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BLACK_MASKS
December 1, 2004
Rev: February 9, 2005
Rev: July 17, 2005
I often use phrases like "the
Black Mask school" or "the Galaxy But why should they?
school", and I forget that some It's not like this
people don't know what I mean. stuff is taught in
English lit classes. BRAIN_PULP
"Pulp Fiction" is just
The "Black Mask" the name of a movie.
was one of the
many and various And because of that
magzines that movie many people seem
came out of the The "pulp revolution": to think that "pulp"
pulp revolution. a technical development, is synonymous with
in cheap (in all senses) "gangster" or "crime".
paper made from "pulp".
Many of the pulps were
aggressively trashy,
pandering vehicles for
trite "entertainments",
but there was also room
for the occasional editor
with a higher concept, The focus of the pulps was
someone with a vision that literally anything that would
danced across the barrier sell, (and that they could get
between high and low art. away with selling).
(And it often seemed Airwar!
like an impenetrable Romance! Another key pulp:
barrier in those Detective! "Weird Tales",
days, far more so Occult! which published
than it is today.) Railroad stories! H.P. Lovecraft,
Spicey stories! Robert E. Howard,
and Clark Ashton
Smith.
The history of the
comic book hero clearly
stretches back into the
world of pulp The effect of new media:
magazines, where masked (1) uncertainty of formula
vigilantes of various (2) explosion of diversity
sorts -- most famously
The Shadow -- waged Cracks in the wall.
their illegal War on
Crime.
The "Black Mask" magazine was
one of the main driving forces
in the rise of the hardboiled private
eye, as opposed to the old
British drawing room mystery.
This is where Dashiell
Hammett first published, in GLASS_KEY
the early twenties.
The hardboiled reign of the
"Black Mask school" is
usually associated with the
editor Joseph Shaw, though it (It was founded in 1920
was already going in that as one of H.L. Mencken's
direction when he took over moves to float the "Smart Set".)
in 1926: they were already
publishing Hammett. (As was the aforementioned
"Spicey Stories".)
The history of American Science
Fiction begins with an editor named As opposed to the
Hugo Gernsback, a guy publishing European "scientific
electronics porn for radio romances" of Verne
technology geeks, who decided to and Wells.
try his hand at a gosh wow fiction
of the future celebrating fancy
gadgetry through the medium of Gernsback serialized his "Ralph 124c41+"
terrible writing. This was the in his "Modern Electrics" magazine in
original "scientifiction" of 1911, and founded "Amazing Stories" in
"Amazing Stories". 1926.
A bit later (1938), an editor "Scientifiction"
named John Campbell took the pulp turned into
magazine "Astounding Stories" and "science fiction"
began mutating it in strange pretty quickly, Some unsuccessful
ways, creating what's sometimes and there it attempts have been
called "modern science fiction". stuck. made to rename it
After some years, he changed the something else,
name of the magazine to "Analog". e.g. "speculative
fiction" (endorsed
Campbellian SF was a by Heinlein) or
complicated creature, "sci-fi" (Forry
though in retrospect it is Ackerman).
often reduced to one
cliche: a celebration of
the superiority of the
omniscient engineer, and
the manifest destiny of the DEAD_HAND
human race.
In the fifties, another voice
emerged, "Galaxy Magazine" under First issue:
the editorship of Horace Gold. October 1950.
Galaxy (at least in retrospect)
is viewed as a refuge for social HORACE_GOLD
satire, liberal-left premises,
and perhaps a higher literary
standard than Analog. Though "higher literary standards"
is more often thought of as the
domain of "The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction", aka F&SF.
Edited by Anthony Boucher (along
with McComas at first), until
1958, and then by a number of
others, with a long stint by Edward
Ferman (~1965-1991).
In the present day era, the
preeminent science fiction magazine
is Asimov's under Gardner Dozois GENESIS_OF_THE_CYBER-PUNKS
(an early champion of "cyberpunk").
But this is not to say that Dozois is
a figure at all comparable to Campbell
or Gold.
Magazines play a much smaller role
in today's world; and written SF
in general often looks like a minor
realm, the retreat of people who would
be happier writing TV scripts.
But once upon a time, these
magazines were where the
action was. Books were a very
slow-moving form (before the To state the obvious:
"paperback"), and reading was
a very big part of popular There were live events
entertainment. (plays, music, sports)
and there was reading.
The top of the line was There was no television,
"the slicks" such as The and the radio-play was
Saturday Evening Post, only gradually ramping-up
the realm of writers throughout the 30s.
like Damon Runyan and
C.S. Forrester.
Science Fiction writers
could only dream of cracking
the slicks some day.
(Heinlein is one of
the few who made it.)
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