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BLACK_MASKS
December 1, 2004
Rev: February 9, 2005
Rev: July 17, 2005
I often use phrases like "the
Black Mask school" or "the Galaxy
school", and I forget that some
people don't know what I mean. But why should they?
It's not like this
stuff is taught in
Of the many and school. "Pulp BRAIN_PULP
various magzines Fiction" is just the
that came out of name of a movie.
the "pulp
revolution"... And because of that movie many
people seem to think that "pulp"
A technical is synonymous with "gangster"
development: or "crime".
a cheap (in all
senses)
paper made from
"pulp".
Many of the pulps were
aggressively trashy,
pandering vehicles for
trite "entertainments",
but there was also room
for the occasional editor
with a higher concept, The focus of the pulps was
someone with a vision that literally anything that would
danced between the sell, (and that they could get
distinction between high away with selling).
and low literature that
seemed like such an Airwar!
impenetrable barrier in Romance!
those days. Detective!
Spicey!
Occult!
Railroad stories!
The history of the
comic book hero clearly The effect of new media:
stretches back into the (1) uncertainty of formula
world of pulp (2) explosion of diversity
magazines, where masked
vigilantes of various Cracks in the wall.
sorts -- most famously
The Shadow -- waged
their illegal War on
Crime.
The "Black Mask" magazine was
one of the main driving forces
in the rise of the hardboiled private
eye, as opposed to the old
british drawing room mystery.
This is where Dashiell
Hammett first published, in GLASS_KEY
the early twenties.
The hardboiled reign of the
"Black Mask school" is
largely associated with the
editor Joseph Shaw (though it
was already going in that
direction when he took over;
Hammett was already publishing).
The history of American Science
Fiction begins with an editor named As opposed to the
Hugo Gernsback, a guy publishing European "scientific
electronics porn for radio romances" of Verne
technology geeks, who decided to and Wells.
try his hand at a gosh wow fiction
of the future celebrating fancy
gadgetry through the medium of
terrible writing. This was the
original "scientifiction" of "Scientifiction"
"Amazing Stories". turned into
"science fiction"
A bit later, an editor named John pretty quickly, Some unsuccessful
Campbell took the pulp magazine and there it attempts have
"Astounding Stories" and began stuck. been made to
mutating it in strange ways, rename it something
creating what's sometimes called else, e.g.
"modern science fiction". After "speculative
some years, he changed the name fiction".
of the magazine to "Analog".
Campbellian SF was a complicated
creature, though in retrospect it
is often reduced to one cliche: DEAD_HAND
a celebration of the superiority
of the omniscient engineer, and
the manifest destiny of the human
race.
In the fifties, another voice
emerged, "Galaxy Magazine" under
the editorship of Horace Gold.
Galaxy (in retrospect) is viewed
as a refuge for liberal-left
premises, social satire, and Though "higher literary standards"
perhaps a higher literary is more often thought of as the
standard than Analog. domain of "The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction", aka F&SF.
Edited by Anthony Boucher, and then
Edward Ferman...
In the present day era, the
preeminent science fiction magazine
is Asimov's under Gardner Dozois GENESIS_OF_THE_CYBER-PUNKS
(an early champion of "cyberpunk").
But this is not to say that Dozois is
a figure at all comparable to Campbell
or Gold.
Magazines play a much smaller role
in today's world; and written SF
in general often looks like a minor
realm, the retreat of people who would
be happier writing TV scripts.
But once, magazines were nearly all there
was: no television (though there were
plays, and a little later, the radio play).
Popular entertainment revolved around reading. And live music,
live sports.
The top of the line was "the slicks"
such as The Saturday Evening Post,
the realm of writers like Daymon
Runyan and C.S. Forrester.
Science Fiction writers could
only dream of cracking the
slicks some day (Heinlein is one of
the few who made it.)
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