Per Wikipedia, for anyone out of the loop: Pulp's definition is more or less locked into its era. Authors will write things inspired by pulp, or try to recapture its entire feel, but it's still a retro take when they do. So what is modern pulp and what do we call it? Or are the box's dimensions too vast now due to the amount of niches that can be continually catered? I'm thinking of supernatural romance, and then what follows is the awkward fuzzy space between erotica and porn. But there are plenty more categories, including most videogame and movie novelizations, YA dystopian number paint, certain kinds of military sci fi/fantasy/thriller, and so on. Spoiler: Successor? So what do we call the more superficial (but still valid) fiction in these modern times? Or is its audience, reach, and quality so diverse that a single moniker wouldn't do it justice anyway?
You're probably well aware of this, but one of the immediate successors to the pulps were comic books, printed on cheap pulp paper in the beginning. There were horror comics, war, mystery, detective (I think), and the superheroes were direct followups to certain kinds of pulps. Superman and Batman both paid more than homage to a guy named Doc Savage, and Batman also mixed in elements of The Shadow and The Phantom. I'd say any long-form series of genre stories that bear the hallmarks of the pulps probably owe their existence to them. Considering Edgar Rice Burroughs, Andre Norton, HG Welles and Jules Verne, Lovecraft and Bierce and Robert E Howard all wrote for the pulps (don't quote me on that, I'm not entirely sure on all of them, but I know some of them did). And of course detective and mystery series all grew from pulp beginnings. I suppose that makes Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators all descendents of pulp progenitors. I would say Harlequin Romance-type stories, with heaving bosoms and dark, handsome bad boys also grew from the same rich bed of fertilizer. But probably there are higher-level stories in all of these categories that don't bear the pulp stamp. Ultimately it comes down to how almost-formulaic they are, how ultra-genre, if that's a term. How shameless. Maybe certain kinds of thrillers and definitely some Westerns. Yeah, I don't think there's any container-category anymore, it's dispersed far and wide throughout culture, including in lots of movies and TV series.
Despite the declining usage of the term, in my view “pulp” stories have been steadily published since their inception. It’s the type of story that’s significant, rather than what material it’s printed on; and the pulp type is timeless. I’d like to note that I differ with the Wiki entry in at least one respect: I don’t consider pulps “low-quality literature” — merely different. I usually categorize a story as pulp if it checks off the following criteria: (1) fits nicely inside a well-established genre; (2) uses easily accessible prose; (3) frequently delivers genre specific “beats”; and (4), comes in under 300 pages. The “easily accessible prose” criteria needn’t always be checked, though, as certain strains of pulp are influenced by Lovecraft and similar authors, and as a result have liberal amounts of unusual, and even arcane, vocabulary. Anyway, I dig the label pulp, and I’ll continue to stick it on modern stories.
I woke with some ideas swirling in my head that I must've dreamed about (don't recall the dreams, but the ideas were strong). Part of it is relevant here— How 'Pulp' something is has a direct correlation to its 'brow level'. Note—as with Thews and Sinews, there's no part of the human anatomy you can find on a chart called the Brow. Yes, there are eyebrows, and there is a brow ridge, the emphasis of which makes a person strongly resemble a Neanderthal. But neither of these terms relates quite properly to that thing that could be called 'Brow Level'. What most closely does relate to it would be the forehead, but really 'the Brow' isn't a physical part, it's symbolic. A thing can be highbrow or lowbrow, and what it really seems to refer to can also be stated (symbolically again) as Book-Smart or... not Street-Smart exactly. Low-brow doesn't necessarily correlate to that (though some lowbrow literature is very street-smart). It means something like unintelligent, but yet it appeals to us in a visceral or physical way. This is what we call Pulp. There are several types of publications/movies etc that are 'above' the pulp level in various ways—smart or intellectual or scientific or literary. Things we might also call Highbrow. These things are considered smarter or more intelligent than the lowbrow, but often they're also considered out-of-touch, they can be too lofty or pretensious, or just not relatable for most people. Pulp is at the opposite end of that spectrum. It's low-brow, visceral, it appeals to our lower or animal appetites, maybe to the desire for rolicking action and adventure, or for soap-opera style relationship hijinks, or it activates the gonads or the fear hormones. Ok, that's all I got. Just a disambiguation of terms.
I want to add that there's stuff around the center of that spectrum too. Mid-brow I guess it could be called, that neither sinks too low (into pure pulp territory) nor raises itself too high into the rarified highbrow atmosphere. I suppose the midbrow is a territory I like personally quite a bit, and that I aim for in much of my own efforts. It can appeal to both our higher and lower instincts, hopefully without alienating the other half.
Other than length, there isn't a lot in those criteria that set them apart from what we call genre fiction. Something is missing. I don't think modern pulp evolves within its genres in the same way other fiction does. It's substantially less self-conscious IMO. Xoic's on to something with 'shameless.' Shamelessness isn't necessarily bad, especially if the shame is supposed to come from possibly unfounded cultural pretension.* I agree about quality not being the best term, which is why I landed on 'superficial.' But even then it felt reductive when I wrote it. *Cerebral as a presented trait can exist independently of theme complexity. And it doesn't have to follow that reading a renowned novel means someone actually spent any time thinking about it. At a certain point, 'book' and 'smart' were subject to an arranged marriage. Naturally the two are sometimes sleeping in separate rooms, merely putting on a brave face for the neighbourhood. I never considered it. Only learned about it in the article. It makes sense, of course. Well that's a complicated place to go. There's the bell curve, but like the surface of Earth, it can be hard to gauge where you are when you're on it. And then different dimensions come into play, and I'm tired just thinking about it.
I think it basically is genre fiction, but not all genre fiction. It's the stuff that leans pretty hard toward being almost formulaic. I guess even that isn't necessarily true. But some pulp was pretty nearly formulaic. I've read some myself—when I was a kid I stumbled onto a series called Doc Savage that was being reprinted by Bantam in paperback form, and I loved it. Bought quite a few of them, and after a while I noticed they all seemed kind of the same. Then, decades later, in comes the internet, and I learn the authors (all under the name Kenneth Robeson) used a formula created by the best of them, a guy named Lester Dent, who created the series and wrote most of the stories. If you search you can find his formula in several places on the web. No wonder he (all of them) was able to crank out a story like every month! And much more recently I read a few noir detective stories. Not all of them are formulaic, but some of them undoubtedly were. The pulps came out pretty frequently I think, maybe some were weekly, some bi-weekly, and some monthly, I'm not sure. But they employed a lot of writers, and many of them could easily crank out a finished story every week (some of the stories were shorts). I don't think they bothered with things like editing or outlining, I think a lot of them just kept using the same iron-clad formula over and over. But not all pulp was like that, There were better writers, like Dashiel Hammet and Hemingway, who didn't write to a formula, and whose work was often considered really good, like too good for the pulps. I read that Wiki article about pulps a while back, I did a deep dive into them myself back when I was all into Noir movies. And I reached the same point you have, where I wanted to try to figure out what the surviving legacy of them is today, and I also threw my arms up in exasperation, because pulp just is too complex to be categorized in any simple way. But generally when people say pulp they're talking about the trashiest, most formulaic stuff. Just keep in mind sometimes it rose above that level, when a good writer did it and was willing to put in the time and effort (or just had the skills). I'd say there's a pretty close correlation with the more generic genres of genre fiction. But I'd also say (as I already did) that it's so diffused into our culture now that it's become ubiquitous and impossible to really classify anymore.
I respectfully disagree. Just working with my first criteria, it’s my experience that a sizable percentage of genre books don’t neatly fit inside any single well-established genre. And the same is true for my second criteria. Add in the page limit and a distinctive story category takes shape. That said, it’s very likely that I would consider a greater number of stories “pulps” than you might. I suspect that a substantial amount of the books being sold today with page counts between 350 - 500 would be considered pulps if they were only trimmed down to a slim 230 pages. Perhaps. I haven’t given the the subject much thought, to be perfectly candid. There is one criteria I would consider adding: a prominent larger than life quality. When I consider the pulps I’ve read, I can’t remember any of them having grounded or understated plots, stakes, or tones.
