Thomas Edison and the Cyclicity of Pulp

The only thing more fascinating than pulp fiction is the contemporary commentary – condemnation? – of whatever genre it exemplifies at a given period of time, and the subsequent pedestal-perching of said genre by posterity. For this, of course, I use a more expansive definition of ‘pulp fiction’ than is generally recommended.

Pulp fiction (as generally recommended) refers to stories published in pulp magazines, which were cheap, long-running fiction series printed on rough wood-pulp paper.

‘Generally recommended’

The pulp fiction I refer to is more all-encompassing: anything popular, cheap, aimed at a younger audience and ‘sensationalist’. (The last descriptor I dislike as an adjective for fiction; I believe it ought to restrict itself to journalism, where its services are necessary and its application plentiful, but I digress.) A better term might be contemporary fiction, but that flowery ornateness doesn’t quite capture the plosive gun-shotty decadence of good-for-nothing kids-these-days ‘pulp’.

Which means my definition includes everything from Charles Dickens to Colleen Hoover. The latter I have never picked up, and therefore cannot comment on the quality of; but self-confessed literature snobs do shun her work despite it being widely consumed, thereby equipping it with the qualification to fall within my definition. 

‘Generally a sacrilege’

A Ludicrous Observation

Dickens’ style of novel is called the ‘Newgate novel’. He and his contemporaries wrote about the glamourised lives of fictional criminals, and were regarded to be the lowest of the lows of literature (at the time). The final nail on the Newgate coffin – by which I mean its decline – is considered to be the 1840 murder of a Lord William Russell by his valet, François Benjamin Courvoisier, who is said to have been inspired by one of these books. Thackeray, who went to watch the hanging, commented on the subject of ‘Boz’ (a nickname of Dickens’):

Bah! what figments these novelists tell us! Boz, who knows life well, knows that his Miss Nancy is the most unreal fantastical personage possible; no more like a thief’s mistress than one of Gesner’s shepherdesses resembles a real country wench. He dare not tell the truth concerning such young ladies.

Am I equating Dickens to Hoover? No. I lack the adequate actionable knowledge, making the comparison impossible. But one commonality persists: the enormous gap between the (contemporary) critics’ consensus versus audience ‘score’.

In this respect, the Newgate novels are precursors to ‘pulp’, and modern TikTok books are their successors.

The roots of pulp fiction – actual pulp fiction, not my made-up one – lie in “dime novels”: long-running series of cheap fiction often reprinting works from story papers, which ruled from around the 1860s to a little after 1900. Early dime novels were made from newly available cheap wood pulp paper and had flimsy paper covers, allowing them to be sold for as little as five or ten cents.

Buffalo Bill’s Bluntness; Or, A Whale in a Saloon If You Like

Though ostensibly a result of mechanical production over creative efflorescence, the dime novel industry had up its sleeve its own peculiar genius: the ability to manufacture the illusion of inexhaustible novelty from a finite reservoir of plots. Series authors, often anonymous or subsumed under collective pseudonyms, plugged familiar narratives into endless permutations, thereby fostering a comfortable recognition even in ‘new’ adventures. 

The prose was brisk and unencumbered by the refinements of ‘serious’ literature, and lent itself to rapid consumption, a fact well-suited to its the itinerant readership – clerks on streetcars, apprentices in boarding houses, farmhands with scant leisure, and most importantly, youngsters in dire need of distraction. 

Take for instance this excerpt from Buffalo Bill's Weird Warning; Or, Dauntless Dell’s Rival (Red-blooded Adventure Stories for Men):

“What sort of a document is that, Gentleman Jim?” asked the scout, nodding toward the legal-looking paper.

The gambler examined the document and gave a low whistle.

“It’s a quit-claim deed to the Forty Thieves,” said he.

A chorus of surprised exclamations greeted the words.

“In whose name is the deed made out?” the scout queried.

“Buffalo Bill.”

This was even more astounding. Nomad tried to say something, but was held speechless by his amazement.

 All the others were in like case. A strange silence fell over the room, broken only by the rustling of paper as Gentleman Jim examined the deed.

The information given is minimal and relevant. Usually (and I say this quite broadly), prose of this sort would be restricted to more fast-paced sections – but here the entire novel, indeed, the entire series enjoys this bluntness. A picnic scene is stylistically indistinguishable from a gunfight. A tree is never described unless Buffalo Bill chooses to rest under it – in which case we are perhaps informed that it is ‘tall’. If Buffalo Bill enters a saloon to meet a man, there could be a humpback whale in a birthday hat beside this man, but if it does not concern Buffalo Bill, it oughtn’t concern us either. 

The man himself is, at most, also ‘tall’.

I couldn't find an adequately high quality cover of the book from which the extract is sourced, so here is another from the same series. 

If nothing else, Buffalo Bill and his fellows in the dime industry have perfected the art of utilitarian efficiency in storytelling. Every word is pressed into service; every plot is readily discernible; incident follows incident with the brisk inevitability of a well-oiled press spitting out its sheets, right on schedule.

By degrees, this mode of storytelling insinuated itself into the very consciousness of a generation, such that to encounter a new title in a favoured series was to revisit an old acquaintance. It is in such a tradition of cheap yet curiously durable entertainment that the Tom Swift series, an oft forgotten giant of juvenile American science-fiction (from the same publishing house as Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, i.e., Stratemeyer Syndicate), found its ancestry.

Tom Swift and a Certain Fellow

I have read my fair share of Tom Swift. My first encounter with him (Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle, 1910) occurred in my local library’s eBook catalogue. I had heard of the series before, but the Duke Classics cover-page confused me as to whether or not this was an unabridged copy. Tom Swift meeting a “colo[u]red man” about halfway through assured me that it was in fact quite thoroughly from-the-horse’s-mouth unabridged. 

Dear Duke Classics: why?

Stashing away their present-day political incorrectness, one cannot ignore the undercurrent of cheery ingenuity in these novels – thereby making them a covert artefact of a (sometimes unconscious) enterprise, wherein the hero’s adventures serve not merely to amuse but to inculcate certain prevailing ideals. Tom Swift – resourceful, plucky, irrepressibly American – did not spring full-formed from the aether; rather, he is the inheritor of a cultural lineage already much saturated with real-world exemplars.

The exemplar being a certain Thomas Alva Edison.

Edison worked meticulously in the early 20th century towards positing himself as something of a mythopoetic American icon – a “magus of electricity,” the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” even the “Napoleon of Science”. He set about forging relationships with journalists who, in turn, produced adoring, if inaccurate, portrayals of his genius. 

The Reflector, February 1896, is all praises for the ‘Charming Personality'.

He famously leveraged this clout, once causing gas company stocks to plummet by boldly (and prematurely) announcing his perfected lightbulb, purely to attract investors. He even once joked to a reporter about inventing a “spirit phone” to communicate with the dead, only to be taken seriously by virtue of sheer public credibility.

Edison became living guarantee in the public eye that the lone experimenter, via sheer determination, might remake the world. That the Swift stories should reflect this ideal is hardly surprising; indeed, they read at times as juvenile transpositions of Edison’s own self-fashioned legend. 

This carefully curated myth provided fertile ground for dime novels and early pulp fiction. And here we have the genesis of the “Edisonade” subgenre, coined retrospectively by critic John Clute in 1993. It featured a young American male inventor hero who, through ‘the power of science!’, extricates himself, his friends and his nation from the perils of oppression both foreign and local. 

Engines of Dominion

Imperialism formed the marrow of many Edisonades, their pages steeped in the late-19th century mania for “unclaimed” lands and the right – moral or elsewise – of their possession. Inventions, invariably some formidable engine of war or locomotion, operated less as marvels of scientific progress than as certificates of proprietorship. 

Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898), an unauthorised continuation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, renders the conceit in its purest form: Edison, flanked by an international force, voyages to Mars, extinguishes the native resistance in a campaign of “triumphant genocide,” and generously bestows colonial subjugation upon the survivors. 

Fun!

To then-contemporary readers, steeped in the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and expansionist realpolitik, such fictions did not appear grotesque but aspirational – an untroubled projection of the “free spirit” inventor who, unbeholden to the graft of government, might claim the spoils of his genius.

Race is unapologetically reflective of the prejudices of their day. Non-white characters are cast, more often than not, as foils to white enterprise, and their homelands are resource frontiers awaiting extraction. In Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911), ‘unfriendly natives’ of an Africa stripped of political reality are stunned into submission, described as “wild, savage and ferocious...like little red apes” (!!!). These massacres became a recurring theme throughout Swift  and Don Sturdy stories, whilst the prose itself remained largely untroubled by moral reckoning. 

Elsewhere, Frank Reade, Jr. offered at times sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans and went so far as to include an African-American sidekick, however swaddled in caricature. 

Gender did not escape the wrath of the Edisonade. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future, though French and more rarefied, nevertheless contrived its Edison-invented female automaton as a corrective to “undesirable” personality – an antifeminist ‘sub’-text well within the spirit of the age.

So long, farewell

The advent of motion pictures, offering a cheaper and more sensational experience, was the beginning of the end for this format. Few new titles appeared post-WWI, followed by a cessation of new material almost entirely by the 1920s. 

But we are yet to escape the permeation of its spirit.

The Tom Swift books inspired the inventor of the Taser, Jack Cover, who famously named his device an acronym for “Tom A. Swift’s Electric Rifle” in 1970.

In fiction as well, modern science fiction relies on these trusty dusty tropes, because they continue to resonate with an audience. Marvel’s Iron Man is basically a direct descendant of the Edisonade hero. 

Between the eclipse of the dime novel and the rise of mid-century genre fiction, pulp magazines assumed the mantle, their gaudy covers and sensational headlines masking an unexpected degree of cultural influence. Titles like Weird Tales (founded 1923) or Amazing Stories (1926) offered a melting pot in which horror, fantasy, and science fiction cohered into recognisable forms. This ‘juvenile rubbish’ served as training grounds for writers who would later shape the literary and cinematic landscape: H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov.

By mid-century, the pulp idiom underwent a metamorphosis. The lurid covers of Black Mask or True Detective yielded to the pocket-sized paperback revolution, inaugurated by Penguin in the 1930s and adopted en masse in America by Pocket Books from 1939 onward. Genres once ghettoised in pulps – hard-boiled crime, gothic romance, planetary adventure – were re-packaged for mass distribution in airports, drugstores, and newsstands. Again disdain doggedly shadowed popularity; critics sneered at Mickey Spillane or Ian Fleming. But did the sales care?

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Thus the cycle repeats. Regardless of its roots (TikTok, serialised anonymous web-novels, webcomics, blogs…?) the formula remains the same: mass reach, critical contempt, and a readership hungry for recognition over prestige.

Wherever it lives, today’s pulp is writing us even as we read it – inscribing our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our blind spots – so that one day, long after we’ve turned the last page, someone else might pick it up and say:

“What idiots.”