February 25, 2019

28: Pulp Fiction (Amazing Stories of the Sisters of Tomorrow)

26 minutes

If you want to understand how we ended up with anything from Star Wars to Star Trek, Superman to Batman, intergalactic travel to microscopic worlds, profound meditations on the nature of being human to thrilling tales about Martian princesses, you have to look at pulp fiction.

Argosy, Blue Book, Adventure, Black Mask, Horror Stories, Flying Aces…there was a lot of it.

The 1920s and 30s was the age of pulp fiction, the time when genres truly became genres. Science fiction, detective stories, war stories, horror, westerns, fantasy. Everything. All those categories that we use to divide up fiction and film and TV came together in the pulps at this time.

But what I want to do in this episode in particular is to look at some of the commonly held ideas about pulp fiction, and about science fiction more particularly. So here are a few things that we all know:

1: Science fiction was, and continues to be, mostly consumed by men

2: Science fiction is, for the most part, aimed at 12-year-old boys

3: There were very few women writers of science fiction between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the new feminist sf of the 60s and 70s

4: Those few women who did write SF were forced to write under male or androgynous pseudonyms in order to make it in an utterly male-dominated industry

So you can probably guess where I’m going with. Yes, all of these are myths. They’re ideas that are completely, demonstrably false.

This week Professor Lisa Yaszek joins me to discuss the history of the pulps and the many myths around early women’s science fiction.

For links, pictures, full transcripts and more head to wttepodcast.com/pulpfiction

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By Conor Reid

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