Pulp Librarianさんのイラストまとめ

The Fixed Period, written in 1882, is Anthony Trollope’s only futuristic novel. Set in 1980 on the island of Britannula it deals with the theme of enforced euthanasia: citizens must die at the age of 67 to avoid suffering through infirmity and becoming a burden on the taxpayer.

That, sadly, is the weak spot of this type of book. It can be almost impossible to resolve everything in a satisfactory way when you have hinted at so much in the building of an immersive story.

But why end it?

But stories don’t just live on the page, they also exist in the reader’s mind as they read them. And if the reader is on social media the story has another existence in the social web as we chat with other people about them. It’s all very meta.

Algorithms have been used for millennia, but it was the work of neuroscientists David Marr and Tomaso Poggio in the 1970s that made them very interesting to cognitive psychologists. Could they help us see complex biological systems in a new light?

Today in pulp… a few musings on a new type of narrative structure that we’re seeing more and more in the 21st Century: the algorithmic story.

Don’t worry, it’s not that complex. Yet.

It's like when I had COVID and I just couldn't sleep. So I watched Zardoz and Excalibur and then, when I put Cannonball Run on, all I could see was epic allegory and the power of heroic myth instead of Dom DeLuise and Jack Elam goofing about with Burt.

Sin In Space, by Cyril Judd. Beacon, 1959. Cover by Bob Stanley.

Librarianship: it changes people over time...

Julie Campbell Tatham also wrote the short-lived Ginny Gordon detective series (1948-56), although her adventures were possibly less dramatic than those of Trixie Belden!

(The French version - Les Club Des Cinq - were très jolie however...)