Concentrated Pulp

"The genre wars have done a disservice to speculative and weird fiction of all types for nearly 100 years now, and it's time to put "big F" Fandom in the dust bin where it belongs." ~ Christopher DiNote on The Last Fanatics

What we know of as Pulp Fiction died just over three quarters of a century ago. It existed for a brief moment in time, a drop in the bucket of the typhoon of history, before it was cast to the four winds never to be seen again. Pulp, for all intents and purposes, died before in the 20th century did. Even before the pulp format itself died, the fiction itself had been warped.

That era is long gone, was deliberately erased, and has no real chance to come back in the form that made it what it was. 

So why does the term still stick around today? There are many theories, some fairly surface level. For one, "Pulp" is just a good word that is fun to say and write. It has a joyful simplicity to it that the far clumsier "Penny Dreadfuls" simply doesn't. It also accurately describes both the intent of the stories and the quality of the paper they were printed on: coarse, cheap, and to the point. As such it has attached itself to the style of story most prevalent in its pages, a fast-paced adventure meant for the Average Joe to spend his change on after a tough day at work. Unfortunately, it is something that does not have an equivalent today, mostly because the industry took that away from them in order to create their own club. Regardless, the term survives.

"Pulp" storytelling as it is defined is, of course, nothing new. People love stories, they bathe and marinate in them and they fashion a lot of their understanding of the events that happen in life around the narrative strings they can puzzle out for themselves. Everything has a meaning and a purpose, one just has to sometimes dig to find it. But it's always there.

Storytelling is also a community activity, it is not meant for hoarding to oneself. It is social, not antisocial. For examples of this, there are the activities that used to center on the act. Fairy tales taught to children were done around the fireplace or before bed, usually mean as a way to relax and wind down, taking wonderous thoughts into your imagination as you head to sleep. Campfire tales worked in much the same way, gathering a group around the campfire and telling chilling tales just out of the bounds of the darkness waiting mere steps from your sleeping bag. Stage plays and cinema rely on crowd reaction to generate excitement and word of mouth. Stories, in other words, have always existed to excite, inspire, and bring audience and artist together, and they always will.

The audience is there for communication; the artist delivers it.

Naturally, from this point on, there are types of stories that resonate more strongly with different groups, the main two being men and women. There usually is crossover, but chances are what an artist puts out will usually appeal to one more than the other.

Men and women, as a whole, each prefer different styles of storytelling. Women prefer relationships (the modern term known as "shipping") and who will end up with who, the more insular issues of the story, while men prefer the outer aspect: the journey and destination. As such, the original storytelling genre of Romance encompassed both. Think of the classics and you will find a heavy focus on both throughout the ages, because each are very important parts of what makes us human and connects us with each other as well as the world we live in.

What then happened next, because both men and women have different interests, is that stories began to lean more in one direction than the other. The stories that wished to appeal more to the female audience would focus on the male and female relationships between the characters, eventually coming to embody the term Romance we still use today. Stories like Jane Eyre and Pride & Prejudice are the archetypal form of this. The male side centered more on the Adventure aspect which stories such as Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island bent more towards. You can see how these two different streams diverged, but also how they still relate to each other.

However, despite this, there was no push to be rid of the original form. In fact, it could be argued that the Ur genre of Romantic Adventure soon found its way into the Weird, the place where the fairy and campfire tales made their home long ago. Here, the romance of existence both interior and exterior could always be explored with no limits on the imagination (the imagination being the one part of storytelling that should not be limited) where the supernatural and natural are intertwined. This is paring it down to the nuts and bolts of storytelling itself.

Imagination and wonder is key to it all.

This might be giving a very superficial reading of it, but this is because it leads into the point. The modern version of Weird which came about in during the early 20th century was a response to the growing materialism and warping of stories to be About Things ideologues which to control. The Romance was being lost, and many authors who saw the universe as a more wondrous creation than slogans and buzzwords for cultists wanted to give it its due. Art as a whole, no matter the form, medium, or genre, is about a celebration of life. Yes, even horror.

Speaking of which, Weird is part classical Adventure and part Gothic Horror, treating both as if they are intrinsic to what makes it all work. In essence, Weird is the closest modern approach to nailing down that original intent of storytelling as a form to lift the audience up.

There are rules designed to sharpen prose and narrative to best communicate with the audience (which is the entire point, remember), just as there is in every medium of art, but in the art itself? No limitations exist. Whatever one wishes to do can do done.

For one moment, one which modern people can only look back on in hindsight now, storytelling did return to where it was meant to be. This would have been the pulp era which ended around 1940 when it was consumed by literary types trying to educate the rubes who wanted wonder and ended up chasing them to other mediums entirely. After that, it became captured by Fanatics who would do their best to erase the past and change the rules.

Fanatics ruin everything.

This was, unfortunately, the legacy of 20th century storytelling. Wonder would find a place, only to be chased out by the materialists and the secular moralists who needed to tear that old world down to be replaced with their vision of utopia. Progress means the old needs to die to such cultists. Fanatics eventually caused an exodus of normal folk from every medium: pulps, comic books, music, novels, television, plays, movies, and finally video games. Every one of those industries in the mainstream of today is nowhere near what they were back in the day.

One merely can trace it back through the 20th century and watch how the weird and wonder drains out of all those medium by the time they hit the 21st and become pale imitations of what once was. All of the wonder and imagination was chased out for "realism" and nihilistic grit because it was "healthier" for audiences. One well knows by now that "realism" and any form of it is a codeword for "acceptable" and it is fairly clear why that became the lay of the land, even as it always ended up chasing more and more people away. This is because it wasn't about pleasing audiences, and never was, but about shaping them to the correct standard. Fanatics were allowed in charge by those who should have known better than they did, and they destroyed it all. They're still doing it today.

Naturally, as a result of all this, every medium and form of art is eventually hollowed out of normal folks and left to the Fanatics to beat to death as they pretend it is an act of love. No one reads anymore, for example, so the industry changes nothing and focuses on pumping out trash meant to educate people who aren't even reading said books. They will not change coarse even in the face of tremendous failures. One can easily communicate with librarians and learn that no one takes these books out. They eventually end up entering and leaving the system without a single check out. The industry has had decades to fix this. That they won't is because it is not about entertainment or uplifting, or pleasing the audience, but preaching the message that the audience already rejected long ago. That always comes first.

What did this selfish attitude lead to? Death. OldPub, the old publishing industry, is as irrelevant as they've ever been, and it is all their own doing.

So as basically all media literacy disappears, where does one go to get their adventure fix now? Not many places, hence the obsession with "celebrity" culture which eventually evolved into being drama about internet figures. Audiences get no excitement from the stories that are shoveled out by cultists so they instead find it somewhere else.

This is where part of the "Cancel Culture" phenomenon comes from. This is because you get to be the protagonist in the adventure and vanquish the great evil in your own adventure! This is a long way from old daytime soap operas and the erotic thrillers of the early 1990s, already twisting towards voyeurism over romance. Now it's warped to an obsessive need around "fixing" the characters in the story--the "characters" who are actually real people. A consequence of the realism obsession materialists forced on the populace? Who is to say.

Regardless, this is where Adventure is in the mainstream today.

Weird is the beating heart of everything else.

What this essentially means is that "Pulp" as it was back in the day, is not feasible enough in Current Year. By that, it means that writers cannot just act around these changes and hope they go away. It is not enough to just make a magazine and call it a day. No one reads anymore, and actually getting them to trust writers again is going to be a very long uphill battle to turn damaged perception that around. And this is just to gain a basic audience again. It doesn't go into the way art and entertainment has been transformed into a drug meant for quick fixes.

How do you fight against the common and accepted knowledge that entertainment is to be consumed and discarded instantly for the next hit? Wait for the assembly line to pump out the next dose! In a world that wants the highest common denominator to be distributed and treated as the lowest common denominator, how does one even create to that expectation? There probably isn't any way to do that, which means a new way forward must be found. Especially in a climate were few read and even fewer read anything under a 100,000 word book made to factory specification, in every sense that entails. There are entire forms and mediums that simply have no room in the modern climate of junk culture as easy heroin.

So if "Pulp" were to continue it would need to move beyond where it was in the 20th century, at least in accessibility. Writers of the weird, adventure writers, carriers of an older tradition, have a duty to make sure the form stays alive, not just with their writing but with mediums. They cannot just abandon the past. Someone, for instance, needs to keep the short story, poem, and novelette alive, as the wider culture abandons them for the next disposable fad to be thrown away five minutes later. But in an age where all mediums are treated as throwaway and disposable, how does one connect? What exactly is "Pulp" supposed to be in the modern age?

Well, it isn't really "Pulp" anymore. Pulp paper is long gone, and the style of adventure it championed was chased out before the medium itself even died off. The spirit flooded out into comics, b-movies, music, and even video games, before being chased out of those, too. So where does it go now? The question could also be asked: should it even be running anymore, especially with its opponents weaker than they've ever been? Perhaps it never should have ran and ceded ground in the first place. Hindsight is 20/20, but still one needs to take stock of the modern climate.

The elephant in the room is that with the growth of NewPub as a separate industry, Fanatics have less control than they've ever had. They can no longer dictate the terms. Now "Pulp" has no obstacle to return, except a problem of how to connect with an audience that has been turned against it by people who hate and wish to control them.

It's all still romantic adventure of the old sort, whether you call it "Pulp" or what have you, but what about it will truly connect with an audience weaned on everything it is against? Writers cannot abandon them, but the point of art is to form a relationship between artist and audience. What is that relationship between them today in the post-post-modern world?

One such example of Weird adapting to new mediums

Despite all of this, it does feel as if modern writers of the romantic adventure know this. It has to be treated as more than mindless consuming and moving on to the next product. They know it far better than modern cultists paid by their inept corporate masters do. Folks in NewPub, before it was even called that, were the first to jump into audio books, webtoons, ebooks, podcasts, web comics, digital distribution, and even streaming. Today they are even willing to connect with streamers and YouTubers to broaden the audience that OldPub hollowed out long ago. In order to gain back an industry worth saving in the first place, one must go out of their way to break boundaries that never should have been set up there to begin with. As a result, however, change will take a long time. Any improvement will take a very long time to be seen.

All writers, artists, and creators, off all kinds, must cross-pollinate mediums and forms and learn from each other, to bring all the disparate parts back together again. This might be difficult in an age where societal trust is at an all time low, but that is the future. It has to be. In order to bring it all together again, one must bring it all together again in a larger sense, too. To have a functioning society is how one has a functioning art and entertainment climate. Funny how that works. As mentioned earlier, art is not antisocial.

The fact is that there are many out there who have been taught the wrong thing, almost as a joke. Just as there are whole groups of people that think anime, an entire style formed back in the 1960s, is just porn, there are just as many told that pulp style adventure is a slogan and buzzword loaded minefield of bad things for bad people. Fanatics want their audience to "think" that way because it makes it easier to have them discount the alternative entirely, without having to think about it. This is how they shaped the "field" to begin with.

Thinking outside the box they designed is the only way to rout them. There is simply no other way to break the conditioning, as it were.

There is no reason that Abraham Merritt, the biggest writer of his day, should have been left deliberately out of print for decades simply due to dying relatively young. If it wasn't for Arkham House, August Derleth, and Donald Wandrei, these same people would have done the same to Lovecraft and all of Weird Tales. The things so many love today would never have existed if the cultists in charge had their way. It is time to stop trusting them.

The industry has forcefully pushed out short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels shorter than the far-too-long 100,000 words, since the 1940s. This is an attack against the form of writing itself, it can no longer be denied. Fanatics have been trying to co-opt and tar the pulps and adventure writing ever since, for nearly a century, because these stories offer a counter-narrative to what you are supposed to believe. Every move the industry have made since 1940 has been to destroy and blacken the name of all that came before.

Why should anyone still listen to the narratives, terminology, and lies they have created? At this point, they have outed their intent and shown their hand. They offer deceit, degradation, and death, to the medium. They must be decoupled, wholesale.

It is the only way tor regain what was lost.

How it is meant to be.

Those in NewPub, going forward, will need to have all of this seared into their very souls: if one does not protect and water the gardens of what they love, enemies will very much use the opportunity to destroy it. They're very good at using deceptive wording and terminology to make themselves out to be the good guys, but their handiwork has been laid bare over the last 80+ years as one of failure. It has been nearly a century and all they have done is strangle the life out of everything they sunk their claws into, whether IP or industries. They cannot be trusted.

What this means is that Adventure, the Weird, the Pulps, the Penny Dreadfuls, Fairy Tales, Romantic Adventure, Romance, or whatever you want to call it going forward, can never be owned by anyone ever again. It cannot be a Brand or a badge, and must be left to its objective definition as stories of wonder meant to lift and inspire, bringing the audience a new appreciation of the universe they live in and their hope for something more. Those that go against this can find their own playpens they can soil themselves in as they have already done for nearly a century.

It might sound contradictory, but this is what true gatekeeping actually is. It doesn't exist to change the content that exists behind the gate, but to prevent those coming in from outside the gate from doing just that. If you like something why would you want it to change? Because new programing from the leader came in, of course. These usurpers then seize control themselves under the guise of mass appeal. But this objectively never happens. If these crowds were truly for mass appeal like they tell themselves, they wouldn't be hemorrhaging sales and audience interest whenever they force their changes in against the people who like it to begin with. There is no argument on this point, it is clear that their changes always devolve to this state. No, their attempts at mutation of others' spaces exist for their own ego and infantile views of an impossible utopia.

This is what one gets for letting Fanatics at the levers of power. They should have been chased out to begin with, but to do that requires a total rejection of what they stand for. They want control over forms that they cannot understand, because all forms are fundamentally against everything they are about. Art is connection, not control. Rules are what define mediums and styles from each other, not a warped means to reshape the reality they hate.

Where OldPub, Hollywood, AAA gaming, and all of the usurped industries and mediums are at now is the opposite of where they should be to allow art to flourish. That is why the Current Year madness of today is at a cultural low, at least, in the mainstream. Antisocial Fanatics control the levers of mass media, and they want to use it against those they detest.

To change this, the entire industry and every subculture and hobby will literally have to be turned 180 degrees around after decades (in some cases, a century) of subversion and mutation. It will require more gatekeeping than simple dunks on social media or snarky YouTube videos. It requires a complete transformation in outlook and approach.

A look into the possible future

It's been a long ride over the past 80 years. As generations have come and gone, they were told that all change is just progress. Of course things change, why wouldn't they? But that is because humanity is just Progressing. Enjoy the ride and eventually the human race will awaken in Utopia and all ills will be solved. Something being new might be scary, but it is new so it is better. Don't think about it beyond that. That is all you need to know, so take a nap while everything you know changes just a little. It's for your own good. It is always for your own good.

Now it is clear what the game was all along. As these Fanatics stomp on the gas to take the world off the nearing cliff while the sleeping wake up in the backseat, things actually have changed quite a lot. However, it never quite changed in the way they wanted it to. Now, the world crumbles around them and all they can do is scream about tolerance and acceptance while they crack snide jokes between pill dosages and sugar rushes. Their loaded and programmed thinking from their betters will carry them to victory as long as they continue the cause of stomping on all that came before them. The people must be protected from themselves, so they must blindly follow processes which led them off the oncoming cliff in the first place. Just don't think about, let the drugs take the wheel.

For those who wish to finally abandon such insanity, there is an obvious truth in all of this. Those who wish to control and deceive, those stained with degenerate and malicious intent, those subversives that only know how to destroy, will always find a way in and they will always try to make themselves the hero of their own story at the expense of their cobbled together villains. There will always be Fanatics trying to poison what they can. Thus we reach the obvious conclusion that the future can never be allowed to be owned by any one person.

Art is communal, but it is also a way for an individual to connect with the whole. It is a way to share and learn, and to grow. It cannot be subversive and destructive, otherwise it will crumble with the society housing it, much like it is today. Modern paths and roads have failed, it is time for other ways. There is no future on this blown out street the Fanatics are barreling down. One would have to be blind to not see this very obvious truth by now. It is no longer the 1990s, it is time to grow up and address the problem.

People are meant to grow and connect. Being trapped in a Fanatic induced cultural stasis focused on killing yourself (in more ways than one) and shrinking from you so-called "lessers" has done little but harm both people and the art they have made. It has killed entire scenes and movements for the next fad, the next hit.

Pulp may be dead, but it's spirit is very much not. This spirit is the only way forward and out of the mess the world has been left in after rushing towards it for longer than anyone today has been alive. The 20th century is over, but it's zombie vampire corpse still hovers over the world as a specter regardless. It is time to put it out of its misery the only way Pulp can.

With fire.

Learn where these Fanatics come from, and how to fight them!