THE PULPS ARE DEAD. LONG LIVE THE PULPS.

Cheap paper.

Lurid covers.

Detectives with cigarettes permanently attached to their faces. Men with swords who regard shirts as an unacceptable restriction on personal liberty. Masked vigilantes working out emotional problems by punching gangsters. Lost jungles, forbidden gods, impossible machines, beautiful troublemakers and spaceships apparently designed by engineers who had recently consumed cocaine.

Pulp fiction was rarely respectable.

That was rather the point.

Pulp Nova takes twelve of the old pulp genres, tropes and archetypes and runs them through a more modern, self-aware sensibility without cleaning away the part that made them fun in the first place.

There is Mythos horror.

Hard-boiled crime.

A Western.

A masked vigilante.

Sword and sorcery.

Jungle adventure.

Post-apocalyptic roller derby.

Psychedelic detection.

Retro adventure.

Science-fiction crime.

Space opera.

War in space.

This is not an anthology devoted to proving that pulp fiction can become respectable literature if everybody sits quietly and behaves themselves.

It is an attempt to remember why millions of people read the bloody stuff.

PULP WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE PRECIOUS

The old pulps were mass entertainment.

They were cheap, sensational, experimental, frequently ridiculous and often written at astonishing speed for readers who wanted monsters, danger, mysteries, sex, guns, spaceships and something dramatic to happen before the next page.

Out of that enormous cultural compost heap came much of modern popular fiction.

Sword-and-sorcery grew there. Weird fiction grew there. Hard-boiled crime developed there. Science fiction exploded there. The masked vigilante stories fed directly into superheroes. Writers who would later become canonical were once filling cheap magazines next to stories nobody has remembered at all.

Pulp Nova approaches that tradition as something to be used rather than embalmed.

The stories borrow the machinery of older pulp genres, but they are not trapped inside the assumptions of the 1920s, ’30s or ’40s. Settings range from recognisably modern worlds to alternate histories, reinvented futures and deliberately retro science fiction. Old conventions are sometimes followed, sometimes inverted and occasionally given a sharp kick in the bollocks.

That was the original idea behind the collection: take familiar pulp forms and give them a more modern outlook and a degree of self-awareness without losing the adventure underneath.

Or, as the author later put it when interviewed by Argosy, try for “the best of both worlds”.

That means you can enjoy the cowboy as a cowboy, the vigilante as a vigilante and the space bastard as a space bastard without having to pretend nobody has written one of these stories before.

The genre knows you know.

Now get on with it.

TWELVE DIFFERENT WAYS TO GET INTO TROUBLE

The collection contains:

• Cichol’s Children — Mythos and weird fiction

• Stain — Detective fiction

• Shanks — Western

• The Black Rat — Masked vigilante

• The Dastard — Sword and sorcery

• Wild — Jungle adventure

• Rink Rash — Exploitation, post-apocalypse and sport

• Mimsy Burogrove — Psychedelic detective fiction

• Doc Osmium — Action and adventure

• Tessa Coyle — Science-fiction detective

• Ace Slamm — Science fiction

• One Man McCann — War and science fiction

That is a fairly wide net.

Cichol’s Children starts with genealogy and a trip from New England to old England before sending the search for family roots somewhere considerably less comfortable. Family history is all very charming until the family history starts paying attention to you.

Stain heads down into grimy British detective fiction, following the sort of copper whose glory days are sufficiently distant that they have begun attracting archaeologists.

Shanks takes the Western and gives you a stranger walking into a country where everybody sensible rides.

The Black Rat goes after the masked-vigilante tradition from street level: a working-class Batman figure in 1970s Britain, wearing a gas mask, carrying a tool belt and discovering just how high corruption can climb.

Then there is The Dastard, a sword-and-sorcery tale with the heroic nobility filed off. Rogues, thieves, prisons and the sort of protagonist for whom “honourable warrior” is somebody else's job description.

Wild: The Dark Canopy heads into lost-world jungle pulp. The jungle contains secrets, some lethal and some inexplicable, including a pale girl running beneath the canopy who may be the difference between survival and becoming part of the local food chain.

Then everything becomes radioactive.

ROLLER DERBY AFTER THE BOMB

Rink Rash may be the easiest example of what “neo-pulp” means here.

The atomic bombs fall at the end of the Second World War.

Then they keep falling.

Civilisation shatters into a glowing, rock-and-roll alternate future and, because humanity apparently learned nothing from the apocalypse, invents an even more violent form of roller derby.

The story deliberately riffs on the old exploitation pulps, including the comparatively coy “lesploitation” magazines, while welding that material to atom-age retrofuturism, post-apocalyptic action and sport.

A reader reviewing the original standalone release called it “a fun start with plenty of action”, which is about the minimum acceptable standard for radioactive roller derby.

One would hope so.

The wider collection behaves similarly: identify the recognisable pulp engine, then mess with the fuel.

Mimsy Burogrove drags detective fiction through psychedelia.

Doc Osmium embraces the globe-trotting super-adventurer tradition of impossible machines, catastrophes and people with doctorates doing things university ethics committees generally discourage.

Tessa Coyle takes detection into science fiction.

One Man McCann puts pulp war fiction into a science-fictional setting.

And Ace Slamm goes directly for space opera.

No apology.

ACE SLAMM: SPACE BASTARD

There are occasions when restraint becomes cowardice.

Ace Slamm is one of them.

The story is shameless space opera, built with obvious affection for the enormous accumulated heap of ray guns, starships, dangerous women, cosmic villains and swaggering bastards which has accreted around the genre.

The author has subsequently admitted that Ace Slamm is probably his personal favourite story in the collection, even while conceding that it may be one of the least successful attempts at the anthology’s supposed mission of reinventing pulp.

The reason given was simpler:

It is fun.

Damn it.

A reader of the original standalone edition apparently agreed, giving it five stars and describing it simply as a “Good little read”.

There are worse ambitions for pulp fiction.

Quite a lot of modern writing would benefit from remembering that entertaining somebody is not a moral failure.

OLD FORMS, NEW ANGLES

The modern element in Pulp Nova is not a matter of replacing everything exciting with an essay explaining why the old stories were problematic.

Nor is the book pretending the pulps were flawless artefacts from some lost golden age.

Pulp was full of stereotypes, colonial fantasies, racial assumptions, sexual caricatures and social attitudes tied very firmly to the periods in which it was written.

Those conventions are part of the material being played with.

Wild, for example, was specifically written with some of the racial and cultural assumptions of old jungle adventures in mind, taking familiar expectations and turning some of them around rather than merely reproducing a 1930s imitation.

That is a more interesting approach than either worship or demolition.

Pulp genres survived because their underlying machinery is powerful.

A stranger arrives in town.

A detective takes the case.

Something ancient wakes up.

A masked figure takes to the streets.

An adventurer disappears into the jungle.

A rogue needs to get out of prison.

A machine threatens the world.

A war follows humanity into space.

Those structures still work.

The cultural furniture around them can change.

That is where the “Nova” comes in.

A NEW KIND OF CHEAP PULP

There is another reason this collection appeared when it did.

By 2013, ebooks had demolished much of the old barrier between somebody writing a story and somebody being able to buy it.

In that respect, electronic publishing looked surprisingly like the original pulp market.

Production became cheap.

Distribution became easy.

A huge quantity of material flooded out.

Some of it was excellent.

Some of it was appalling.

Nobody yet knew which bits people would still remember ten years later.

That chaos was familiar.

The old pulp magazines did much the same thing with paper.

They published enormous amounts of material, most of which vanished, while a handful of writers, characters and ideas escaped into the wider culture and became foundational.

Pulp Nova was consciously written during that transition, treating ebooks as a possible new pulp ecosystem: cheap, accessible fiction without the requirement that every story first pass through a large publishing institution.

There is something pleasingly circular about buying a pulp anthology as a small digital file and reading it on a cheap screen while waiting for a bus.

The paper may have disappeared.

The delivery mechanism has not changed as much as people think.

FICTION FOR PEOPLE WHO GET BORED

The advantage of an anthology like this is that it refuses to stay in one place.

Had enough cosmic horror?

There is a detective.

Tired of detectives?

Here is a cowboy.

Cowboy wearing thin?

Have a vigilante.

Already own enough vigilantes?

Go to the jungle.

Get malaria.

Come back.

Play roller derby after nuclear Armageddon.

Take drugs with a detective.

Fire yourself into space.

This breadth also means the stories are allowed to be different from one another.

The tone, setting and assumptions shift with the pulp tradition being invoked. You are reading variations on a broad tradition of popular adventure fiction rather than twelve attempts to reproduce one house style.

The unifying idea is not a shared universe.

It is attitude.

Stories should move.

Things should happen.

Characters should find trouble.

The reader should have a reason to turn the next page.

Revolutionary concepts, apparently.

PAPERBACK AND AUDIOBOOK

This product is the digital ebook edition, supplied by Postmortem Studios in MOBI/Kindle format.

The collection was first published in December 2013 and contains all twelve stories in one volume.

For readers who prefer paper, there is also a 336-page paperback edition, published by Lulu, ISBN 978-1-291-67254-1.

Buy Pulp Nova in paperback

The paperback is a compact edition, roughly 108 × 178 mm: appropriately close to the sort of book you might actually shove into a coat pocket, abuse on a train and eventually lend to somebody without maintaining an archival humidity-controlled environment.

There is also an unabridged audiobook edition, released in 2025 and running for approximately 8 hours and 3 minutes, using Virtual Voice narration.

Find Pulp Nova on Audible

So you can have your pulp electronically, physically or poured directly into your ears.

The original magazines would probably have approved of anything that moved copies.

CREDITS AND FORMAT

Pulp Nova is written by James “Grim” Desborough, edited by Salome Jones, with additional assistance from Michael Garcia.

The current Postmortem Studios edition is an English-language digital ebook download in MOBI/Kindle format.

The twelve stories span weird horror, crime, Westerns, masked vigilantes, sword and sorcery, jungle adventure, exploitation, alternate history, post-apocalypse, psychedelia, science fiction, war fiction and several combinations which sensible librarians would probably prefer not to catalogue.

Which is fitting.

Pulp was always a mongrel.

HALF-BAKED IDEAS AND BUG-EYED MONSTERS

The old pulps mattered partly because nobody had yet erected neat fences between all the genres.

Horror could rub against adventure.

Science fiction could turn into crime.

Fantasy could be grotesque, funny, erotic or violent.

A masked vigilante could sit three pages away from a tentacled horror.

Writers stole techniques from one another with magnificent enthusiasm.

Out of all that cheap, lurid rubbish came Conan, cosmic horror, hard-boiled detectives, superheroes, modern science fiction and much of the popular culture we are still consuming.

Pulp Nova is a small tribute to that glorious lack of discipline.

Twelve stories.

Twelve varieties of trouble.

Cowboys, detectives, monsters, vigilantes, swords, jungles, roller skates, psychedelia, spaceships and war.

Somewhere in there, something should offend your sense of genre purity.

Good.

That probably means the pulp is working.