Bringing Back Pulp in the 21st Century

I grew up reading mass-market paperbacks of sci-fi and fantasy books by Ace and other publishers. Fueling my imagination were books such as Michael Resnick's Redbeard, books by Andre Norton, Philip Jose Farmer's Dark is the Sun and The Cache, and the most influential writer in my life, Robert E Howard and his stories about our favorite barbarian, Conan, in addition to other stories REH wrote including the stories collected in the Gods of Bal-Sagoth.

The art of pulp is to create a fast-paced story, setting a main problem for the protaganist to overcome, and introducing obstacles to the solution for the main problem along the way. (see Lester Dent's Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot)

In today's face-paced entertainment scene, in which a movie that doesn't have CGI explosions and gun-battles within the first couple of minutes on screen time is quickly labeled as "slow-paced", I am surprised that pulp-fiction is not more readily accepted by mainstream readers of thrillers and crime stories, and to an even more extent, horror and fantasy fans.

But the times, they have a'changed. Young adult novel depicting vampires and werewolves are still selling well, riding on the coat-tails of the Twilight series. The vampire had changed from an oafish, unbelievable monster, to a more human-like being with emotions. The idea of a tortured vampire was introduced by Anne Rice in Interview with the Vampire in 1976. It took Hollywood over 10 years to get a movie deal going, which in turn influenced the next generation of vampire writers. Everybody and his sister were writing vampire stories, and the trend is still going strong.

Pulp-fiction lasted for decades, and in my opinion died during the late 1970s. I am talking about books being put to print, but were still being sold through the mid-to-late 1980s. Tor and Dragonlance were putting out D&D books, which in my opinion, though considered high-fantasy, were the closest thing to pulp being printed. They were being mass produced, and at any bookstoer you would, and still can see hundreds of titles available by a few authors in the D&D universe.

The fast action of the pulps drew me in, and will always influence the way I write.