Time for a pulp countdown now, and today I attempt the impossible by picking my top 10 Ed Emshwiller illustrations!
No 10: Crisis in 2140, by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire. Ace Doubles, 1957. Emsh paints fantastic villains, and this one is my favourite.
No 9: Ed Emshwiller's alternative cover for Super-Science Fiction, June 1957. The composition is lovely and the spaceship is excellent.
No 8: an interior illustration by Emsh for 'The Visitor at the Zoo' from Galaxy Magazine, April 1963. I just really like these aliens.
No 7: Star Wars, by Poul Anderson. Ace Doubles, 1957. It's easy to miss the details on this cover, but if anyone can get away with drawing a space kilt Ed Emshwiller can.
No 6: Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1951. There's a lot of wit in Emsh's work and this is one of my favourite Galaxy covers.
No 5: Ed Emshwiller's cover illustration for Rat in the Skull, by Rog Phillips. If Science Fiction, December 1958. Creepy and funny at the same time.
No 4: Starship Soldier, by Robert A. Heinlein. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1959. Emsh did a lot of Heinlein magazine covers and this captures the essence of what would become Starship Troopers.
No 3: Threshold Of Eternity, by John Brunner. Ace Doubles, 1959. Emshwiller breaks the 4th wall.
No 2: Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1951. Emsh regularly painted the Christmas Galaxy cover, and this one has a great Mid-Mod feel to it.
And No 1: Women's Work, by Murray Leinster. The Original Science Fiction Stories, November 1956. It's just my favourite.
More pulp countdowns another time...
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Happy #DoctorWhoDay everybody! The show is 58 years old today, and as this is a pulp account there really is only one way I can mark the occasion...
Let's look back at the New Adventures!
In 1989 the BBC killed off #DoctorWho. The corporation said the series was being 'rested'; the fans suspected it was as dead as Adric.
But an unlikely saviour emerged to carry Who through the wilderness years: Richard Branson.
Both Michael Grade and Jonathan Powell, BBC Directors in the 1980s, disliked Doctor Who. They felt it was outdated, violent and cheap-looking. Ratings were awful, exacerbated by terrible scheduling. Relations with producer John Nathan-Turner had also hit rock bottom.
One of the best Christmas presenta you could ever get was a View-Master! It sold over one billion reels across the world, but it's based on Victorian technology. How did one simple gadget get to be so popular?
Let's take a look at the toy that took over the world...
Stereographs are cards with two nearly identical photographs mounted side by side. Viewed through a binocular device they give an illusion of depth. By 1858 the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company had published over 100,000 of them.
Sawyer's Photo Finishing Service began in 1919 in Portland, Oregon. By 1936 they had teamed up with William Gruber, who had been experimenting with stereoscope photography using the new Kodachrome colour film.
In 1916 Hugo Gernsback coined the term 'Scientifiction' to describe the stories his magazines published. And Jules Verne and H.G. Wells provided a lot of his material. But did anyone 'invent' science fiction?
Brian Aldiss believed that "Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode."
Arthur C Clarke wasn't the first to come up with the idea of satellites, but his 1945 essay in Wireless World did popularise the idea of geo-stationary communication satellites: though these would rely on valve technology.
And 20 years later in 1955 The US announced they would put a satellite into orbit in 1957 to mark International Geophysical Year, using a modified Jupiter rocket caled Juno 1. The satellite - called Explorer 1 - would carry a number of scientific instruments.
Today in pulp: a woman with great hair is fleeing a gothic house. Why?
Well this is a signal to the reader: they hold in their hands one of ‘those’ books – not a historical romance or a ghost story, but a modern gothic romance.
New readers start here: what is a modern gothic romance? Well it's a romance story with strong supernatural themes, all tied to an atmospheric and foreboding building which our heroine must flee.
Actually it's a lot more complex than that...
Firstly it has a long pedigree. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually acknowledged as the first gothic romance; set during the Crusades it follows Lord Manfred's fateful decision to divorce his wife and pursue his dead son's bride-to-be Isabella.