magazine in the 1950s he enjoyed success as a scriptwriter for the new medium of television (including several episodes of Perry Mason, which is about as unlike Dan Turner as it's possible to get). His books are now highly sought collector's items, and several small presses have reprinted the best of Turner's adventures so that modern audiences can be driven utsnay just like their parents.
It's enough to make me ankle over to the ookbstore to order one.
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BONUS SELECTION:
As promised above, here is a sample of Kim Kinnison/Sybly Whyte's deathless prose, and if you think that Doc Smith was making fun of his own work, why, the duck will come down and give you a hundred galactic credits before you can say "Children of the Lens":
Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship's plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall...
Isn't that amazing?
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