A friend of mine brought to my attention a couple of anthologies produced a couple of decades ago, where a couple of heavy hitter editors went back and researched some of their favorite old out-of-print pulpy stories and assembled them for ease of read for the new generation to discover these Worlds of Wonder:
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Old-Stuff-Gardner-Dozois-ebook/dp/B00G1FBO7G
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-101-Exploring-Craft-ebook/dp/B00FX7RDDC The dedication to old authors “who knew the secrets I was trying so hard to learn” is what makes this one quite interesting. Ignore the bad rebrand that makes this look like a textbook on how to write, with a bad name and bad cover. The original name was “Worlds of Wonder” as I alluded to before, which is much more apt for such a study.
Modern booksellers don’t know what they have with these rebrands. I posted yesterday, that I thought that Tarzan must be about gardening and sipping mint tea based on this barnes and noble classic recovering of the great book:
No idea what they were thinking!
I haven’t read the two anthologies above yet, but given some of the names involved and the source that brought them to my attention, I am picking them up for sure. They’re super cheap in paperback and you can get a good glimpse about what the Pulp Revolution entails by looking at these stories, a bit easier than reading the whole books on the Appendix N list. If you’re just looking for your first dabble into this world of laser swords and giant monsters to wrestle with on Mars, this is a good place to start.
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