The Thing Itself

GE has already started advertising their electric car charging stations. The Nissan Leaf is already for sale. I love being right, even when the odds have been loaded in my favor for quite some time. My predictions have been obvious to those in the know, but for some reason mum in the street and the rest of the media. The electric car is freaking here! It’s going to happen. Good bye OPEC! So long terrorists. Asta, you stinking third world dictators. Our future of clean air and free driving is here. There ought to be parades.

Perhaps not yet. And there’s a good chance the parades will never happen. Did anyone hold a parade when the entire land line telephone business up and evaporated? How about when all of the brake and muffler shops went under? Not only was there no parade, most people aren’t aware of what happened to Ye Yonder Midas.

The story is very short: mufflers got better. They don’t rust out anymore. Remember when you could count on having to replace a muffler at least once if not twice on any car you owned for an appreciable period? Doesn’t happen anymore. Not for ten years. And thus the muffler shops have gone the way of Blockbuster and Ma Bell.

It didn’t happen all at once for the Muffler shops. After all, there were still plenty of old cars out there. But within two years, the bubble burst and they began going away. Each old muffler replaced was with one that would never wear out. And thus the sight of Swiss cheesy burnt through mufflers at the curb became a memory.

No one is going to hold a parade for the sudden closure of gas stations, either. Most of them have the default setting of also being quickie marts, but without the excuse of needing gas, whatever edge they may have will soon vanish. And we only need so many quickie marts. They will join the inventory of empty corner shop space, just like the beeper stores, video rentals, music stores and brake shops.

There will be nothing sudden about it. In two years, 1/5th of all cars sold will be electric. After that a die out rivaling the Blockbuster will take place. Much depends on whether battery tech can be modified for commercial trucks, but the near term survival of the gas station as anything but a tollway phenomena is in doubt. Hampering any switch to electric for trucks will be the price of gas dropping like a stone.

I could go further, but I will quit while I am ahead.

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About the Hard Money and some of the other fiction shorts I have been posting.

I did a lot of these for specific magazines or publishers. Let me tell you, no one is more specific than the small press. It seemed to me, the smaller the print run, the more obtuse the requirements. Given that I have already done the small press, the game was starting to get old. Not that all of these stories are wonderful-- it was just that, over time, they became less fungible. Yes, we are a science fiction magazine, but we only do hard science fiction. We only do soft science fiction, but never humorous. Our response time is not in excess of your lifespan. Blah, blah, blah.

I did get some good criticism back on occasion. But with the stories being so specific, I found very few alternative markets to make a run at. There was one market that was so incredibly rude with their responses, that I generally gave them first crack. In the case of Hard Money, the young lady complained that there was just too much exposition in the front and that she HAD TO STOP reading it because nothing had happened. The real market I intended it for then reopened—and then said it was shut for the next two years. I kept getting that on a lot of submits. (Except for the editors of one magazine, whom I am certain start typing out the reject notice before opening my mailer.) Mostly, I was dealing with a lot of long turn around times, no replies, magazines going under and general bother. I am currently shopping one short story. When that sells, I am done.

Concurrently, the Hil-Gle site and attendant weblog have taken off, in a mucking way. Let’s put it to you this way: I have a better circulation here than most of the small press. And printing here is faster, although (only slightly less) profitable. I really don’t care. If I am going to make any money off of this racket, it’s going to be on the novels.

I think the Hard Money would have worked a little better as a novel. I’m not too keen on the obviously male writer writing as a woman concepts, for a number of reasons. (My not being very good at it being number one.) In the end I think you have to do it 3rd person and in the style of Walter Gibson. I’m not entirely certain there is a place in the market for a Nick and Nora super hero pulp team who battle monsters, but it might be worth a plodding try. (My idea. No stealing.)

At any rate. I have a number of novel projects and game projects to keep me busy. I intend to have web page versions of the stories and the Ballyhoo and Midnight and bad ads from the pulps up fairly shortly. I fear it will be April before I can put things in real gear. Until then, I must plod along as my time and current “lifestyle” permits.

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Next Up: Pulp History Basics

It occurs to me that I have failed to define some of the terms I have been throwing around left and right for these past few years. It’s also not a bad time to disclose some of my perhaps not too apparent biases.

All history is framed. Most histories contain a bias or selective theory. There is such a thing as psychological history and even communist history. Now not all framing devices are equally useful. You would have to do some pretty interesting contortions to pull off a Communist History of Pre-Historic Mammals. I’m not saying that it would be invalid or even disinteresting, but rather that the framing element would draw far too much attention to itself. When it comes to pulp history—the history of Pulp Magazines or Pulp Fiction—the prevalent trend has been towards psychobabble. Or it’s just randomly incidental. Some of that has been great fun, but perhaps the time has come for another perspective which might in some way mimic the way other histories are done.

In art, the histories are finely segmented. There are schools of artists. There are types of art. There are distinct periods. There are personalities: heroes, madmen, fiends. But in the end the subject matter is a singular noun—the artist or a piece of art. Although patterning after art history is close to good, it’s not quite good. In the end, pulp magazines are mass produced objects—a presupposed patronage. They aim to please, in their own weird way. Although composed of several types of artforms, their purpose had very little to do with art. We either need to add something to the framework—such as psychobabble—or we need a more diverse method.

My personal preference is the framework found in Natural History. It’s history basic. You have eras. You have biomes. You have affinity groups of living things. In Natural History, it’s left somewhat up in the air what is driving the change in things. You can call it what you want—evolution or providence. In Pulp Magazines, we have that issue solved. The publishers are the drivers. In many ways, it is the publishers much more than the writers, genres or magazine titles which are the only real permanent actors on the scene. It is they who come in in eras. It is they who have affinity groups. It is they who survive or die in various biomes. It was largely the start of the pulp houses which began the era and it is with the deaths of the last ones that we have come into the present era. The genres migrated to other forms. The writers came and went. Just as dinosaurs are the exclusive defining force of their era, pulp publishers are the reason for their era being. They have more ownership than any other noun.

Just as a main character of a story is the person who knows the most, the defining element of an era is the one whom we learn the most by following. This is why I have centered my historic perspective on publishers. They are the game. They have the most relations.

You may find this focus dubious. I find the publishers to be the easiest pivot point from which to paint the entire canvas. The fact that the majority of them are as mad as hatters just lends spice.

In the next installment I will be defining the animal life itself: the types of pulp magazines.