Startling Stories on the Premiere of Electro-Pulp Video Magazine!

06. Dec, 2009 10 Comments

Wow. It is finally finished.

For those who have not been following along, getting this first issue out, as rough as it is, has been a beeyatch!

Turns out I had a codecs issue with movie maker.

I screwed around for an entire day trying to get it chopped up into 4 managable eight+ minute segments, but no-go. For some reason one of the segments would just not encode and a couple of the others did not end or start where they were supposed to. I ended up posting the entire thing to Vimeo. There’s still the pause button, so what the heck.

This first installment is a bit rough and didn’t turn out exactly the way I was hoping, but lessons have been learned and will be applied to the next one.

In general summary – the first eight minutes cover the history of the origin of Startling Stories (January, 1936).

The second eight or so minutes cover its editor (Mort Weisinger) and the SF community that he drew from.

The third eight minute segment covers Stanley G. Weinbaum’s The Black Flame – the lead full length novel in the first issue of Startling.

The final eight minute segment covers the editorial and other features found in the magazine.

I hope you enjoy this effort and I’d appreciate commentary and suggestions.

Electro-Pulp Video Magazine Vol 1, No 1 from steve davidson on Vimeo.

Thanks ought to go out to Phil Stevenson-Payne for use of some of his imagery (www.philsp.com), and several other websites devoted to the pulp SF magazines.

Below – the cover of Startling and several of the other magazines mentioned in the show

startling 1939 titlescience wonder titlescience and invention all scientific fiction numberfantastic story titlefantastic story quarterly titleelectrical experimenter1914amazing stories titleair wonder titlewonder stories titlethrilling wonder titlestartling 1955 longest title

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art, fandom, magazines, science fiction

10 Responses to “Startling Stories on the Premiere of Electro-Pulp Video Magazine!”

  1. Jerry 06. Dec, 2009 at 11:49 pm

    It was well worth the wait. I especially liked the letter column. I don’t think I’ve heard the good Dr. Asimov call it “scientifiction” before. Unfortunately the audio got bad for about four minutes starting around the 25 min. mark. Hopefully that won’t be a problem in the next issue.

  2. John M. Whalen 07. Dec, 2009 at 12:00 pm

    Steve,

    Very cool. I’ve been saying over on the Raygun Revival forums that we are in the midst of a Neo-Pulp Electronic Revolution. The proliferation of new ezines that are devoted to reviving or resuscitating the pulp genre is steadily growing. It’s spreading into print media as well, with republication of the original Doc Savage and The Shadow stories and others. It’s great to be able to view the pages of Startling Stories on line and to hear your commentary. Three cheers for Electro-Pulp Video Magazine.

  3. Richard Robinson 07. Dec, 2009 at 3:51 pm

    As mentioned in the email, I also experienced the audio problem, but you know about that now. I’m eager for more. Do you have a rough publishing schedule for E-P VM?

  4. Amy Sterling Casil 08. Dec, 2009 at 1:34 pm

    Super-cool! OK, here’s some more evidence . . .

    http://blog.markcnewton.com/2009/12/03/why-sf-is-dying-fantasy-fiction-is-the-future/comment-page-2/#comment-1875

    (sorry – look at the coverage the guy has gotten!)

    And it’s not very good . . . but . . . I did my best.

    http://asterling.typepad.com/incipit_vita_nova/2009/11/earth-girls-r-ez.html

  5. Amy Sterling Casil 08. Dec, 2009 at 2:13 pm

    Hi Steve – going through the 90-some comments on that guy’s post, identically-titled to yours, I saw you’d already been there. To elaborate on what I think I said elsewhere, I noticed this weekend that the Adult SF/F section of 2 different Borders in the area had been spruced up, with numerous new titles. Most of these were reissues of well-selling authors of the past (an entire Terry Pratchett case, 5 David Eddings shelves, etc). There were reissues of popular titles over the past 15-20 years, most with snappy new covers, and somebody had spent some time with the displays. I saw SF books from Orbit and others that I had not seen before. They might have been there previously, but with the shelves as dusty and tightly-packed with soon-to-be remainders as they had been, they weren’t immediately apparent. Now, there were lots of books faced-out and basically an effort to market and sell. I also noticed that Pyr books recently acquired a number of new titles, many from international writers, many SF. http://www.pyrsf.com/blogpage.html

    This is either crash and burn or suggests a renaissance of sorts. I would never have written SF if I were pessimistic, so I’m going to say “renaissance” beginning.

  6. Paul 08. Dec, 2009 at 7:32 pm

    Steve, all your hard work paid off. Great stuff! Looking forward to the next one.

  7. Eddie 11. Dec, 2009 at 2:54 pm

    Very interesting! I can’t wait for the next one.

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