pulp | Karavansara

1 March 2013
by Davide Mana 3 Comments

Prizes and Books

OK, I’ll brag, but not much.
In 2012 I took part in an independent short story competition, called Hydropunk, The Drowned Century.
The competition was for stories set somewhere in a drowned version of the 20th century – high tides, sunken cities, sea monsters.
My story, called Tempi Interessanti (Interesting Times) is set in a Venice-like Shanghai of the 1940s, and features nightclub singing, Triad gangsters, a certain tentacled god and his fish-men cultists.
It was great fun to write, and it won the second prize in the competition – a quite pleasant result, considering the first prize was won by Alessandro Forlani, Italy’s most awarded young SF writer.

The story will be out in 2013 in the Hydropunk ebook anthology, together with the other winners and runner-ups.

In the meantime, I cashed in the Amazon gift voucher which was part of the prize. Continue reading →

Everybody knows about it.

But in case you Missed it, here’s the Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot.

Does it work?
We’ll talk about it, one of these nights.

11 February 2013
by Davide Mana 4 Comments

The Master of Dragons

Henry Bedford-Jones was known as King of the Pulps – the sort of man that writes two novels at the same time, working on two typewriters*.
Bedford-Jones loved Dumas, and if historical adventure was probably is preferred field, he also wrote any other kind of story he was able to sell to the pulps.
A real pulp writer, he had a dozen pen names.

One of the best, earlier finds of this year is the reprints of H. Bedford-Jones stories by pulp specialists Black Dog Books, which complement the meagre selection of stories in the public domain found through the Gutenberg Project and its Australian counterpart.

The Master of Dragons collects the stories starring O’Neil and Burke, two American adventurers that find themselves in the employ of the self-styled Governor of Szechwan in the 1920s. Continue reading →

6 February 2013
by Davide Mana 4 Comments

The Treasure Hunter (2009)

Set in “the great desert northwest of China”, The Treasure Hunter, a Taiwanese fantasy adventure feature from 2009, is a fun movie with some minor drawbacks.

The story steals happily from a number of classics – from Indiana Jones movies and the Mummy franchise (unscrupulous archeologists, lost cities), with major nods towards Romancing the Stone (the shy woman involved in an outrageous plot), Highlander (some pretty Kurgan-ish warriors), the old Army of Darkness (a certain Raimi-esque use of camerawork), to old Spaghetti-western (costumes, sets). Continue reading →