And Then the Town Took Off
By Richard Wilson
Apex Online
Richard Wilson published four novels and a handful of short stories over the course of about three decades. It's surely not a staggering output, but then again, Wilson had a full-time writing gig of another sort - as a reporter for the news syndicate, Reuters.
The Ophidian Conspiracy
By John F. Carr
Apex Online
I'm not completely comfortable around snakes, but I also don't have a particularly intense fear of them. As for snakemen, well, that's another story altogether.
Freezing Down
By Anders Bodelsen
Apex Online
When I picked up this book I had a notion that it wasn't pulp fiction. But since it had the physical appearance of pulp - slim, crappy cover, crappy pulp pages - I figured I'd give it a whirl. Not to mention the fact that since I've left the used book paradise called Arizona (really) the pulp fiction pickings have been decidedly slim.
Flight to Terror
by Michael Elder
Apex Online
I don't know how this keeps happening, but I seem to have developed an unerring knack for unwittingly picking out book two of a trilogy or series. Which kind of leaves me with a curiously disjointed feeling much of the time as I read through such volumes.
Time Tunnel
by Murray Leinster
Apex Online
If Ed Wood - of Plan 9 From Outer Space fame - had ever turned his hand to the making of science fiction television one could imagine the result turning out something like The Time Tunnel. The show, which debuted one night after the introduction of a slightly more influential SF TV show - Star Trek - kicked off in 1966 and ran for several years. It was one of four SF-themed series turned out in the Sixties by producer Irwin Allen. The others - Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants and Lost in Space.
A Sword Above the Night
by John Lymington
Apex Online
John Lymington, who also wrote as Jonathan Chance and David C. Newton, was actually John Newton Chance (1911 - 1983), a prolific author who turned out somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 novels. Most of these were in the mystery genre, but Chance also found the time to write a couple dozen science fiction books - as John Lymington - from about 1947 to 1984. One of these, Night of the Big Heat, was made into Island of the Burning Doomed, a 1967 movie that starred that popular genre movie combo of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
Blade of Mars
by Edward P. Bradbury
Apex Online
When I began this series of pulp fiction reviews I set a few guidelines for myself. Though pulp covers a great deal of ground I decided to stick with science fiction, fantasy or horror novels published in paperback with a page count of less than two hundred. The arbitrary logic here is that anyone who takes more than two hundred pages to write a novel sure ain't writing pulp.
Tama, Princess of Mercury
by Ray Cummings
Apex Online
Of all the multitude of things we have to worry about nowadays, an invasion from Mercury is probably near the bottom of the list. But, as Tama, Princess of Mercury opens, we are informed that, just the summer before, the world was "startled by an attack of Mercurian invaders upon a girls' summer camp in Maine."
The Atom Conspiracy
by Jeff Sutton
Apex Online
By the standards of many pulp fiction writers, Jeff Sutton (1913-1979) would probably be ranked as moderately prolific. He turned out about 19 novels (depending on who's counting) during a writing career that appears to have spanned two decades, from 1958 to 1979. Several of these works were young adult novels co-authored with his wife Jean.
The Cosmozoids
by Robert Tralins
Apex Online
Author Robert Tralins is probably best known for Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, a SciFi Channel series based on his original stories. According to his Web site, Tralins is also the author of 251 published books and novels, written under his own name and various pennames.
