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 They felt it was outdated, violent and cheap-looking.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.

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Pulp Librarian

@PulpLibrarian

22 Nov

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.

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Pulp Librarian

@PulpLibrarian

21 Nov

https://twitter.com/nytimesbooks/status/1462077043110289408

Am I going to take the bait?

You betcha! Come this way...

https://twitter.com/nytimesbooks/status/1462077043110289408

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."

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Pulp Librarian

@PulpLibrarian

20 Nov

Today in pulp... early satellites!

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.

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