Looking around, it occurs to me that
there’s actually quite a bit of heroic pulp still being published. The stuff that
identifies itself as such hangs out mostly on the Internet, and it tends to be
pastiche — glorified fan fiction, some of it, usually with a 1930s setting. I
could see the appeal of that — not only is that kind of time period an
immediate and identifiable signifier placing you’re your stories in the pulp
tradition, but the world of the ‘30s was a perfect place for an adventurer. For
one thing, there were still new frontiers, new places to explore. The idea of
stumbling across a lost civilization hidden somewhere in a remote jungle — a
staple of pulp stories — seems somehow faintly ridiculous in a world with GPS
and satellite imagery. You’d have so much explaining
to do.
But I rejected the period setting. I
wanted something that lived in today’s world. Now, the pulp spirit lives on in
the contemporary best-seller lists, in the many formulaic action-thriller series.
And in larger-than-life figures like Jack Reacher we see a debased version of
Doc Savage, with all of his natural ability but none of his refinement, and
none of his extravagant altruism. Doc spends his downtime between missions
performing neurosurgery and inventing new kinds of scuba gear; Reacher spends
his digging swimming pools. If Clark Savage, Jr. had been allowed to go feral,
instead of receiving intensive training in all the arts and sciences, he might
have become a psychologically-aberrant superman like Reacher, whose abilities
are nigh-supernatural, but whose social conscience is nearly nonexistent.
Reacher is presented as an
aspirational figure — women want him! men want to be him! — but it’s a
solipsistic, libertarian aspiration. Reacher has no ties to anyone or anything,
he’s a badass, he doesn’t get hassled by The Man. He’s got no interest in
actually making the world better or fairer; his moral sense, inasmuch as it
exists, extends to personal vengeance and a general sympathy for the underdog.
Doc Savage aimed higher than that, and following his lead I wanted my pulp
heroes to be, well, heroes —
thoroughly modern figures, not just aspirational but inspirational.
You wouldn’t think that characters
like that would even be plausible in today’s world, but I found one — on a TV
show about fishing, of all places…
And the wheels, they keep on grinding...
No comments:
Post a Comment