Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Pulp Masters

There seem to be few current editions of Dennis Wheatley apart from a couple of the occult novels published by Wordsworth books but such was his popularity that second paperback and hard back editions from the 1960s and 70s are still available at very cheap prices on line.As yet there seem to be no Kindle versions of his books which one would have thought the literary estate would seek to remedy especially in regard to the occult novels.His Conservative views are now deemed politically incorrect which may also be preventing any revival of his works.In the 21st century the horror writer Clive Barker championed him in his TV series and book The A to Z of Horror and there was a television program devoted to him entitled a Message To Posterity.This revolved around a letter left by him in a time capsule in the late 1940s warning the future about the danger of a socialist communist dictatorship. A number of cultural talking heads discussed him and his books in the program.The critic John Sutherlan devoted  a chapter of his cultural autobiography  Magic Moments to his novel Such Power is Dangerous which he favorable reviews.He contrasts him with Aldous Huxley a literary writer who he also read as a teenager.There has also been the recent biography by Phil Barker entitled The Devil is A Gentlemen.There are also several blogs devoted to him .Whether this will result in a revival only time will tell.

Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Pulp Masters.

During the Second World War Wheatley  worked at on secret ops with Ian Fleming the future creator of James Bond.Wheatley  had created his own secret agent Gregory Sallust who is similar in many ways to the future Bond and who featured in a series of thrillers set during the war.Wheatley has his hero meet various real historical persons in these stories such as Hermann Goering and Hitler.After the war Dennis Wheatley continued his prolific output down  the 1970s.His books are exercises in pure escapism within a realistic 20th century setting (apart from the historical).Like most pulp fiction the message is conservative with heroes coming from the upper class and living the good life.His lost world stories are his most fantastic with visits to Atlantis, another to a lost Atlantean civilisation in the Antartic ,a lost civilisation of 17th century English cavaliers in the Sargasso sea and a visit to Mars by flying saucer.These stories are all mixed in with struggles against the Nazis in World War II and the Communists in the Cold War.His chief claim to fame however is his novels which combine conventional thrillers with Black Magic and Occult themes.

Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Pulp Masters.

Way back in the 1960s one of my favourite authors was the paperback thriller writer Dennis Wheatley. I must have devoured most of his oeuvre during those years .His output was prodigious and contrary to received wisdom  only a small number were concerned with the black magic and occult themes for which he is now remembered that is when he is remembered at all.Much of his work consisted of thrillers set before and during the Second World War in which he served as an adviser to Churchill's War Cabinet.He also wrote historical novels set during the French revolution and Napoleonic Wars and the late 19th and early 20th centuries.As well as the Black Magic novels he also wrote novels of the lost world variety which date back to Edgar Rice Burroughs ,Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.I believe on modern creative writing courses the students are advised to write about what you know.In Wheatleys case this involved a year in the Kaisers Germany studying the wine trade prior to the Great War,four years in the trenches, a partnership with a Raffles style gentleman crook Eric Toombes,the Roaring Twenties as experienced by someone in the wine trade invited to all the wild parties,meetings with the worlds leading Occultist Aleister Crowley,marriage to a wife who subsequently worked for MI5 and a place in the planning department of Churchill's War Cabinet.He was also King George the Sixths favourite novelist.

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future.

Topics covered in Philip K Dicks books include parallel universes such as the Axis controlled America in Man In the High Castle but also the Neanderthal earth of Cantata 140,Schizophrenia and mental illness, artificial life forms,global heating in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edrich,everyday domestic appliances such as doors and taxis that talk to you, artificial realities produced by drugs which are controlled by the supplier of the drugs, cryonic suspension of the dead with whom it is possible to have a conversation,The Penfield  Mood organ on which you dial up your moods for the day, a device which produces animated film versions of novels where you decide the animation style ie Moby Dick animated by,Dali or Picasso.A key trope is always the impossibility  of defining what is actually real or not in such a world.A child for example can watch real footage of an elephant and CGI footage of a dinosaur probably not understanding that one is real and the other not.Philip K Dicks world is now our world, we actually live in Philip K Dicks universe ,perpetually asking ourselves the question is this for real?

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future .

During the 1960s and 1970s Philip Dicks out put of science fiction novels was considerable.At the time they were naturally enough only known of and read by readers of science fiction which was still a vast literary field  which had been going for decades.This is pretty much over now as anyone can see who walks into a bookstore and looks at the section devoted to science fiction and fantasy.This is mostly devoted now to modern fantasy novels.The writers who dominated the science fiction field in the mid and late 20th century have largely disappeared and those under 50 are unlikely to have even heard of them.The one exception to this rule seems to be Philip K Dick whose work is still in print and readily available.This to someone who was a reader of science fiction and to whom Philip Dick was only one author among many has always struck me as rather strange.Why Philip K Dick of all people ? ,an author who was so poor at one time he was reduced to eating pet food.

Philip K Dick ,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future

Philip K Dick first started publishing science fiction short stories in the science fiction magazines of the early 1950s.His first published science fiction novel was Solar Lottery published in 1955.His novel a future dystopia in which life chances for the population are decided by lottery was quite prescient .At that time the notion that the state would actively promote the vice of gambling would have seemed far fetched yet it has now come to pass and is taken for granted.However at this time despite his small success as a fairly minor science fiction author Philip Dick was actually trying to become an author of mainstream literary fiction.The novels he wrote in the 1950s such as Confessions of A Crap Artist,The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt and In Milton Lumky Territory among others  are tales of suburban Californian life.It seems Philip Dick was following the same groove as Richard Yates with stories of post war America with its affluence combined with conformism.It seems probable if these books had been actually published Philip Dick would have dropping the science fiction in favor of  social realism.Like Richard Yates he would no doubt be largely forgotten now.Instead the literary novels loss turned out to be science fictions gain.It is hard to imagine Riddley Scott directing a block buster based on In Milton Lumky Territory.The key text which bridges the two worlds is The Man In The High Castle   set in California in 1961.The characters are similar to the suburbans who feature in his unpublished 50s novels.However the California they inhabit is occupied by the Japanese as a result of Americas defeat by the Axis powers in World War II who have partitioned the country in the same manner that Germany was.Philip Dick won a Hugo Award for the novel and after this largely stuck to writing science fiction.

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The men who the saw future .

Pohl and Kornbluth's next collaboration Gladiator At Law continued the vision of The Space Merchants with corporate lawyers instead of advertising executives as the protagonists.The book was published in 1955 at the height of Americas post war boom .However the future depicted is far from optimistic with the post war  housing developments turned into slums dominated by gangs of feral children. The population is  divided into corporate serfs or  welfare drones  with entertainment laid on in the form of gladiatorial games a prophecy which looks all too likely to come true. This vision was one in direct opposition to that for example being turned out for Americans by Walt Disney's Tomorrow Land  for example.In fact the world of the early 21st century has turned out to resemble that of Pohl and Kornbluth rather than Disney.