Tuesday, August 6, 2019

WELCOME BACK!

It has been a while since I last updated STORIESARESIGNPOSTS. There were moves, illness and financial troubles, but it's time to type more words.

I'm a fan of old time comics, science fiction and fantasy. I've started two new Facebook groups you may find of interest ~ Retro Rockets and SteamPulp ~ for writing projects.

Retro Rockets members and I will be putting together a recurring anthology of pulp SF called SOLAR STORIES. I don't call this "science fiction", because the "science" is based on what we thought we knew back in the pulp era, the 1930s into the 1950s.I call the genre science fantasy because like most heroic fantasy it is set in a distant realm somewhere in time and space ~ a realm that never was and can't exist given what we now know.

The setting for most of the stories is the Solar system, but not the Solar system as it is. This is the Solar system that real scientists speculated it might be, back then. All nine planets are inhabitable and inhabited. Mars in its red deserts hides the ruins of an ancient and mighty civilization. Venus is part world-ocean and part jungled swamplands, where fearsome beasts including lizard men and dinosaurs lurk.

You can get anywhere in the system in hours, days at most, in rocket ships from small personal cruisers to huge passenger liners ~ but the asteroid lanes are infested with pirates. Ray guns, disintigrators, tractor beams and paralysis guns are the weapons of the day, and communications between planets are instantaneous.