Pulp Archaeology
Researchers, historians, and collectors all share a common activity: the amassing of collections for a specific purpose. Those purposes vary, but the underlying process—gathering, comparing, and interpreting material—remains consistent.
My own book and magazine collection is organized around pattern and resonance. With sufficient material in a subject area, I can understand it well enough to use that knowledge in applied ways: to create a new but historically grounded story plot, or to produce a new piece of artwork that feels authentically of its time. In effect, this method functions as a kind of time machine, bringing the reader or viewer into another space and time through the sounds, colors, and words on the page.
Creative Reconstruction from Historical Materials
This kind of reconstruction requires both technical skill and historical understanding. Deconstructing vintage materials is similar to starting with a small vintage dress pattern and reworking it for a larger body size. If you don’t have sewing skills, you must learn those first. In the same way, if you don’t understand the fundamentals of grammar or story construction, you cannot rebuild a historical story form from the ground up. Just as important, you must understand the historical moment you are replicating. Without that context, the result becomes a modern story pasted onto the past—visually convincing at a glance, but ultimately artificial, like a poorly constructed Photoshop image.
This approach has shaped both my creative and scholarly work. When I created my award-winning pulp story “Battle at Neptune,” an alternate ending to the 1933–1934 shared-world novel Cosmos, I began by systematically deconstructing the original text. I studied its narrative viewpoints, language, and moral assumptions, and I intentionally set aside modern sensibilities in order to immerse myself in the intellectual and emotional world of Depression-era America. That same process later informed my 2025 WorldCon presentation, “1930s Space Opera: Depression’s Cure.” I refer to this method as pulp archaeology.
Pulp archaeology is the process of examining historical popular literature as material culture: analyzing its structure, themes, language, and cultural assumptions in order to understand how it functioned in its original moment—and how those functions can be responsibly reactivated today.
Visit The Exhibition Hall
Lucina Press exists not only as a publishing imprint, but as a public-facing research space. In addition to selling books, the website functions as a highly rated blog and a kind of digital museum that documents my ongoing investigations. Much of this material can be accessed through the “Exhibition Hall,” available from the site’s main navigation.
Visitors may begin in the room labeled #PulpArchaeology, which outlines the foundational premises of the project. From there, they can explore my concept of Neotopia, a human-centered alternative to both utopian and dystopian models of the future.
The Historical Notes section contains works in progress—focused inquiries that may later develop into Rocketeer podcast episodes, convention presentations, or formal papers. These are followed by the Case Studies, which present completed investigations supported by research data. The first of these publicly available studies examines a rare book in my collection titled Mad Marriage.
A forthcoming section, the Curator’s Notebook, will present synthesized summary essays drawn from completed research, offering a more accessible entry point for new readers. Finally, the Exhibition Hall features a rotating mini-exhibit. The current installation is “Born of Today, Bound for Tomorrow: A Buck Rogers Mini Exhibit.”
Goals
Bringing the pulps back to life is not simply a matter of writing new stories about heroes with ray guns and rocket packs. Nor is it achieved by overlaying contemporary cynicism onto brightly colored visions of the future. While such approaches can produce entertaining work, they do not serve my central aim.
My goal is reconstruction with historical fidelity. I want my new pulp to function as a time capsule—so authentic that a reader might reasonably forget it was created in the 21st century. These are human-centered stories shaped by aspirations once common and now largely displaced by dystopian frameworks. That creative and scholarly recovery of lost futures is the legacy of the pulp era that I am excavating, preserving, and bringing forward.
Listen to the Rocketeer Podcast.