A PULP Preface, 2.0

PULPable is where the many points on the graph of cultural modernity bubble just beneath the surface of popular culture.
If you’re wondering exactly what I’m talking about, then you should go immediately and read A PULP Manifesto, but if your attention span is better suited to Lois  & Clark than to Nietzschean “Supermen” then you [...]

PULP Prophets: Philip K. Dick, Battlestar Galactica & Sci-Fi

“Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.” – Rod Serling

In flashback to a much unchanged Edward James Olmos, wires and suckers taped to Bill Adama’s body send unreliable responses to a polygraph machine. The operator asks “are you a Cylon?” In the context of the audience’s chronology not a [...]

PULP People: Obama, Warhol & American Secularism

Every line means something Jean-Michel Basquiat

As Barack Obama accepts his new role on behalf of the American people and God, I ask you: What would Andy Warhol do? As jocular an opener as that may be, it hopefully leads the reader to assume a particular amount of PULPable’s tongue is today firmly in-cheek. Academic treatises [...]

PULP Pictures: B0dy M0ds #002

B0dy M0ds is a new weekly web-comic about sci-fi body modification and relationships, from PULPable contributor Jacob Z. Clinton
Click on the strip to enlarge.

PULP Pictures: B0dy M0ds #001

B0dy M0ds is a new weekly web-comic about sci-fi body modification and relationships, from PULPable contributor Jacob Z. Clinton
Click on the strip to enlarge. Go to www.bodymods.wordpress.com for more.

A PULP Manifesto, Version 2.0

Go to A Pulp Manifesto, Version 1.0 to see how it all started.
LIKE THE BEST LITERARY FICTION, THE BEST PULP FICTION has had a profound impact on both the content and the texture of the arts in the Twentieth Century and beyond. The original Pulps grew out of their Nineteenth Century predecessors, converging at the [...]

PULP Precedents: Putting the Detective into Detective Fiction

Part psychoanalyst and part physical detection, part author of his own tale and part a product of his own time, the Detective has long been a symbol for the modern era of science, justice and the search for meaning in an increasingly anarchic world.
The Detective archetype also plays a pivotal role in some of the [...]

A PULP Manifesto

What is Pulp? Mass entertainment, or something more specific perhaps, such as film or television? If a comic book is Pulp, does that mean a novel cannot be? Does Pulp still thrive, or was it just folly for the Raymond Chandlers, Andy Warhols and superheroes of the world?
‘Pulps’ were the younger, spottier and less refined [...]

PULP Pictures: Alan Moore & “V for Vendetta”

To some degree you have to kind of create a credible world in all of its detail when you’re writing something, which means that you have to have at least a slender grasp upon what the real world is like, the engineering of human personalities.—Alan Moore
 
The urge to write is something which few people manage [...]

PULP Authority: Shakespeare & Joyce

Where Shakespeare wrote symphonies of words, Joyce was the avant-garde jazz musician improvising on his main themes.

Or, Shaksper. Or Shake-speare. Or Shakspear. Like most real people now hidden behind the more Pulp icon, the Stratfordian is rather hard to pin down. The authority debate surrounding his work has been around almost as long as [...]