My Week in Geekery: Pulp Appreciation

I've always had an affection for pulp, schlock, and camp, and I realized recently that I've been consuming a lot of it. I read the John Carter of Mars books a few years back when I was working overnights at a hotel, and I recently discovered that one of my favorite authors, Stephen Lynch, has a web serial that's inspired by it called Queen of the Iron Sands. It's a really fun read, a great take on pulp sci-fi with a female hero and a sense of meta irony. I've been working my way through it whenever I have some spare computer time for the past few weeks, and I've got that sense of panting anticipation that I know people must have had for the newspaper serials of the last century.
Right now, I'm also reading Stephen Hunt's Secret of the Fire Sea, the fourth novel of his Jackelian series. It is, in a word, delightful. I've enjoyed his previous novels from this series immensely; he's part of what I would consider the New Weird, and he effortlessly blends disparate genres into something that is at once familiar and strange. In any given book, he's got everything from Dickensian orphans to Cthulu-like gods to Aztec-inspired human sacrifice to a fallen Atlantean civilization. He is very derivative, but what he does with established tropes is inspired and playful.

Freshly arrived from my Netflix queue (yeah, I'm one of those people that still has a DVD subscription) is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It was not popular when it came out in 2004, but under recommendation I decided to give it a shot. I haven't watched it yet, but I have high hopes for a movie in which giant flying robots attack New York City.