I do like the pithy summaries of the Bard's plays by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (shakespeare.org.uk)
Here's a few favourites...
A Midsummer Night's Dream: "People get lost in the woods. Puck manipulates their romantic affections and (in one case) anatomical head shape. They put on a play."
Twelth Night: "Viola thinks her brother is dead. He thinks she is dead. Everybody thinks that she is her brother. Everybody thinks that her brother is her. Shenanigans ensue."
King Lear: "King divides kingdom snubs daughter, goes mad. There's a storm and everyone dies."
Troilus and Cressida: "Troilus loves Cressida, but she betrays him. Achilles loves Patroclis, but he is killed. The Trojan War goes on. No one is happy."
The Merry Wives of Windsor: "Falstaff tries to pursue two married women. The women are smart; they put him in a river, dress him as a woman, and bring him to a haunted forest. Everyone is happy."
As You Like It: "All brothers hate each other for some reason. Rosalind dresses up as a boy and convinces her crush to hit on her while she's a boy. Everyone is married by a Greek God."
Henry VIII: "Cardinal Wolsey is shifty. Henry divorces Katherine and marries Anne. Queen Elizabeth is the most extraordinary being ever to be been, praise her."
Today in pulp: the searing, evocative power of a well crafted opening sentence!
For this thread I will draw my examples from the greatest writer* in the English language: the Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe.
(*based on synonym use)
On death:
"Bellenger was dead when they found him. That Bellenger was dead was probably the understatement of the year. Bellenger was horribly, violently dead!"
On crowds:
"The crowd had to be seen to be believed. There are crowds and crowds but this was the crowd to end all crowds. Never, perhaps ever before in the whole of human history had there been such a massive congregation. Such a teeming of humanity."
Today in pulp I look at time travel. It's full of paradoxes but there's one we rarely explore: does it break the Law of Conservation of Energy?
Let’s investigate…
Time travel is a staple of pulp science fiction and it often involves a paradox: changing history, killing your grandfather, creating a time loop etc. Solving the paradox, or realising too late that one is happening, is half the fun of these stories.
Thinking about the nature of time is also fun. Does it exist or is it emergent? It is a local or global event? How many dimensions does it come in? Why is there an ‘arrow of time’? There are many possible answers.
"I wanted a mission. And for my sins they gave me one."
"Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River by Navy patrol boat, pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba, infiltrate his team by whatever means available... and terminate the Colonel's command."
People who feel they have no voice can have a powerful creative spark, sometimes born of suffering or solitude. Mostly it's hidden, but in the 20th century it began to be admired, celebrated, and even perhaps exploited.
Let's look at the story of 'Outsider Art'...
Outsider Art, Art Brut, Visionary Art, Naïve Art: nobody has really settled on a name for artworks made by untrained artists which express a raw, energetic experience of the world. It's art from a different perspective, demanding to be heard.
Outsider Art began to be recognised in 1911 by Der Blaue Reiter group of artists in Munich. The group was short-lived but influential: fundamental to Expressionism and admiring of artworks created by people struggling with their mental health.