For the purists among you, today we have a legit pulp magazine, an issue of Startling Stories published this month in 1947 by Chicago based Better Publications, also known as Standard Magazines. We don’t post these often because there’s a paucity of visual content other than the great covers but we do have a small collection of ’30s and ’40s pulps and love them. We can easily understand why these mags were so addictive. You got fresh fiction in various genres, wildly imginative for the most part, and at a great price—15¢, which would be about $2.10 in today’s money. The pulp era was long finished by the time we came on the scene, but we can project back to that long ago January, buying this in a whirl of adolescent eagerness, running home, reading until way past bedtime with the help of a flashlight.
The cover here was painted by Earle Bergey and illustrates the tale “The Star of Life” by Edmond Hamilton, which is about a “future civilization in a desperate struggle against tyrannical rule by a minority which derives its tremendous power through knowledge of the secret of immortality.” It resonates—tyrannical rule by a minority of the powerful has been our historical norm. And aside from a tyranny-lite era triggered by the black swan cataclysms of two world wars, a flu epidemic, and an economic collapse, elite minority rule is advancing again. How do the people in “The Star of Life” deal with these oppressors? We won’t give it away. We actually read this tale in novel form several years ago with no idea it was also in this Startling Stories. Imagine our surprise.
