I'm going to talk a little bit about writing style today—not only because it's something that all of us should think about when reading in general, but in particular since it's something I think we should mull over when reading classics from the Planet Stories library. Writing styles change over time, some of them seemingly eternal, others appearing one moment only to flitter into oblivion in the next as the winds of fashion shift. A thousand cultural variables account for such changes, and its my view that no single stylistic element is by itself better or worse than another. It all depends on how that element adds to the story being told.
I have a graduate background in writing fiction, but I was lucky enough to be in one of the few programs out there that didn't turn up its nose at genre. And while I was in school, we talked a lot about what it took to make a classic. Why was one book considered a classic, and another not? The best answer I heard was Time. Because Dickens and Twain certainly weren't thinking of writing literary masterpieces, at least no more than any author takes pride in the crafting of words. No, they wrote for a popular audience, their works by-and-large considered entertainment fiction by their contemporaries.
Now the classic science fiction and fantasy adventures we gleefully resurrect at Planet Stories aren't written in today's styles. But there's a life in them, a sheer exuberance of derring-do, that I often find missing in contemporary fiction. Not that there isn't amazing stuff being written today—there will be as many classics written this year as there were in 1939. But I think as we go through these turbulent times of ours, we can benefit from the experience of another time of troubles, a time when rocket ships roared out of spaceports of the imagination, or when a rapier, quick wit, and a smile might win freedom for an entire planet. So try out some Brackett, some Kline, or some Moore and join us on our adventure. After all, adventure is part of the human spirit—it never goes out of style.
The paths to our most cherished obsessions take on many varied forms. For me, one such passion is reading science fiction and fantasy from an older, often more spirit-soaring, freewheeling era. My Yellow Brick Road to the type of pulps we publish at Planet Stories began at an early age with an uncle bequeathing to me a longstanding love of Edgar Rice Burroughs's works. Probably the foundation for my fascination with the pulps was laid much earlier, reading H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, although at the time I didn't really realize their novels were serialized in magazines like Burroughs's. And even after I'd read a healthy dose of Burroughs, it wasn't until I found Irwin Porges's mammoth biography, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan, that I first saw reproductions of those splendid All-Story Weekly, Blue Book, Argosy, Amazing Stories, and Fantastic Adventures covers and made the connection between ERB and the pulps.
Then, of course, there was Philip José Farmer. Farmer was for me, as for thousands of SF/F readers growing up in the 1970s and '80s, the mega-gateway to the pulps. And like many, I stumbled across his writings through Burroughs, picking up Farmer's post-modern metafictional masterpiece Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke, and later his "biography" of the 1930s scientific genius and crime-fighter Doc Savage. In these books Farmer proposed his intricate Wold Newton faux genealogy, linking together into one giant family an array of pulp era heroes and villains ranging from Allan Quatermain to Solomon Kane, Captain Nemo to Fu Manchu, and everything in between—and in many cases beyond. A virtual reading list of the "hero pulps," for which I will forever be grateful to Farmer for having amalgamated. If I would have been told back then that one day I would meet the man and edit three collections of his fiction, I would have lit up with such joy that my glowing manifestations would probably have been visible on far-off Poloda (for the as-yet ERB-uninitiated, I refer to a planet in the strangely shaped solar system from Burroughs's Beyond the Farthest Star).
I radiate a similar joy working with Erik and Pierce and James bringing back into print fantastic lost classics of the pulp era for Planet Stories. I think I speak for all of us when I say the task is more than a job, more even than a privilege, although it is unquestionably the latter. Planet Stories is about tradition, about carrying on the flame of the spirit of adventure and excitement and wonder of the type of science fiction that first soared free in the pulps.
But enough said about my road to the pulps. I encourage you to stop by the Planet Stories messageboards and let us know of your own unique journeys to the world of science fiction and fantasy literature. Like the out-of-this-world genre they lead to, they are always tales of wonder.
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