Pulp International

Jun 21 2022

Aliens arrive on Earth to show humanity how killing is really done.

Above is a French edition of the 1898 sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds, published by Éditorial J'ai Lu in 1959 as La Guerre des mondes. H.G. Wells' vision of monstrous invaders with giant war machines, drooling mouths, and a thirst for human blood is still scary even today. The cover on this is by Italian artist Giovanni Benvenuti, a true master we've documented extensively. You can see what we've done on him by clicking here and scrolling down.

France Italy Éditorial J'ai Lu The War of the Worlds H.G. Wells Giovanni Benvenuti cover art literature sci-fi

Vintage Pulp

May 30 2022

You can make it, honey. Just imagine the future satisfaction you'll get blaming me for coming here in the first place.

This is a dramatic piece painted by Ed Emshwiller for Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1955 novel A Town Is Drowning. Did Emshwiller run out of paint, or is the fact that the town in the background is a mere ink drawing symbolic of its fragility and impermanence? We're pretty sure it's option two, and the result is a very striking cover, with some nice color bleeds as one of its main features.

The story is exactly as the title suggests, with fictional Hebertown, located somewhere in the American northeast, being hit by precipitation from a hurricane that sends the local river well over its banks to destroy large portions of the town. The rains and flooding are over by the halfway mark, at which point Pohl and Kornbluth focus on various aspects of social collapse, from infrastructure breakdown to looting.

Disaster-triggered social regression has been written many, many times. Some of the best efforts along those lines kill the soul to even read. A Town Is Drowning is a decent pop fiction undertaking on a non-apocalyptic but still somewhat harrowing scale. It isn't bad, but we think it's a little too impersonal. We'll concede that the authors' ambitions were to have a large array of people to show many different perspectives, but that makes getting to know them—hence caring about them—difficult. At least two characters could have been ditched to allow others to come to the fore.

But what do we know? Pohl and Kornbluth collaborated half a dozen times, so they clearly loved the result. They would go on to much acclaim, with Pohl peaking with the Hugo and Nebula Award winner Gateway, and its sequel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. A Town Is Drowning is not on that level but it's interesting to catch Pohl here early in his career.

Ballantine Books Hugo Award Nebula Award Frederik Pohl C.M. Kornbluth Ed Emshwiller cover art literature sci-fi

Vintage Pulp

May 26 2022

Forget Mercury and Venus. Zsa Zsa is the hottest celestial body between Earth and the sun.

This beautiful West German promo poster was made for Zsa Zsa Gabor's 1958 cheeseball sci-fi flick Queen of Outer Space, titled in German In den Krallen der Venus—“in the the claws of Venus.” This is our third entry on the film, though not because it's good. It's because the promo art is excellent, as you can see by looking at the U.S. promos here, and the Italian ones here.

How is the film? As we know, space is a vacuum, which means no one can hear you scream to get back the eighty minutes

you lost watching this. Is it so bad it's actually good? Well, maybe. It was meant to be silly, but in the end you'll probably have to supply your own humor.

The poster, by the way, is signed, but we can't unravel the artist's illegible scrawl. We've included it here in case you can. Feel free to let us know who this is, because their work is great. After three years floating around somewhere between Hollywood and the inner planets, Queen of Outer Space premiered in West Germany today in 1961.

I hope your entry vehicle is sufficiently heat and pressure resistant, Captain.

Edit: It takes a village. Our friend Kevin has identified the artist as Ernst Litter, and now that we know who he is we'll return to him a bit later. Thanks, Kevin.

West Germany In den Krallen der Venus Queen of Outer Space Zsa Zsa Gabor Ernst Litter poster art cinema sci-fi

Vintage Pulp

Nov 16 2021

It's the year 11,959 and everything is screwed worse than ever.

We thought we'd hit the sci-fi genre, since it's been a while, and chose Edmond Hamilton's Star of Life. It's one of the books visible in the photo of a 1959 airport paperback rack we showed you in August. The story concerns an astronaut named Kirk Hammond whose lunar capsule goes off course toward the far reaches of the solar system. Hammond decides to end his life rather than starve in the void, and when he vents the capsule the absolute cold of space freezes him. He awakens in the hot spacecraft hurtling back toward Earth. Turns out he was frozen so rapidly that his cells sustained no damage, and re-entry has thawed and revived him.

He's thrilled to be alive, but when he lands he's stunned to learn he's made a long elliptical orbit through the solar system and returned to Earth 10,000 years after he left. He's immediately caught in the middle of a millennia-old conflict between two races—the Vramen, immortal humanoids who control all galactic space, and the Hoomen, descended from ancient humans, and imprisoned on Earth. At least that's how it all sets up at first. Revelations are in the offing. Hammond is rescued by the Hoomen, but the Vramen have seen the capsule arrive, and their search for this strange object sends Hoomen-Vramen tensions into overdrive, while Hammond himself, as a being 10,000 years old, has the potential to permanently alter the balance of power.

Star of Life has some big concepts and it's spread over a galactic backdrop, but like a lot of science fiction, it's written at basically a junior high level. We had to laugh when one of the characters dropped the nugget: “We made an hypothetical reconstruction.” Here's an helpful hint for Hamilton and his editors. Don't teach your impressionable young readers to talk like knobs. It's not good for them. Still, the book is entertaining—utterly weightless, mind you, but fun in an awkward, haven't-gotten-laid yet sort of way. This Crest edition is from 1959 and the psychedelic cover art is by Richard Powers. Now back to our regularly scheduled grown people fiction.

Fawcett Publications Crest Books Edmond Hamilton Richard Powers cover art literature sci-fi

Vintage Pulp

Nov 7 2021

The search for alien life is over. Just look in the back.

Adam magazine's cover illustrations usually deal with criminals, ranchers, wild animals, runaway vehicles and the like, so what is this unusual thing on the front of this issue published this month in 1968? It's a shlunk, and it comes from Tod Kennedy's science fiction story, “To Catch a Shlunk,” about a bloodsucking alien—named for the sound it makes—that terrorizes a hunter. In form this alien is like a squid, but with four thick tentacles. “It moved with a glutinous rhythm [and had] a band of flickering lights around its domed head that blinked off and on like radar stations seeking contact. With one quick motion its body shot upward and the four legs distended like chewing gum.”

That's pretty scary. As the hunter watches in silent horror, the creature, which seems part organic and part machine, grabs a wallaby, crushes it, and sucks its insides out. Needless to say, the hunter flees at the first opportunity, and thinks he's dodged this creature, but misses the part where it jumps in the back of his truck and rides home with him. Whoops. From that point Kennedy's tale deals with the hunter's defeat of the creature, which is accomplished via unlikely means. In the end, “To Catch a Shlunk” is merely a ripe concept that goes rotten due to poor execution.

But Adam on the whole is as rich as always, filled as it is with more fiction, fun cartoons, exotic factual stories, and great illustrations. Primary artist Jack Waugh even signed a couple of his pieces, which later, during the 1970s, he mostly stopped doing. Will we ever stop buying these? Well, since we've bought more than one hundred, it seems not. They are, however, becoming more difficult to obtain without buying issues we already have, though most vendors are understanding about separating issues from a group. Still though, it may be time to find another magazine to obsess over. We have a few candidates. Meanwhile, thirty-plus scans below.

Australia Adam Magazine Jack Waugh Tod Kennedy magazine art sci-fi

Vintage Pulp

Oct 4 2021

One small film for sci-fi, one giant Lepus for bad cinema.

This rare poster was made to promote Night of the Lepus, and those creepy eyes in the dark belong to rabbits. Giant rabbits. Lepus. Makes sense, right? Stuart Whitman, Rory Calhoun, Janet Leigh, and DeForest Kelly, post-Star Trek, star in what is supposed to be an epically bad film, but to us it was more like standard low level sci-fi or horror (take your pick). The special effects drag down the entire enterprise, but that's almost par for the course when it comes to this genre during the time period. We can imagine the actors signing on and being told the special effects would carry the movie. “Yeah, we've got top people on this giant rabbit thing. They'll look totally convincing!” Well, they don't, but neither do the monsters in 90% of vintage sci-fi.

If we had to guess, we'd say one reason people think this film is so bad is that there are numerous inadvertently funny lines of dialogue, for example when Kelly says, “We've got three holes to blow,” and when Chuck Hayward says, “I'm ready to release the gas as soon as they come out.” But the script is coherent, and the acting is more than adequate, so those two positives alone keep this out of the Plan 9 and Starcrash sub-basement category, as it brings to life the story of scientists and ranchers trying to reduce the number of feral rabbits in Arizona. Researchers Whitman and Leigh turn to hormones to shut off the bunnies' breeding capabilities, but this accidentally causes them to grow to enormous size—and makes them hopping mad too. In short order they overrun the nearby town and all the humans are fleeing for their lives.

Yes, the movie is silly. It's a clinic in the limited utility of forced perspective for trying to make believable monsters, an endeavor additionally undermined by the inconvenient fact that giant bunnies are still cute. But can you really pass up the chance to see Bones from Star Trek ambling around the high desert? And Janet Leigh is always sight to behold, here settling deep into an elegant milfhood, forty five with a cotton candy afroperm that she makes look as regal as a platinum crown. Epically bad? It's bad alright, mainly because it lacks distinction. But maybe you should just watch it and decide for yourself where it ranks. Night of the Lepus premiered today in 1972.

Arizona Night of the Lepus Stuart Whitman Rory Calhoun Janet Leigh DeForest Kelly Chuck Hayward poster art cinema sci-fi horror movie review

Intl. Notebook

Sep 16 2021

Texas legislature finally stops with the half measures and passes law that stamps out all rights for women.

Above: a Paramount Pictures promo image of Janice Logan about to be smashed by a boot much larger than her. It was made for her 1940 sci-fi flick Dr. Cyclops, which deals not with a big man as you might expect, but with a normal sized man who makes those around him tiny. Science fiction movies from the period tend to be a bit silly and this one is no exception, but an efx team probably spent weeks making those boots, so you gotta respect the effort.

Paramount Pictures Dr. Cyclops Janice Logan sci-fi

Vintage Pulp

Sep 7 2021

Zsa Zsa gives Venus va-va-voom in all time sci-fi clunker.

We're back from a spontaneous vacation, and it seems fitting to discuss a movie about the same. We went to Tarifa, but this trip deals with Venus. Once more a cheapie sci-fi flick has brilliant promo posters, as you see above for Queen of Outer Space, which premiered today in 1958 starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, Laurie Mitchell, and Eric Fleming, with a brief appearance from Joi Lansing. Set in the then-distant future of 1985, a group of astronauts are unexpectedly propelled in their rocket millions of miles to a crash landing on our solar system's second planet. This is not the hellhole Venus of scientific reality, but a place with snow, forests, a breathable atmosphere, and intelligent inhabitants—more specifically, babes. In fact, babes in mini skirts and heels, much like Tarifa. And they speak English. And are starved for love because men have been banished from Venus after a revolt by women. Now the world is ruled by a cruel, masked queen. We'll stop there and offer this snippet of dialogue:

“That's incredible. How did she manage to overthrow the men?”

“They didn't take her seriously. [snip] After all, she was only a woman.”

If that gives you an idea the movie is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, you're right. It actually strives to be a sci-fi comedy. In fact, Queen of Outer Space is almost unique in our experience in that it tries to be funny, fails spectacularly on those terms, but is so badly made it's still hilarious. It's the movie equivalent of a stand-up comic slogging his way through a lame routine with no idea he's getting laughs because his fly is open. It's cringingly awful, yet consistently uproarious, as the astronauts

come into conflict with the titular space queen while she hides behind her mask and plans to destroy Earth. Actually, we'll give the movie a little credit for humor—there's one instance when this campfest tries to be funny and succeeds. The three astronauts and several horny Venusians are making out in a cave. Someone notices their campfire going out.

One astronaut to another: “Larry, get some more wood, will you?”

Larry: “What do you mean, 'Larry, get some more wood?' What's the matter with, 'Mike, get some more wood?'”

Mike: “This is one time when seniority really pays off. Turner—more wood!”

You're thinking the lines are unintentional, but no—they're deliberately written to be double entendres. Need proof? Look no further than the next line, delivered by a Venusian hottie, between smooches: “We don't really need any more wood.”

So, yes, it's deliberate. Only a muted trumpet going wah wah waaaaah waaah could have made it more clear. Wanna know what accidental looks like? Have a glance here. Whoops. Sadly, because this is the 1950s, none of the Venusians actually get the ole deep space nine, but the wink-wink implications of impending sex are clear, as the astronauts use their sharply honed kissing skills to turn the queen's royal inner circle against her. While her plot to explode Earth was spawned by understandable concerns that men will ruin the galaxy, to that we say, “Stop her! Joi Lansing is down there!” Defeat looms, as does an embarrassing unmasking that reveals— Well, we bet you can guess. Bad doesn't begin to encompass Queen of Outer Space, but as we've always told the Pulp Intl. girlfriends, if you're going to be bad, at least be fun.

Queen of Outer Space Zsa Zsa Gabor Eric Fleming Dave Willock Laurie Mitchell Joi Lansing poster art cinema sci-fi movie review

Mondo Bizarro

Jun 15 2021

More people are talking about alien visits but they still aren't happening.

Have you noticed the uptick in talk about UFOs the last couple of months? The subject is being discussed on websites like Scientific American and BBC, in the pages of publications like the New York Times, and even in the corridors of power in in Washington, D.C., where a while back Congress demanded that the Pentagon produce a report on the subject. Donald Trump and Barack Obama have talked about it. Retired Nevada Senator Harry Reid even went so far as to say that weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin may have fragments of a crashed UFO in its possession.

All we have to say is here we go again. We know a lot of people really believe in the existence of alien UFOs, but here's when we'll believe: when one arrives, an alien climbs out and says. “Greetings, Earthling. Take me to your leader. We ask because we couldn't figure out which of you is in charge of this clusterfuck.” Let us be clear. We aren't

UFO agnostics. Agnostic would be to neither believe nor disbelieve—in other words to cop out. We're UFO atheists. When the only alleged evidence consists of hearsay, anecdotes, blurry photos of pie tins on strings, and indistinct FLIR footage, we feel safe saying they don't exist.

The idea of UFO sightings being legit hinges upon numerous assumptions. That aliens have the ability to come here. That they have the ability to come here and want to observe us. That they want to observe us and prefer to do it up close rather than from a vast distance. That they want to observe us up close rather than from a distance and aren't interested in disguising themselves. And that their up close methods of observation would be detectable to us in the first place. Think stealth or nanotechnology. We human doofuses already have the basics of those figured out. Aliens would have the capability to observe us by using machines the size of gnats, a far more likely option than soaring around the sky chased by F-35s.

The list of assumptions UFO believers gloss over goes on, but the biggest problem, in our view, is that aliens could learn far more about us from our broadcasts and data emissions than in person. Even our detection and defense capabilities, assuming

they wanted to understand those, would be easier to learn from the math that built them, rather than with field encounters. They could also, from millions of miles away, decipher our languages, observe our many warring cultures, ponder our crazy taboos, note our hundreds of fanciful religions, puzzle over our destruction of the very environment we need to survive, be horrified over our caste systems based on the presence of a pigmenting chemical in our skin cells, and be astounded over the fact that most of the above is true because we've created a global system that elevates and rewards ruthless, dangerous people. Some of those people are smart, but many of them are sociopaths, and all the major tribes of Earth (U.S., Russia, China, et al) are led by people prone to violence. Would aliens really want to bother with creatures like that?

So while we keep up with UFO reporting—as required by our status as a pulp website—we don't believe aliens are the cause. If they're anything, they're advanced drones. But the alien UFO stories will keep coming. We think humans, or at least some humans, will believe even the most outlandish fantasy if it makes them feel good, or makes them feel frightened or outraged. If you doubt that the latter is true, just ponder the epochally sad fact that fantasies about a pedophile ring in a Washington D.C. pizza parlor have had an indelible effect on American politics. In short—people are amazingly gullible. Despite anything Harry Reid says, we don't think Lockheed has alien UFO bits in a top secret warehouse.

All that said, we also do not believe humans are alone in the cosmos. Scientifically, the assumption that we're alone makes little sense. Plus wouldn't that be utterly depressing, the idea that we're the smartest creatures in the universe? We're hanging off a cliff edge like Indiana Jones, groping for a stray tree root to save us as our sacks of gold threaten to pull us to our doom. If nuclear war and global heating don't send us hurtling into the abyss, resource depletion and social collapse will. The system we put in place to deliver prosperity is now eating the foundations that enabled it to stand in the first place. We can't be the smartest beings in the universe. We think aliens exist—but immeasurably far across the cosmos. And if we're wrong, and they're actually among us, all we can say is: reveal yourselves, and please help.

UFOs sci-fi

Vintage Pulp

Jun 5 2021

Little Schmo Peep is such a creep and doesn't know how to stop.

1965's Passion Peeper, for which you see a Darrel Millsap cover above, is another sleaze novel credited to Don Elliott, but allegedly written by future sci-fi author Robert Silverberg. The blurb tells you all you need to know, as a voyeur named J. Martin Crispian gets his rocks off by spying on his female neighbors who live across the courtyard from his apartment. He describes himself as a schmo and a loser unliked by women, though he certainly likes them. Among his obsessions: a blonde who does nude calisthenics every night, a high school aged nympho, and this pair:

They were in a tight embrace. Mr. Crispian watched, startled by what he saw. These two young girls, framed in the window, were unmistakably kissing. [The redhead] began rubbing her hand over the brunette's blue jean-covered buttocks.

Lesbians!

It had to be, Mr. Crispian thought. Two girls who were just roommates or good friends might kiss each other now and then, he figured. But they wouldn't kiss on the lips the way these two were doing. And they wouldn't go in for buttock grabbing and breast squeezing.

That's pricelessly funny. Interestingly, the peeper doesn't appear much through the middle of the story, as Elliott/Silverberg expands his narrative to encompass the lives of other characters. But everything circles back to him, as his spying puts him in the uncomfortable position, Rear Window fashion, of witnessing a possible crime. A clever ending follows, but future sci-fi legend or not, this is mediocre fiction. Silverberg was just trying to pay bills, which we can certainly respect. He later proved he could do much better.

Greenleaf Classics Don Elliott Robert Silverberg cover art literature lgbt sci-fi