Time for a pulp countdown now, so here's my top 10 future inventions we were promised by Popular Mechanics magazine that we're still waiting for! #SaturdayMotivation
At #10: motorised unicycles! This was a very popular Edwardian idea inspired by the penny farthing bicycle. Although a few prototypes were made we never really fell in love with driving one big wheel. Also: not great in the rain...
At #9: personal radar. Now this is actually a pretty neat idea and a number of cars now use radar or lidar as an anti- aid. We're still waiting for it to be built into a hat however.
At #8: the ion drive. Some space probes do use this as an efficient incremental mode of propulsion. Getting it to power flight on Earth is a bit trickier.
At #7: wearable gyrocopters. More powerful than jetpacks the concept certainly works, but it's still a solution in search of a problem. Oh, and deafeningly loud!
At #6: airships for everyon. The airship is the quintessential pulp mode of transport and modern blimps are pretty safe. But we still don't like to travel by gasbag, no matter how sustainable it may actually be.
At #5: air tugs. Having one aircraft transport another one can make sense: it's one way to crack the problem of single stage to orbit flight. Virgin Galactic are the only current takers though.
At #4: rocket-assisted vehicles. It's a neat way to manoeuvre a truck on tricky terrain, or to break a speeding car quickly, but putting rockets on cars is probably going to cause more problems than it solves.
At #3: recreational helicopters. The 1950s was the heyday of recreational flight ideas; soon we would all vacation in the Sikorsky RV. However we still stubbornly refuse to embrace the chopper as a flying Winnebago. It's hard enough towing a caravan!
At #2: monorails. Why we still think this is futuristic is beyond me. It's certainly not faster than traditional rail and apart from shuttling people around theme parks or airports it's remained a niche proposition.
And of course, at #1: flying cars! We've been promised this for so long that I'm beginning to think it will never happen.
That's it for our paleo-futuristic look at Popular Mechanics. More gee-whizz history another time...
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What are the pulp archetypes? Pulp novels are usually written quickly and rely on a formula, but do they use different archetypal characters to other fiction?
Let's take a look at a few...
The Outlaw is a classic pulp archetype: from Dick Turpin onwards lawbreakers have been a staple of the genre. Crime never pays, but it's exciting and trangressive!
Some pulp outlaws however are principled...
As Bob Dylan sang "to live outside the law you must be honest." Michel Gourdon's 1915 hero Dr Christopher Syn is a good example. A clergyman turned pirate and smuggler, he starts as a revenger but becomes the moral magistrate of the smuggling gangs of Romney Marsh.
Given the current heatwave, I feel obliged to ask my favourite question: is it time to bring back the leisure suit?
Let's find out...
Now we all know what a man's lounge suit is, but if we're honest it can be a bit... stuffy. Formal. Businesslike. Not what you'd wear 'in da club' as the young folks say.
So for many years tailors have been experimenting with less formal, but still upmarket gents attire. The sort of garb you could wear for both a high level business meeting AND for listening to the Moody Blues in an espresso bar. Something versatile.
Today in pulp I look back at the publishing phenomenon of gamebooks: novels in which YOU are the hero!
A pencil and dice may be required for this thread...
Gamebooks are a simple but addictive concept: you control the narrative. At the end of each section of the story you are offered a choice of outcomes, and based on that you turn to the page indicated to see what happens next.
Gamebook plots are in fact complicated decision tree maps: one or more branches end in success, but many more end in failure! It's down to you to decide which path to tread.