Empire State and Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher

The cover, sadly, is the best thing about Empire State

We should make it clear from the outset that we here at The Jade Sphinx read a great many trashy novels.  However, as with all things, there are degrees of trash … and I will happily champion the work of writers as diverse as Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Zane Grey (1872-1939) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961).  However, most genre fiction is barely readable, and much of it downright embarrassing.

This is particularly true in two new subgenres that seem to have taken the science fiction world by storm: steampunk and superhero novels.  Superheroes, of course, are familiar to anyone who has been awake and attentive to pop culture for the past 25 years; steampunk, however, may take some explaining.  Steampunk is science fiction set in the past (usually the Victorian era), but featuring retro-futuristic gadgetry or inverted social structures.  One would think that the possibilities are limitless, but, actually, nearly all steampunk is gimcrack stuff.  The overarching problem with the steampunk genre is that its practitioners really do not understand the past, or, worse yet, that everything they know about the past was gleaned from comic books and old television shows.

These thoughts – and others – drifted through my mind while reading two novels by Adam Christopher (born 1978), an emerging voice in the science fiction arena.  His first book, Empire State (2012), is about an alternate 1920s-1930s: a pocket universe of supervillains, lesser gangsters, hard-bitten PIs, airships and superscience.  In summary, it sounds like something right up my alley – I love that era and the pulp fiction written during it, and the book sounded like goofy fun.  I pulled this, and his second novel, The Seven Wonders (also 2012) from the shelf.  The Seven Wonders, if anything, looked like even more fun: a West Coast city full of superheroes, an ordinary man suddenly gifted (or burdened) with superpowers, and a threat from outer space.

Well… both books are major disappointments to even the most cursory readers of the genre.  Empire State is a thudding bore, and your correspondent found it a slough to get through it.  The book is innocent of a single fresh idea, and the situations and characterizations are third-and-fourth-hand: everything is a reflection of some earlier trope, or, worse still, a reflection of a reflection.  Readers looking for an Art Deco romp should go elsewhere.

More egregious was The Seven Wonders.  The book deals with a team of superheroes and how they react when a new, superpowered entity emerges.  It also has a supervillain who changes alliances, a duplicitous sidekick, a moon base and various global threats.  In it is nothing even remotely resembling a human being: the characters are all riffs on existing comic characters, and the story a pastiche (not a meditation, mind, but a pastiche) of comic book conventions.  Complete with four (or five – I lost count) finales, it seemed to this reader like a novel that wouldn’t end. 

The Seven Wonders also has to be the first book in recent memory that uses the word f-ck as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, expletive and gerund.  Such linguistic flexibility may satisfy undemanding readers, but adults may be looking for a little bit more.

Both novels were written by someone who knows a great deal about science fiction and comic books, but nothing whatsoever about life.  

Orange Pulp: The Pulp Magazine and Contemporary Culture

Proving once again that great things often come in small packages, my New York readers could do no better than a visit to the Palitz Gallery at Lubin House, 11 East 61^st Street.  In this small space, Syracuse University Library has managed to cram 61 super-rare works from the long-ago world of pulp magazines – treasures much too fun to miss.  I attended last night with arts advocate Clarissa Crabtree, and the show is sure to please anyone with even a passing interest in Americana or classic pop culture.

A quick primer for the uninitiated: the pulp magazine was so-named because of the rough, wood-pulp paper on which they were printed.  As such, pulps were not supposed to last – they were the essence of disposable literature.  But many, many American pop culture icons emerged from the pulps, including such characters as Doc Savage, The Shadow, Conan the Barbarian, Sam Spade and Tarzan of the Apes.  Writers who worked in the pulps included Ray Bradbury, Dashiell Hammett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, and even world-class crackpot and religious huckster, L. Ron Hubbard.

The heyday of the pulps was roughly from the start of World War I to the end of the 1940s.  They were largely genre-specific, and to walk into a newsstand in the 1930s was to walk into a paradise catering to every taste.  There were magazines devoted to science fiction or supernatural stories, or detective stories, jungle stories, adventure stories, hero pulps and aviation stories.  There even was a short-lived pulp dedicated to stories about airships! 

One of the greatest things about the pulps was the vibrant cover art, well represented in this exhibit.  Several paintings by Norman Saunders are on hand, and they have to be seen to be believed.  Artists worked at breakneck speed, and most of the work created for the pulps no longer exists.  But it is not scarcity alone that makes this exhibit worthwhile -- the pulps were often lurid, but they were lurid to an almost lyrical degree, and much of the work (both art and prose) attains a status of near-poetry.

Also on hand: rare letters from a young writer named Ray Bradbury, still trying to break into the business; a table devoted to The Shadow (the greatest creation of the pulps), including rare radio scripts, advertising posters, the first issue of the magazine, and an Orson Welles radio show playing on a continuous loop; a payment stub for H.P. Lovecraft for his story At the Mountain of Madness, naming Julie Schwartz (of later comic book fame) as his agent; and a copy of Weird Tales containing the first published fiction of Tennessee Williams.

This exhibit runs through April 12, and gallery hours are Monday to Friday 10 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.  Admission is free.