The Word & Sound Alliance

For about as long as I've been alive I've always found something ephemerally beautiful about the way music can affect us, whether it be general moods or just triggering emotions we don't expect. This isn't exclusive to music, but it's entirely aural impact gives it a bit of a different punch than other mediums do. This is just the power of art, and it is what makes it so valuable to us as individuals and as a society.

Stories have the same affect, they just achieve it in a different way. Whereas music is entirely aural, storytelling slips through the eyes (or fingers) into the brain where we process and understand it. How they are ingested into the body and soul is completely different. They are both very varied artforms that require wholly separate skills to master. 

And yet they are both very similar in a lot of ways.

When author Alexander Hellene asked me to be part of his Pulp Rock Anthology project, I instantly jumped aboard. I didn't even have to think about. The reason is that I think the two different forms should come together more often than they do. In fact, we've separated and sealed off every medium of art and entertainment into its own ghetto of "communities" instead of allowing them to intersect and flow into each other like they did before the 21st century came into existence. We have forgotten how wild things can get.

There is nothing quite like an adventure story based around music, songs, or legends thereof. I've done it myself many times because it is just so fascinating to me. However, outside of Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John stories, this subgenre of adventure is disappointingly rare, especially today. But it doesn't have to be!

In fact, I created an entire series of short stories involving a band that travels across an old backwoods country planet while dealing with supernatural craziness along the way. You've already read one of them in StoryHack. One of this series is in this Pulp Rock anthology, and another is on the way elsewhere. You'll have to see what all those other tales are about in the near future. But for now, there is plenty on the way.

Aside from that I've also written Grey Cat Blues and Y Signal, both of which feature music as a major component to what happens. I do have other stories in the pipeline with the same sort of inspiration, but for now let us focus on the ones that are already out.

Grey Cat Blues is where the music I was listening for most of my life gave me the entire aesthetic to work around and even add in entire character ideas and motivations. The old blues and country-style storytelling the genres were known for back during their commercial and creative peaks inspired a lot of what I did in that book.

For Y Signal, it was about the Gen X era of using noise rock to express anger and a desire for more than the world they saw before them at the time. It is something that still resonates now even decades later after the 1990s are but a fading memory in a vanishingly small number of people. But the music and stories from that time help keep the memories alive of what an odd time it was. This is something only our art and entertainment can really convey to the audience.

Art is like an intangible cloud in the back of your mind, unpredictable yet thick. It contains all our shared experiences, our hopes, our dreams, and even memories of the past. Without it we would be much poorer, just as we would without any individual life in this world. Every piece matters, every piece contributes, and every piece is necessary, even if we don't see it. This is how it is meant to be. Everything matters.

I was reminded of this recently when the most popular VTuber in the world, Gawr Gura, performed her usual popular karaoke stream and decided to throw in a Sabaton cover in the middle of it. The internet blew up talking about it, but I think many might have missed why exactly it hit so hard with so many people. It wasn't just the song, but what it meant to the people listening to her. The performance came out of nowhere and left many pleasantly shocked and delighted.

For those unaware of the term, "VTuber" just means virtual youtuber. Someone who uses an avatar for anonymity to do what normal youtubers do. This burgeoning scene blew up big last year thanks to newcomers like Gura who have a lot of charisma and winning personalities to connect with audiences. Next month will be her first year anniversary as a VTuber and she already has over 3 million youtube subscribers. Despite initial skepticism in some circles, she won many people over. Now, near twelve months later, she continues to grow in popularity.

For reference, here is the encore performance of the above song:

The song is out of her vocal range, but it hardly matters. She still nailed it with plenty of enthusiasm. Gura's voice is more adapt to slower, jazzy numbers, and yet she attempted to sing a power metal song that requires a harsher tone and big energy. It is the opposite of what she is best at doing. You'd think it wouldn't work, right?

But it did, and quite splendidly. She performed two Sabaton songs (and a Motorhead one!) during this stream regardless, because she likes the songs just that much. And the audience enjoyed every moment of it. Gura is a fantastic singer, you can find many clips to prove it, but when she enjoys herself, the audience gets into it too. That is what matters more to those listening.

When she asked for an encore, the audience unanimously asked for Sabaton's The Last Stand again, and she eagerly jumped into it. Why did it work so well despite that it technically shouldn't have? Because the song is clearly one she has passion for and put everything into her performance of it. Does it help that the song is great and that she has a great voice? Sure. But it is the fact that threw herself into it like she did is why it worked out so well. It was trending for quite a while on social media for a reason.

At the same time, she also managed to both bridge the gap with metal and Sabaton fans as well as introducing a good portion of her own audience to music they might not be familiar with. On the other hand, Sabaton fans might have found a streamer they might want to follow by listening to her sing. No matter how you look at it, this is a win for everyone.

This is the power of art, especially in something like music. You can be linked to people and things you wouldn't in a million years think you have anything in common with. Such a thing is unfortunately underrated these days, but it still remains true.

Didn't think you had anything in common with a singing anime shark girl? Think again! Art is deeper than just the surface level. You never know just what is going to connect with who and when it is going to happen. This is what makes it exciting!

This is one of the reasons the ego problems we see with artists, musicians, and writers, today is so utterly misguided and pointless. It isn't about us, it's about the art and how we can use it to reach each other when we couldn't otherwise. That is what matters!

At some point we began to worship the artist and the art, and it is what has led so many people to have the wrong view on entertainment. It has also caused us to build whole identities around this misunderstanding. Art is made for everyone, not just cliques.

You can see this in the music world, too. The whole concept of a "rock star" didn't really exist before Elvis Presley, and even his popularity came from that fact that he was naturally popular and charismatic when performing. Starting in the 1960s, most rock music was boosted by either the record labels with the most cash to spare or managers with the same. Not to mention payola, as much as certain people don't want to admit it, existed and flooded radio stations. The music world began worshipping stars over enjoying the music instead. It might be hard to imagine now when all modern music stars are walking punchlines, but it was different back in the day.

Unfortunately, most of the time the music was liked mainly because of who was making it. This filtered reception of said material and caused fanatic cliques to spring up. Just look at the way music made from those who die young is treated in comparison to those who live normal, long, fulfilling lives. It is as if they are worshipping golden gods. It didn't help that there were entire magazines dedicated to building a cult out of this music.

The advent of MTV putting an emphasis on aesthetics and looks over the sonic quality of an aural art shouldn't even need to be mentioned. For some reason in the 1980s and 90s you needed a music video--a term that is contradictory on its face--to stand out. Of course, music videos don't really exist anymore, and anyone hearing about them these days would be baffled by their appeal, but they did a good job changing the perception of what the form is meant to be about. Visuals are simply not a part of what makes music powerful. Sorry, punk and metal fans. What matters is the musical content.

Oddly enough, the combination of music with prose fiction is a unique one that actually adds a layer to each, though it was hardly every pushed the way music videos were. Aural sounds to put a slant on prose and words to put a story to sounds is a combination that adds something unique. It is just reality that the shallow and pointless form of the music video could never really do anything on this level.

This is what makes projects like Pulp Rock so fascinating.

How does this combination of sound and word do it? By attaching so viscerally to the imagination. Music requires your mind to put the disparate instruments and sound together to form a whole. The production and the composition of the song adds to what picture your mind puts out in order to understand it in a coherent manner.

Reading is not much different. You read the words off the page and your brain plays the scenario inside your head. You are given the tools of the story--now it is up to your imagination to do the heavy lifting of letting the plot play out. This is the fun of it!

Combine these two separate things together and you can easily see the appeal of each and how they can work as one. This is one of the reasons I jumped at the chance to contribute to Pulp Rock. In an age where both music and reading have been so devalued by the wider culture it is nice to be a part of a project that combines them into one and allows the audience to see just what makes this insanity all so special. In a time where we worship artists and aesthetic over content, it's nice to be part of something that cares more about concept and the core. It's not as common as you'd expect!

I am not certain when it happened, but a shift did occur. We went from liking music for being music and stories for being stories into liking the idea of each being dismantled by the people "in charge" of these industries. As a result, you now have what the modern music and OldPub industries are--walking corpses that receive no respect from anyone. They are dead, and not coming back, and no one is going to think they deserved any better.

But the forms themselves remain very much alive! With the death of those old decrepit industries, it is now the chance for the revival both need badly. Pulp Rock is one such new idea.

The 2000s especially was such a horrible decade for art. If you lived it and put aside any lingering nostalgia, you'd know what I mean. Post-2001 art was a quagmire of misery and misdirected hate that makes it unbelievably hard to revisit outside of personal attachment. 

Music especially suffered a death blow. It was the decade where rock music finally breathed its last breath and endless variations on boring dissonant dance music being dominant. What wasn't awkwardly politicized by people who just repeated talking points from comedians was still covered in a grime and misery that wouldn't wash off no matter what anyone did. By 2010, the genre of rock was irrelevant, and the industry itself was basically over and done. The collapse was sudden, and few noticed it at the time, but it was very real.

To be fair, reading as a hobby and industry did die first. After the Thor Power Tool Case removed so much history and backlog off the bookshelves, people started reading less and less. Everything appeared to wrong during this point. All the independent companies were bought up or went under. The sword and sorcery boom was cut off at the knees due to OldPub meddling, and Mythic Fiction began imitating the bones of Tolkien's story structure and calling it a genre. 

Creativity was being commoditized into formulas for easy bookshelf stacking. Reading was no longer fun, imaginative, or thrilling--it was a bunch of checkboxes you needed to hit to be accepted into the OldPub meat grinder. In essence, the industry has been dead for decades.

The less said about the slide in Futuristic Fiction, the better. If you can think of anything from the genre from the 1990s that made any impact, you probably either lived during the period and scrounged hard for something to find or you just read anything with a sword or spaceship on the cover. Either way, none of this improved when the 2000s came along. By that point it was already much too late to right the ship. Audiences were long gone.

It didn't take much longer for other forms like comic books or movies to make the same slide into the mire, though you can still find the root causes go back much further than even the '90s. The nadir was just hit during the 2000s. Even video games are falling into this pit. Really, the lack of creativity from the big boys was only a problem when audiences had no access to alternatives. The thing is, now they very much do.

Nonetheless, that was over a decade ago. It's in the rearview mirror. Today we can appreciate things for what they are again, especially with the rise of so many better alternatives. The withering away of crusty 20th century institutions have given us the chance to reassess and remember just what everything is for again. 

Music at its heart is meant for the concert hall or the hootenanny, a place where we can all get together and have a ball together. That might be difficult these days, but the internet gives us the opportunity to have that connection in a new way when it would otherwise be difficult. Even if it is through the online concert of a singing anime shark girl!

Reading as well now is no longer locked to OldPub bookstores owned fully by the flatlining large book corporations. Now you can find anything online you desire, regardless of your taste. It would be nice if it were easier to do that, and if the internet weren't battered by poor algorithms and programming all over the place, but who knows what the future will hold? Either way, reading itself is in much better shape than it was a decade ago.

And projects like Pulp Rock allow us to see the connection between them on an even clearer scale. This is the future of art and entertainment. You better get used to it! The tired 20th century ways are finally over and done with. It is time for new ways; ways more in line with human nature itself.

I have to say that if this is the future we see before us then we are really heading in the right direction. We are starting to connect and share among each other again, and that means everything. We've needed this for a long time. The times are finally changing.

In the end, that's what really counts. Change isn't always a good thing or a bad thing, but in this case it was well beyond needed and very necessary. The old way of the big publishers and industry is finally over and done. The corpse can now be laid to rest and buried. We are well beyond due for this.

Art will never die, no matter how we might try to smother or gut it. Just like the future will never stop coming, even if we try to ignore it bearing down on us at every opportunity. All we have to do is pay attention to what's ahead, because it could be anything!

Once again, you can find Pulp Rock here. Check this exciting anthology out for ten exciting stories about music, in any way you can imagine. They are all very wild and off the wall. My story is bizarre, but it fits in just fine. You're going to love it.

And there is much, much, much more to come from me and many artists and entertainers out there. We're going to find a way to get across to you, no matter what. Because that's what we do, and that's why we're here.

It might get strange, but isn't that what makes it fun? You never know what's coming next on the road ahead. All I can say is that you won't see anything else like what is coming down the pike. The future is open, but it's also always coming straight for you.

Be ready!

For more weirdness, check out my new book, Brutal Dreams! This is a story of adventure, romance, and horror, in a nightmare world. What does the future hold in endless sleep? Read on to find out!

Fantastic Passings

While we have reached the End of Pop Culture, we are beginning to learn a lot of other new facts about the people behind the curtain of what we consume. Many years ago, many even just a few--it depends on who you are, one got an impression of those in the general entertainment industry as extremely competent people with their pulse on the public's tastes. Those in charge of the entertainment industry knew what they were doing. You might deny having such thoughts, but is fairly clear that many people believe such a thing. 

Or they did, I should say. You would have a very hard time in 2021 finding a normal person who not only thinks such a thing, but also willingly consumes modern mainstream entertainment. We aren't in the 1980s anymore, and most everyone knows this now. The people in charge have no idea what they're doing.

When you look at a present that isn't all it could be, you tend to have two different reactions. You either decide to reexamine the past to see where things went wrong, or you ignore it by charging blindly into the future and believing things will work out because that's how Progress works. Reality has taught us the latter never works, especially after the failure of the 20th century, but no one in the mainstream is willing to attempt the former as of now, which leaves the rest of us going elsewhere. It is no wonder, even despite a pandemic, no one is willing to pay money for their products.

The last few years of the entertainment industry's death rattles should have obliterated any remaining sense of wonder about how the sausage is made. The structure was built on shifting sand and sinks deeper every day. Despite this, there is an entire class of creator and customer that demands building on this safety hazard even as it crumbles and sinks into the pit. Until this crowd is finally ignored, larger issues will never get fixed.

The death of Fanaticism will only lead to better art, but not until we put things where they belong and treat them as they truly are. Only when we stop treating the past and patrons as the enemy can we finally forge a better landscape for everyone.

Everything we built to replace "better" practices, products, and institutions, has already collapsed and is currently in its death throes. Unless we finally eject the source of the decay, we too will be caught in it. these dilapidated institutions must go.

We need to return to better things--things you have been taught to reject by those who usurped said better things. It is time to put them behind you--they no longer have anything to offer you or anyone else.

Nowhere has this problem been more focused on in recent years than in the life and death of the pulp magazines. Ever since the Pulp Revolution started, people have ceased being quiet on this front. If there is a segment of the industry more gaslit than the history and impact of the pulps then it must have been nuked from existence to thoroughly that not a single soul remembers it. And, if many industry types had their way, that is what they wished would happen to the pulps.

You know this is the case because of all the lies spread about those old magazines to this day. Lies made by people who were taught to hate them without even reading a single page or understanding what the stories were even about. They simply needed "better ways" and to replace what the audience wanted with their own junk. To do this, they needed to erase the past with revisionism.

But where did this attitude come from? Why are there so many weird people that hate wonder stories about adventure starring moral heroes where there are no made-up genre boundaries later fashioned by people who had no right to create said barriers? Why do we still use these terms made by people who hate the things they purport to love? Why do we listen to people who hate us? At what point do we look at their failures and realize that we have no reason to continue bowing to them?

Why do we still listen to these types to this day? Especially when we've learned that their "successes" were either illusionary, temporary, or subverted by even worse minds.

This is why the wide-open playing field of NewPub is so important: it offers the rest of us a chance to finally escape the iron fist of the uncreatives and return to traditions that would be lost otherwise. Though times might change, audience tastes never really do. It is only a shame that so many of us have forgotten the audience even exists to begin with.

The big question is whether you want to give them what they want, or force-feed them what they don't. After a near-century of failure, we now know where the latter approach gets you--abandoned by the masses and run by Fandom cliques who in turn will abandon you at the drop of a hat. there is no future here, only death.

Pictured: Campbell "rescuing" his genre before crushing it.

You've heard the common refrain about how John W. Campbell rescued "Science Fiction" from the horrible fate of pulp magazines and ushered in a Golden Age of a genre that brought us to literary paradise. Though, reality shows that the opposite happened. His changes did not increase sales of the magazine, it made the audience base narrower, a fact that didn't change up until the day the pulps actually died: April 8th, 1949. Campbell's publisher abandoned the market on that date, leading to the death of the pulp magazines over the next few years.

You see, despite popular Fandom mythology, the 1940s were not some sort of a science paradise where the greatness arose out of the muck, like in the above image. It was an era of . . . nothing much, really. Just boring stories of Big Men With Screwdrivers, most of which were dropped by the new Fandom audience as soon as there was a new toy to play with. They abandoned tradition which led to the ones coming up under them to do the same.

The 1940s were not a fertile field for success and creativity for adventure fiction in the way the 1920s and 1930s were. And by April 8th, 1949, the ride was finally over.

This date was when Street & Smith completely stopped publishing pulp magazines after several years of declining sales in the 1940s. Why wasn't Campbell's supposed Golden Age reversing this trend? Why didn't they save their publisher from abandoning their market? The obvious reason for this, and one a certain shrinking segment of the audience don't want to hear, is that Campbell didn't create a Golden Age. He was actually responsible for the opposite: a decline.

"Golden Ages" imply many things: an explosion of creativity, audience interest, increasing sales and popularity, and incredible influence over the field. Think about video games from the mid-80s to the mid-00s or ska music in the late '90s. All these factors came together to create an exciting scene that influenced and excited an uncountable number of people.

The pulps of the 1940s did not have any of these things, nowhere near to the same level of the decades before them. In fact, about halfway through the '40s they cratered so hard that it astounded everybody involved. No one saw it coming.

Within a few years, by the 1950s, they would all be gone.

From ThePulp.net:

“They weren’t making any money,” Street president Gerald H. Smith explained to Time magazine. “We just weren’t interested in them any longer.”

Street was also losing interest in its comic books and canceled those, too, along with its pulps.

What Street was interested in then were its slick magazines, Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle’s Living and Charm. After an awkward start in 1935, Mademoiselle had taken off with its circulation reaching 300,000 by 1940 and over half-a-million by 1955.

Like Street, readers, apparently, were losing interest in the pulps, too. Circulation figures for Street’s pulp group show a dramatic drop leading up to the company’s 1949 decision. Through the 1930s pulp heyday, Street’s pulp circulation hovered around a million copies a month, with a peak of 1.2-million in 1935.

As World War II heated up and the United States became embroiled in the global conflict, Street pulp circulation dropped 1940 through 1942.

As paper became scarce and the number of pulps declined on the newsstands, Street’s circulations soared to over 1.6-million copies in 1943. Remember the economic maxim about supply and demand: Fewer pulps meant better sales for the remaining magazines. “In all brackets, the pulps which had been losing popularity boomed in sales,” Writer’s Digest editor Aron M. Mathieu recalled in a 1951 Digest article. “Some people thought this sudden success was due only to the forced scarcity of magazines; but most older pulp editors felt it proved how right they had been all along. ‘The tide swings,’ they said. ‘The pulps always come back.’ ”

The last line is definitely right, but the overall point was correct. Aside from the circulation increase due to the paper shortage, it was only a downward trend. The 1940s were the death of the pulps. A few survived into the 1950s, but by then they either folded like Weird Tales and Planet Stories, or changed format entirely like what Campbell did to Astounding (including changing the title, since he detested the founding principles of the magazine) and no longer being a pulp magazine. The audience interest in the declining quality of the pulps was quickly being turned elsewhere with the better options arriving on the scene.

Times did change, but audience tastes didn't. The sort of television and comic books that became popular were almost exactly like the pulps in intent. Movies, too, focused harder on the adventure element that was being lost by the death of an older form. By the time the 1977 space battle movie and video games came around, pulp returned in full form. Fandom lost, audiences won.

Even still, it was sad to lose the pulps. They could just no longer compete.

But don't think an entire industry of eggheads didn't fatuously rub their hands together to declare victory over the death of this disgusting industry. As ThePulp.Net mentions:

"In an article in the Writer’s 1951 Year Book, fictioneer Allan K. Echols echoes this sentiment. “Pulp editing hardly changed for 30 years; yet compare Ladies’ Home Journal, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post today to 1915! These magazines changed artistically and editorially as people’s minds expanded with the store of more information.” Pulps, he goes on, didn’t."

Speaking of not aging well. Guess what the average opinion of those relics is these days? Meanwhile, pulp influence has only increased over the past few years, storming the fields of NewPub as the OldPub castle sinks into the sands.

The above 20th century mentality of the Progress religion is seeming more and more ridiculous the further we get from that abominable century.

"Jack Byrne, managing editor for Fiction House, replied to Echols in a letter published in the Writer’s Year Book that it wasn’t the editors’ fault that pulps were languishing, it was the publishers’ problems with “manufacturing, distribution and promotion.” Byrne goes on, “The pulps are always dying, as they died for Old King Brady and Nick Carter, as they died in 1930 for the publishers of that day, yet only the form dies. The business of supplying low-cost entertainment to mass markets always manages somehow to confound the obit writers.”"

And it still does. The rotting carcass of OldPub and the success story of NewPub shows as much. But much of the struggle of pulp-style entertainment has always been from many industry gatekeepers, busybodies, and editors, refusing to let it in the door, choosing to instead shrink and eventually crater their chosen industry.

As an example:

"While the pulpwood magazines died, the “pulp”-style story would live on.

"In a letter to the New York Times, Kenneth W. Scott of New York wrote, “The decision of Street & Smith to discontinue the publication of pulp thrillers and comic magazines may mark the end of another era in the history of sensational literature. However, though a waning interest in pulp adventure tales may be the trend at the moment, it seems unlikely that the demand for swiftly paced, stereotyped, inexpensive stories will ever die out permanently.”

"Indeed, paperback books, comic books and television took up the mantle from the pulps. Even a few digests remained after all was said and done, including Street’s own Astounding Science Fiction, which continues publication today as Analog Science Fiction and Fact by Dell Magazines."

The spirit never dies, try as the eggheads might.

But for a long time, pulp didn't have a home. Deliberately blocked by gatekeepers throughout the 1950s and 1960s, locking out an entire segment of adventure fiction ended up warping the field. Sure, while there were many great books in that time, so too was there a lot of drek, however none of it was done in the spirit of the form that brought it success to begin with. And the people in charge were ecstatic over this mutation they caused.

In fact, here is what the death of the pulps looked like to journalists of the time:

New Keys Open Doors For Escape to Romance

We pause in the day’s occupation to heave a few sighs over the passing of the pulp magazines. It is not that the pulps have been our reading fare for a long time. But news that Street & Smith Publications are leaving the field of fictional adventure, romance, and crime-does-not-pay is like a reminder of the fading of youth.

Many is the greying citizen who will be thinking back fondly today upon the news stands of 25 or 30 years ago, and all those irresistible covers that beckoned to an hour of escape into the realms of derring-do and love. Many is the respectable and best-selling author who recalls the start he got in that wide, motley, and insatiable list for which he wrote gratefully at a cent a word.

The world has not changed. It has only moved. There is still a way to momentary forgetfulness of the atom bomb and inflation, but there are other keys to the door. The movies, the radio. and the daily comic strips have come along to charm those magic casements into opening on perilous seas. They give reality to the crack of .44s, the beat of hoofs, the long-drawn susurrations of ecstasy and the sobs of affronted virtue. What cold and crude type can suffice against them?

The lady of the house can get it all without moving from her dishes or the washing machine. Even over the hum of the vacuum cleaner rise the accents of the soap opera; and in the evening the whole family can enjoy it all together on the screen, without hating one another because the printed page is for one pair of eyes at a time.

Before Street & Smith moved to uptown Manhattan into quarters to match the chic and glamorous slicks to which they turned with the times, their gloomy old house was a citadel of fantasy. One by one the old titles were weeded out with changing tastes and demands. A few withstood the pressure of new mediums, but now, with television for all just around the comer, it is too much.

That is an almost touching epilogue for the death of an industry. But it has not aged particularly well. We can offer the same eulogy to what the writer mentions as "replacements" to the pulp industry. In fact, they are just as finished as magazines are.

Television is dead. Radio is finished. Movies are on the way out. Comic strips are on life support. Literally everything used as an example to replace the pulp magazine is over. They are outdated and have lived out their time in the art and entertainment landscape. So what do we do now that they are gone? What do we move on to? This is a good question.

Though the old pulp era ended way back in the 1940s, it didn't stop the industry from attempting to move on to new things. Today it feels like the opposite: as the corpse of the literary industry has long since cooled and begun to stink, OldPub still clings madly to it as if it were still alive with a beating heart. As opposed to the "forward thinking" industry of the past, we now have OldPub refusing to let the coffin door of the past shut.

As an example, Conde Nast's recent play (apparently before they lose their properties to the Copyright Gods) for The Shadow IP is to turn it into OldPub swill for a shot at a few extra bucks into a property they have mismanaged for years now. You can't get much further away from the pulp roots than what they are doing now.

What was once the leading pulp hero, inspiration to many creations of the 20th century, was turned into another brand name. They turned the property into yet another interchangeable bland product by human book-producing corporation James Patterson. In other words, one of the most inspirational ideas of the 20th century has became typical 21st century hack work. OldPub strikes yet again.

Here is a review of this mess.

"Patterson and Sitts have written an exciting dystopian science-fiction novel with elements reminiscent of both the Marvel and DC comics universes, and a little touch of Alan Moore’s Marvelman. With its teenage female protagonist, it would be easy to mistake it for a young adult book if not for a couple of scenes very much inappropriate for young adults.

"We know that the young woman, Maddy by name, is the POV character because she is the first-person narrator of at least half of the book’s 104 chapters. In a rather odd move for an author, all the chapters NOT narrated by Maddy are written in third person.

"Normally I try to make my reviews fairly spoiler-free but it’s not really possible to really get into some of the problems I have with this book without giving away a few plot points so be advised. From here on out, there be SPOILERS.

"The book opens with what in my opinion is its best written segment, set in 1937 and featuring a very recognizable Lamont Cranston and Margo Lane. The only surprise is that the generally aloof Lamont is about to ask Margo to marry him. An even bigger surprise is her implied secret pregnancy. This segment takes up Chapters 1-3 and ends with the pair being poisoned, and yet Lamont somehow having the superhuman will to drive them both across town to a secret warehouse/laboratory he owned.

"Cut to 150 years later and another Chapter 1."

Anyone who has read an OldPub book in the last decade certainly has warning bells going off in their head, and for very good reason. All you need is the above information and I bet you can guess everything to come in the plot, including any potential twists and turns involving the main character. This is checkbox fiction at its most obvious, an OldPub staple.

None of this is The Shadow. There is nothing of the pursuit of justice, no mystery, no wonder at the danger, and the entirety of the cast and setting has been completely written out. If you have seen any of Hollywood's numerous "reboots" or "sequels" in recent years you can already guess most of what will occur and even how the new main character will act and behave. It's all stock and rote, tired before even a single page is turned.

This is literally all OldPub can put out anymore. The "formulaic junk" of the pulps have been replaced with a new formula far more constrictive than anything that has come before. But you won't hear any voices in the industry speak it, even though it is an obvious truth that anyone with eyes can see. They simply need you to not notice it.

Just keep in mind that no one in the industry will ever reverse course because they will never admit failure. It is always the audience's fault when they don't want to buy junk.

"Maddy is described as 18 but as written comes across as maybe 16. She’s yet another of those plucky, rebellious teenage heroines like Goldie Vance, Nubia, Primer, or even Supergirl, who have turned up so often in graphic novels I’ve reviewed recently on this site.

"Maddy lives in a world where the privileged elites have it all and the rest of the world is left to live in decaying slums, scrounging for food and being “kept in their place” by violent armored police.

"One day she gets a letter from one of the few attorneys left in business, saying she has received a mysterious inheritance. Presuming it to be money she can give to her grandma, she hurries to his office. Instead, under the influence of Maddy’s immediately revealed mind control powers, he sends her to a seemingly abandoned warehouse near the docks to pick up the inheritance, which turns out to be a man—Lamont Cranston, his body preserved since the night he was poisoned, artificially kept alive."

I wonder if she can also draw a bow.

Let me get this out of the way instead of dwelling on the other obvious issues with this setup. The first major one is that The Shadow was not about individualism, which is what YA books like The Hunger Games and all of its ripoffs are ostensibly about. The Shadow is about how only when the individual and the whole (The Shadow and his agents) work together can we impact change on a world that rejects Justice for vice. The whole isn't really spoken of in works like this, except as background cattle to be slaughtered for not being the special main character. Modern YA likes to pander to the narcissistic side of its audience, it doesn't like so much to offer characterization. It has a formula to follow, not a story to tell.

The Shadow wasn't a superhero and he wasn't a crime fighter. He was a representative of something higher than both, and as such the mystery around him is central to his character. Getting into his head or explaining his past completely ruins the mystique. I fashioned The Seeker in Someone Is Aiming for You after him partially because the concept of such a character offers unlimited possibilities for potential storytelling.

Unlimited possibilities and OldPub go together like medicine and poison--opposites that will never meet. Instead you will get pages of clichés and obvious turns. Because that is the only safe material they can let their audience chew on.

Anyone who reads modern OldPub works or watches decrepit Hollywood productions knows that you're not allowed to have wonder anymore. Everything has to be explained to a fault, leaving nothing to the imagination except the same cardboard storytelling you've seen a hundred times before. It mirrors their lazy effects being done by computers and never looking anything better than uncanny. And yet they will never change.

When you see anyone slander the pulps for being formulaic, simply mention that they were still far less formulaic than what they watch by spending a monthly fee on Netflix and watching programs that are exactly like the book we are currently discussing. Formulas exist for a reason, but it is the good ones that should be cherished. Not ones that check boxes to make life easier for giant soulless corporations. Pulp is natural; this isn't.

For example:

"Another unbelievable coincidence is that Maddy is quite familiar with The Shadow and Lamont Cranston from years of collecting bootleg pulp magazines and old-time radio shows. Whoa! What are the odds?

"Lamont remembers them, too. He says they grossly exaggerated his real-life crimefighting adventures and he never liked them, particularly the iconic depiction of him in the slouch hat with the red scarf. He tells Maddy he never even owned a hat, which is, of course, ridiculous, as males of all ages in the 1930s wore hats. It was a huge business. Look at any old movie and if there are a dozen men, you’re likely to see a dozen hats. (There is a funny scene later on, though, where Lamont dresses up in that classic Shadow look to crash a masquerade.)

"Maddy is at first convinced this crazy person has just assumed the name of her hero but she does watch him use some of his powers and has to wonder. In order to save time in convincing her, the authors have him use a Vulcan Mind Meld-type move which instills his entire backstory directly into Maddy’s consciousness so she’s now a believer."

Modern adaption of a classic work slandering the source material? Of course. You didn't think we could go without that today, did you? not only that, but stripping all mythology from the character. It is every single OldPub trope rolled into one.

It doesn't stop there with the clichés. Remember how popular the MCU was? Just as you surely didn't think we could go without a loud, noisy, chaotic superhero brawl which goes completely against what the character is known for:

"More climactic is the exciting, action-filled finale. Maddy describes it as like something right out of a Shadow novel but it actually seems more like something out of an Avengers movie, with Lamont (and Maddy) and Shiwan Khan, now dethroned and thwarted, in a knock-down, drag-out, shape-shifting, energy-tossing, fight in what was once Times Square."

The key phrase "Something right out of a Shadow novel" when it describes nothing in a Shadow novel should really say it all. There is a good chance neither of the writers of this book had ever read a Maxwell Grant Shadow book or even listened to the radio show. There is a far greater chance that they might have watched the 1994 movie and took the worst examples from it. Regardless, none of this is The Shadow.

Another possibility is that they just took another idea they had lying around and grafted The Shadow into it. From what the review surmises, that is almost certainly the case. None of this is representative of the property in any way, and yet the rights holders allowed it.

The Shadow IP was an afterthought to this entire story.

"And make no mistake. When the cover of this book says, “Crime has a new enemy,” it’s talking about Maddy, NOT the Shadow. Lamont is a major character but he’s not the center. The same with Margo.

"So why are they there? If Patterson and Sitts wanted to write a sci-fi novel about a young girl developing various superpowers and using them to better her world, how did they go from that to the Shadow? Neither the pulp Shadow nor the radio Shadow would be among the first hundred or so characters to pop into my mind to go along with that initial premise. 

"And if you absolutely felt the need to use the Shadow, why go out of your way to change him so much that he really ISN’T recognizable as the Shadow any longer? Only a few of the names are the same by the end of the book. Change those and you have all new characters."

They did this because they don't respect either the property or the people who are interested in it. Unfortunately, that's just the way the industry works. OldPub aims their projects at invisible demographics that don't exist at the expense of ones who do and want to spend money. This is one of the many reasons that they are failing.

When this lot tells you they are doing something strange, you can be sure it is never for profit. You can tell because it never results in such a thing. The previous Shadow comic book was such a stinker that it killed the IP for years, all because the people who were making the product told the audience to pound sand. "You don't get the pulp you enjoy--you get my hackneyed manifesto instead," says the modern OldPub writer.

To be fair, they've been doing this since the pulps died. Even before. The audience, the majority, who loves their action and adventure tales of heroism and wonder have been forced to scrounge around in other mediums to get them while said mediums have also begun trying to eject their own pulp influence. The fact that they keep telling you how trash the pulps were, despite their own 20th century literature being an utter failure on every front, should tell you that there is a narrative they wish to sell you. They aren't in it to tell stories.

And why would they want to sell this narrative to you as badly as they do? The attempt to rewrite reality has led to nothing in the industry, still to this day, even remotely approaching the popularity or spread of the pulp magazines. And yet they still don't want you reading or taking anything away from them. They want those old stories buried and replaced with modern swill like the above. They want what they can never have--the appeal of the pulps. They can't have it, because they don't even understand what it is.

What is so dangerous about simple pulp fiction that leads the entire world of OldPub and Hollywood to want to wipe it out? Why do they still insist on subverting and wrecking old properties that haven't even been commercially viable in years thanks to their own meddling? Why can't they move on and do new things instead?

And how are they going to handle that pulp-inspired fiction is going to outlive their attempts at subverting old brands? Doesn't it bring into focus how backwards this might all have been? Perhaps OldPub really has no idea what they are doing.

There are many questions, but they all come to the same conclusion. In the end, Truth always comes out on top. Pulp is truth; slicks are not.

Let us look at one more article from the above link on the death of pulp magazines:

The Pulpers and Literature

In using the word “literature” in connection with writings to be preserved, people normally think of culture and intellect. But the word also means specifically the collective literary works or the preserved writings of an era, a nation or a people. In the latter senses American pulp magazines, the “cheap” publications on paper often rougher than newsprint, are part of the literature of this nation, ami its people, and specifically are part of the literature of current generations — present, immediately past, and perhaps in the near future.

Originals of the Nick Carter series and of the Horatio Alger series are more valuable in dollars and cents than some books published a century or more ago; this coming from the rarity of the document rather than from its content, as a rule. For nearly a century, a major portion of American literary diet has come not only from pulp magazines, but from one firm publishing them — Street & Smith. So, it is with varying feelings that we read that Street & Smith no longer will publish “pulpers” but will confine itself to slicks — slick paper productions which may or may not be of any greater cultural quality than the pulps.

But, though the content of most of the pulps always has been trash from the cultural viewpoint, it is fact that quite a few cultural gems first were printed in these quick-sale and catch-penny magazines. And, many an author whose later productions gained cultural recognition earned a living writing pulp trash while climbing the ladder of culture — or perhaps “success” would be a better word. Some of the big salaried writers of Hollywood and some of the modern authors whose works are looked on as more than passing fancy never could have stayed in the literary game long enough to write worthwhile things or to gain material success but for the small sums gathered in writing for pulp magazines through their early years of literary effort.

In years past, we have known young men and young women who wrote for half a dozen or more pulp magazines simultaneously, under half a dozen or more pen names, or sometimes under several pen names for a single magazine. One name would be used for love-mush stories, one for westerns, one for detective stories, and so on. We have read letters from pulp readers to the publishers saying that “Sheila Sheilcross” was the only woman writer in the world who really understood the emotions of young girls, and others saying that “Norcross Madre” must have roamed the Seven Seas and all the lands between, so broad was the scope of his thrilling adventure stories; and we have seen a young man, half starving in a Greenwich Village attic, hastily searching encyclopedias for material to use in his “Norcross Madre” stories and reading newspaper advice to the lovelorn columns to get material for the love-mush type, the same young man writing under both names and in two very different fields.

Once, we joined a “Literary Factory” — a group of young Chicago reporters who decided to grind out pulp magazine stories by the yard and split the proceeds. The trouble was no one could agree who to write what. Each wanted to tell the other how to form his plot, and when a check did come in everybody claimed precedence on it. This naive effort at collectivism failed completely.

Of course, there’ll be pulp magazines — millions of issues, perhaps — despite the self-removal from the field of the century-old firm of Street & Smith. But, this removal definitely will make a hole in American contemporary literature, and its past productions definitely are a part of American literature — poor, bad, or indifferent. After all, there’s many a dime pulp magazine story that will last far longer in literary history than most of the trash now appearing in the so-called top flight magazines of three times or more that price, printed in gaudy colors and getting thousands of dollars per page for advertising.

And now we live in a pulp world, ready to rule the universe. Pulp never really left, and it never really will. As long as the spirit of romance and adventure exists, so too will the beating heart of the masters. Pulp tradition lives on, and it always will.

The old ways might pass on, as will fads and fancies, but Truth never does. The past is pulp, the present is pulp, and the future is pulp.

It's time for everyone to get used to it.

More stories of action and adventure!

Signal Boost ~ Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You!

Find it Here!

Today I'd like to bring your attention to a new release. Just out today is author and cultural critic Brian Niemeier's non-fiction book entitled Don't Give Money to People Who Hate You, which is about as straightforward a thesis as one can get.

Mr. Niemeier is someone who I have been following for quite some time and his critique of the modern world is second to none. I can guarantee this book is one you will want to read, and at a dollar it is quite a bargain. If you enjoy the posts at this blog then this book is one you are going to like.

The synopsis is as such:

Everybody thinks Hollywood is political. Everybody’s wrong.

You know that the big movie studios, comic book companies, and video game publishers push an agenda. What you don’t know is that the corporations in control of your entertainment aren’t grifters or ideologues. They’re evangelists of a fanatical anti-religion. 

Movie producers don’t ruin beloved film franchises for profit. Comic book writers don’t warp iconic superheroes into self-parodies to sway voters. They hate their audiences with zealous fervor. They want you demoralized, they want your kids propagandized, and they want you to pay for the privilege. 

Nostalgia-fueled habit keeps many of these cultists’ victims coming back for more abuse. But you can escape the cycle. In this book you’ll see how the corrupt entertainment industry hooks its customers, and you’ll gain the tools to reclaim your dignity from the Pop Cult. 

Learn to stop paying people who hate you, take back your life, and have fun while you’re at it! Read on!

Find it here!

Read some stories by someone who doesn't hate you!

My Appendix N: Video Games

Have some tunes for this post.

We are the first generations to consider video games important influence in storytelling. Particularly those in Gen Y who grew up during the biggest shift in the medium stretching from the release of Nintendo's NES and DOS PC gaming up to the release of Sega's Dreamcast and Sony's PlayStation 2. The reach is quite great and the most the medium has changed before or since.

Since my generation spans being born from about 1980 to 1990, it means all of us came of age when Nintendo was still a cultural force (which it has been off and on since) being that the NES burst onto the scene in 1985 and were kings in the scene until around the release of the Gamecube in 2001. At the same time Sega and the Genesis and its attachments, the arcades, the coming of the PlayStation, and PC gaming's meteoric rise, were all at their peak through the same time period.

If you can find me someone born in the '80s in the west and was not somehow influenced by video games they are probably either lying or were sheltered in a way that would make the moral majority weep with envy. You knew about video games back then. They were mainstream more than they are now.

A lot is made due of the Boomers and their parents' quest to ban and destroy video games, but much of it is overblown. They had never seen such a medium and as such they made bad calls. It happens. What we don't have an excuse for are members of Gen X and Y currently in charge who grew up with video games trying desperately to destroy them as if they don't know better. As such I won't be covering the tired "banning vidya" arguments since we are far worse at it then our parents and grandparents were, and we have no excuse for it. I'm not going to be throwing stones.

Still, the fact that it was a topic at all shows how big video games became in such a short period of time. From being pure time wasters in the '70s with simplistic fare such as Pong to more involved products such as River Raid or Pitfall! it was by the '80s when they hit their stride. By the end of the '90s they would be unstoppable.

Blazing Lazers

Of course I was influenced by video games. I had an NES before I can even remember and played the original Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt constantly as a kid. I remember the Console Wars (the only good one) between Nintendo's SNES and Sega's Genesis, and I remember entering high school around the time 3D graphics were all the rage and everyone was bragging about them. I graduated not long after Sega left the console business and the arcades were beginning their slow death. To say they didn't have an effect on me would be to lie.

Video games were a way to live out adventures and experience sights and directly interact with them. It was different than watching a movie because you could influence what happened. It was different than playing around with your friends because they couldn't change the rules on you. It was different than reading a book because you could all enjoy it together at the same time. As a result they really weren't like anything else. To join in, all you had to do was pick up a controller and push the buttons.

If you want some examples of my favorite games you can click the "Video Game" tag at the bottom of this post. I've written about a bunch of my favorites here. So instead I would like to go over some genres that made the difference.

There are many to go through, but I'm going to start with the obvious one. The first is the platformer.

Really coming into its own with Activision's Pitfall!, starting with Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. for the NES (and a pack-in for the console) the genre blasted into prominence where it stayed for 3 full console generations. That was before publishers decided to ditch it, not knowing the highest selling game of the first HD generation would be a 2D platformer from a series that originated on the NES. They're still trying to kill their roots, but the platformer survives regardless. It is one of the most important genres in gaming.

Rocket Knight Adventures

The reason it became a sensation is because of a simple premise and understandable goals. In a platformer the player is tasked with going from a starting point to an end point and dodging every obstacle in their way to reach it. This is as straightforward an idea as you can get, making it perfect for action gaming and the basis for much to come.

Platformers aren't far away from Shoot 'em Ups ("Shmups") and in fact are linked by a subgenre called Run n' Gun which features elements of both. For the best example of this you can look to Konami's Contra series.

Inspired by 80s action movies such as the Predator and Rambo series, Contra was one of the series that really helped the fledgling shooter genre find its feet beyond spaceships. It's also a a great example of mixing genres, and perhaps one of my favorite series in gaming. You only take one hit to die, but you fight waves of enemies who are the same as well as giant bosses who make you feel small and helpless. Getting through a Contra game in one life is quite an achievement and rewarding.

But that is just one many series.

The NES was home to some of the best platformers ever made from the aforementioned Contra to Nintendo's own, and still running series, such as Super Mario, Kirby, and Metroid, but there were plenty of arcade-style games in other genres such as Jackal, Gun.Smoke, and GUN*NAC, not to mention the licensed games that were great from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to Disney's Capcom games, to even obscure properties such as Little Nemo, or Yo Noid! featuring the old pizza mascot, the NES had just about everything. Never trust anyone who has bad things to say about the NES, they have missed out on much and have a dark heart. That's not even going into overlooked gems such as Rockin' Kats, Gimmick!, or The Lone Ranger many missed out on.

Double Dragon II: The Revenge

What I should also bring up are arcades. Never trust anyone born between 1970 and 2000 that has never had a favorite arcade game. Particularly up to 2003 or so when the consoles caught up tech-wise, arcades were considered the peak of video games and in many ways the loss of them and their influence has changed the medium for the worse. Games are not the same today.

There was a community aspect to arcades since you both had to wait in line for them and since anyone could drop in to challenge you or work with you it could lead to developing new relationships. Couch co-op at home isn't like this, and certainly neither is online multiplayer. There is something strange in meeting someone you've never met and achieving a goal alongside them.

Because of the fact that the publishers wanted you there in the arcades, the best way to do that was to make the games difficult. You had to keep coming back to beat the games. This is why difficulty is synonymous with with video games and why those who seek to eject it from the medium are missing the point of the hobby. You're meant to stick with it and get better. Why else would you keep playing it?

As for some of the best arcade games, well, there is so much you could mention. From Shmups such as Detana!! TwinBee, Gradius, and Fantasy Zone, to shooters like Gunforce 2, Sunset Riders, and Rolling Thunder, to racers such as OutRun, Hydro Thunder, and Initial D, to fighters such as Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Mortal Kombat, and Street Fighter II, there was more than plenty to play. Genres such as rail shooters mostly died with the arcade as series such as Virtua Cop, House of the Dead, and Time Crisis, have since fallen into obscurity despite how big they were at the time and how many gameplay possibilities they could still offer. I haven't even gone into hidden gems such Elevator Action Returns, The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy, and Boogie Wings.

But my all time favorite arcade genre was the beat 'em up. Capcom and Konami were the clear winners in the genre, though Data East would randomly throw out a bizarre title and Sega had a few of their own such as Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder. Heck, even the guys behind R-Type, Irem, made Undercover Cops and Ninja Baseball Bat-Man. But Capcom and Konami were easily the best at the genre.

Metamorphic Force

Capcom made their mark with the original Final Fight in 1989, taking the Double Dragon formula of buddies taking on the world and simplifying it while making it faster. They released many great games in the genre up to 1997's criminally under-looked Battle Circuit which had a full on shop and upgrade system, complicated combos, and varied level design. The genre had come a long way before it was unceremoniously abandoned for 3D. Thankfully Capcom has at least recently released a brawler collection featuring some of their best non-licensed work from mech action Armored Warriors and the aforementioned Final Fight all the way up to Battle Circuit. If you're never experienced the genre before, this is a place to start.

However, my favorite beat 'em ups in the arcade were probably made by Konami. Their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games were great (The SNES version of Turtles in Time is better, however) but my favorites from them are a bit more obscure. They did some licensed work including the only good The Simpsons game to date, to Bucky O'Hare (developed by guys who would go on to form Treasure), to Cowboys of Moo Mesa, and yet in other genres such as shooters, but their forgotten original work is the Crime Fighters trilogy and it is their best.

The original Crime Fighters is a busted, cheesy game with a draining health mechanic that needs quarter munching to raise. The game has some good music, but it's otherwise forgettable. However, the follow-up, Crime Fighters 2: Vendetta, might be the best in the genre ever made. Essentially a Cannon Film movie starring Hulk Hogan and his musclebound pals, they are a neighborhood gang of good guys who have a woman taken from them and they fight through enemy territory to take her back. The sprites are big and lively, the weapons and levels are inventive, and the difficulty is actually manageable. That this has never been re-released is a crime itself. Then we come to the third game Violent Storm.

Violent Storm

Violent Storm was Konami's final beat 'em up, coming out in 1993, and it might be their best. It takes pieces of everything of the time from the obvious Fist of the North Star-style post-apocalyptic setting to Final Fight's more popular two button fighting controls, to the large and expressive sprite work, but it added its own twists.

Violent Storm's world is both post-apocalyptic yet features Utopian societies bubbled up all over that present more questions than they answer. It has Final Fight's two button controls, yet is far deeper than Final Fight, with smoother controls and more plentiful moves that require digging to find. The giant sprites are some of the best ever made with many hidden inside levels and used for one-off jokes. The soundtrack is the best in the genre, and if you've heard some of the soundtracks in this genre you know that is a bold claim. From cheesy synth rock, to '50s rock n roll, to groovy early '90s hip hop, to surf, to atmospheric beats, it goes all over the map. As far as I'm concerned the genre never got better than this which might be why it was abandoned not long later.

The Crime Fighters trilogy highlights the evolution of the genre perfectly, and two of them are some of the best in the genre. It is great stuff.

Suffice to say there were a lot in the arcades back then. Much of it is still worth playing today. If only more companies were more interested in preserving the past and making them more available many would understand that. The fact that one can't legally purchase Violent Storm and hasn't been able to in over 25 years is ridiculous.

But as influential as the arcades were I would say the ultimate peak was the 16-bit generation of consoles. I am talking about the Super Nintendo, the Sega Genesis, and (technically) the Turbografx-16/PC Engine. If one wants to include PC games that came up during this era (because there are a lot of them), portables such as the Game Boy and Game Gear, and the aforementioned arcade games they can do so. Heck, even through in the Neo Geo. But I'm referring mainly to the consoles that really perfect what the 8-bit systems put out.

Terranigma

Should one every question how competition could ever make anything better, I don't think you have to go any further than the 16-bit system wars. Nintendo's system had a slower CPU so it required games that took advantage of its superior graphical and sound capabilities. Sega's system was faster but weaker in most other aspects, so it used that speed to create different sorts of games. Both console as a result featured vastly different games, but both had fantastic libraries. The PC Engine was more of a bridge between 8 and 16 bit, but its CD technology allowed it to have a unique approach of its own during this war.

To be sure, this is the only console generation where every player had their own tremendous library of games that could go toe to toe with the others and somehow every gamer could still be jealous of the other. Games still had their roots in the arcades, new genres were coming up every day, older ones were getting interesting spins, and the gamers made out like bandits.

It was never that good for us again.

Of course I'm still a gamer today, but even at the time I knew that things changed with the 32-bit generation, and not for the better. For one, it's aged the worst of any console generation. Just about every 3D game from that time needs a remake, and 2D was cast into the trash as if it didn't matter as most of those 2D games look worse than they did on the SNES and Genesis.

It was a downgrade of a generation.

Mega Man X

At the same time the CD format had gone the wrong way from the Turbografx CD being used solely to pack in movie cinematics in a desperate bid to make games respectable by turning them into movies. Even soundtracks began to move away from the excellent Redbook audio from that system to becoming more interested in licensed music and, eventually, wannabe movie scores. It moved away from the strength of the medium.

Nintendo and Sega both shot themselves in the foot with bad hardware choices brought about by hubris over a successful previous generation, so Sony's movie approach started to become more and more accepted and seen as the norm.

And that's why we are where we are today. Games are "respected" now, but they're barely games most of the time. They're glorified movies. Good games used to be common and now they are the minority.

That isn't to say I didn't like any post 16-bit system. The Dreamcast is one of the best systems ever made, with great hardware and software made for it. It was the last Sega system and the last fashioned after arcade gaming. The Nintendo Wii was the best system of its generation with an attempt to actually do something other than mindlessly make graphics prettier and as a result has an excellent library of both big name and lesser known titles, and tons of hidden gems. Both of Nintendo's DS systems were great fun, but their Game Boy Advance was superior, featuring the last stand of 2D gaming and the best library of portable games by far.

But aside from them? Eh, it's dicey.

Ninja Five-O

As for how video games could possibly influence anyone, well, I would say it is because of their aim to allow the player to connect directly with a world beyond their own. There isn't anything like that. That is how they got big to begin with.

For a writer it helps me get that tactile feel of dealing with a high stress situation that hearing a story 

from someone or just reading a book about it just doesn't quite give. It allows that extra bit of connection to the action itself. It also helps the writer understand the value of stakes and effort to achieve a goal.

So yes, video games were a very important part of my life. I grew up with them and don't remember a time I had without them. They have helped me to understand things I might not have otherwise understood and connected me with fantastical worlds and ideas far out of my comfort zone. These are things I never would have imagined without them.

Even though I think the industry right now is in a terrible spot and has been there for a very long time, I cannot deny that it has its place. Video games are here to stay.

Here's hoping we can still say that ten years from now.

The Importance of Being Brief

One of the best parts of getting into the pulp era of writing has been diving deeper into short stories. This is speaking as someone who had treated them as lesser for most of my life. From my experience most people don't see short stories as anything more than tiny fragments of fables centered on teaching a moral with a shocking twist ending, and little else. Most of this is taught in school, and very rarely has the form escaped this impression in the current age.

But I'm not going to be talking about that. The fact of the matter is that if you're a reader or writer and refuse to read or write short stories you are limiting yourself. As author Misha Burnett has said many times, the form of the short story has been where every literary movement has started from before rolling out into novels and then other mediums afterwards. That's self-evident. What I want to bring up is a whole other problem, this one is on the writers themselves. This is about the importance of content.

Without naming names (partially due to memory lapses, I'll admit) there are authors that simply treat anything other than novels as quaint or, at worst, a complete waste of time. So many writers will buckle down to write a 100,000+ word novel but can not be bothered to craft a 20k novella or 6k short story and in the process are limiting the type of tales that can tell. And if they do, the tiny piece they crank out is usually little more than a throwaway. But stories need to be important, not quaint or pointless.

Do not confuse this with ideology. Stories do not need to be about Important Things or Current Year social issues which end up dating it out of the box to scratch the itch I am describing. When I mean importance, I mean that the plot needs to be important to the main character in it.

It needs to be life or death critical. The story should be a snapshot in a wider landscape where everything that occurs is of deathly importance.

I've seen stories that are anecdotes from larger universe series. A multi-book epic pauses for a short story about how the protagonist got a zombie dog. This is what character X was doing during moment Y in book Z. On his day off the main character deals with a problem far below what he usually does and faster at that which sucks the drama right out. None of these are using the format to its full potential.

And outside of those, a lot of authors simply never write short stories at all. It's disconcerting, but nothing new. There's not much in the way of short story audiences, never mind novellas or novelettes. Many writers simply don't have the incentive to do it.

So this is for those who do.

Every word you write is the difference between life and death, Heaven and Hell. It doesn't matter the length. Editors and writers will tell you to trim the fat in novels all the time. This is to sharpen the prose and the plot to make it easier to pierce the heart of readers. The shorter the word count, the closer the ideal. It only stands to reason that story contents should be just as deadly as the prose. A short story shouldn't be frivolous for the same reason a novel shouldn't. The reader deserves better.

Short stories need to be important because those that read them are, as is their time. They, and the medium, deserve better than cast offs and busy work.

Make them want more. They deserve at least that much.

Speaking of which, I apologize for the lack of a post last week. I will try not to miss one again. I've been trying to get myself back on track again after some recent blunders. That aside, as a reminder, the Heroes Unleashed kickstarter campaign is still going and it has doubled its initial goal! If you haven't thrown in yet, you have less than a week. I promise you that it will be worth your time, as I follow the very same rules above.

That's simply the way writing should be, short stories or not. Sharp and direct. Just like this post.