Site of the Week -- Dec. 13, 1999
efore television, there were the pulps--sensational
fiction printed on cheap paper made from pulpwood scraps. These inexpensive publications caught the public's imagination and introduced readers to such authors as
H.P. Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, and E.E. "Doc" Smith. When the
"character" pulp was introduced in 1931, in which an entire magazine was
dedicated to The Shadow or some similarly mysterious and intriguing figure,
publishers had to scramble to meet demand.
ThePulp.Net celebrates pulp magazines--and character pulps in
particular--with well-organized histories, forums, links, and image
galleries for The Shadow, The Spider, and The Avenger. The site offers detailed bibliographies of pulp-related works in print, as well as user polls--a
recent question was a referendum on the upcoming Schwarzenegger version
Doc Savage--and even a chat room. There's also a series of
fascinating photographs showing newsstands from the '30s overflowing with pulps. (It's fun to see The Spider and
Horror crowding out McCall's and Redbook.)
Science fiction owes a great debt to the pulps, which made possible the
golden age of SF short stories and serialized novels through such
titles as Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction (Analog), and If. ThePulp.Net is a good place to
explore some of our roots.
-- Mark Wilson
Site of the Week -- Dec. 6, 1999
luggy Freelance is a Web-based comic that has the irreverent feel of
early Bloom County and Doonesbury strips combined with a
harder, geek-centric edge.
It stars Riff (a sort of mad scientist slacker), Torg (a freelance Web
designer) and BunBun (a psychotic, switchblade-toting lop-eared rabbit).
The guys fight Borg wannabes, trip through dimensions and build
time machines. When they're home, they kick back, relax and summon a demon
or two to pass the time.
Sluggy deftly parodies modern science fiction--anyone who's ever
groaned at Star Trek: Voyager's energy particle of the week
technobabble will appreciate the humor--while taking on the subjects genre fans love to read about.
The site is easy to navigate and follows most of the standard online comic
strip conventions. There's also a handy viewer guide for jumping between major
story arcs. The only thing missing are some write-ups that explain who the
characters are, but those can be found off-site on one of many fan-created
Web pages.
-- Kenneth Newquist
Site of the Week -- Nov. 29, 1999
efore gray-skinned aliens captured the world's xenophobic imagination,
green-skinned Martian invaders were the principal extraterrestrial bad guys.
Planet Mars in Popular Culture chronicles the rise of
Mars in the public psyche, from Percival Lowell's canals to H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds to Ray Bradbury's tragic, dying race in The Martian Chronicles.
Its creator, David Catling, is a research planetary scientist
at NASA who built the page in his spare time. His brief overviews of Martian-inspired phobia and euphoria in print, television and radio make up the majority of the site, which includes plenty of links to other Mars material. The site's Mars Chronology is an excellent, detailed timeline summarizing major scientific discoveries and public crazes about the Red Planet.
The only Martian craze the site doesn't cover is the current one:
terraforming and colonization. Oddly, there's no mention of Kim Stanley
Robinson's Mars trilogy--in which both ideas play a major
role--although perhaps the novels didn't reach far enough into the public mindset for Catling's purposes.
-- Kenneth Newquist
