#Futuremen

[esonetwork]

'Avengers of the Moon' Book Review By Ron Fortier

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/avengers-of-the-moon-book-review-by-ron-fortier/

'Avengers of the Moon' Book Review By Ron Fortier

AVENGERS OF THE MOON (A Captain Future Novel) By Allen Steele Tor Books – Pub 2017 300 pages

In the early part of 1939, veteran sci-fi pulp writer Edmond Hamilton met with Leo Margulies, Better Publication’s editorial director, to discuss the creation of a new title, Captain Future. The lead character of Curt Newton, a super-scientist who lives on the moon and goes by the name Captain Future. The original idea for the character may have come from Mort Weisinger. Captain Future’s companions in the series included an enormously strong robot named Grag, an android named Otho, and the brain of Simon Wright, Newton’s mentor. Joan Randall, Newton’s girlfriend, was also a regular character

Margulies announced the new magazine at the first-ever World Science Fiction Convention held in New York in July 1939. The first issue, edited by Weisinger, appeared in January of the following year. It would last for seventeen issues and is still today considered one of the finest hero pulps ever produced. Still old heroes never die and in 2017, sci-fi author Allen Steele took it up upon himself to revive the series and thus write brand new adventures of Captain Future and the Futuremen.

It appears (and we could be wrong) that he’s written four, this being the first. Of course, Steele could have merely reinvented the entire concept given us new characters, and been unimpeded by what Hamilton had done. Instead, to our delirious delight, he merely adapted the originals to work in an era compatible with our current knowledge of science and space exploration. This is a full-blown origin story built on a Hamilton tale that was only hinted at in the magazine stories. The Futuremen are all here, and Steele has given them unique personalities as are classic Captain Future villains from the pulp days.

In “Avengers of the Moon,” a young Curt Newton is after the man who murdered his parents. With the aid of the Brain, Otho, and Grag, his hunt leads him to uncover a nest of radicals plotting a revolution on Mars against the Solar Coalition. Steele’s pacing is perfect and if you love old-fashioned space operas, it is high time you met Captain Future. For the record, we found out copy in a second-hand bookstore. It’s the kind of treasure any pulp lover would love.

[sonicziggy]

"0" by Futuremen https://ift.tt/gSinLK4

[chernobog13]

Captain Future #1 (Winter, 1940). Cover by George Rozen.

The very first appearance of the Futuremen: Captain Future, the metal robot Greg, Otho the android, and the disembodied brain of Prof. Simon Wright (who, to my recall, never made a cover appearance).

[sathan-cult]

Press conference at #HotelbarrioCDMX

About the release of the new single “ESC” from Futuremen ft. Sexes.

[peace-of-souls]

Und ich liebe dich. Ich liebe dich mit jedem deiner Fehler und egal was auch passiert, du warst der beste Zufall in meinem Leben!

eigenes

[justinkemerling]

The official Round and Round corporate retreat is in the books. Thanks to the city of Chicago for hosting us. You were the perfect setting for trust falls and the strategic planning of our American domination via coup de kindness. Until the next one! #coworking #chicagoland #collaboration #futuremen (at The Bean) https://www.instagram.com/p/BoMtAr5AaBu/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=184ayx8epx9xn

[hughrlgrosvenor11]

#NEWS

No one would be surprised that i like to post pics where Hugh Richard is smiling 😺

So, here are some pics of cute Leone D'oro 🌾🌞🦁 Original post: https://twitter.com/ceoordini/status/1393473767347736578/photo/1 credit: @ceoordini on #twitter, @westminsterfoundation and @futuremenuk on #twitter 😊😊😊

https://www.instagram.com/p/CRzMIAAosdC/

[mechattack]

From Startling Stories, 1951.

Thanks to @danskjavlarna for sending it to me.

[theseventhoffrostfall]

Thoughts on railguns? Both small arm and artillery size

I'm told that after a few shots they tend to spread and pop out of alignment, an issue that we'll assume futuremen will rectify.

Small arms, they might genuinely be the way of the future if the physical problems with those can be solved more easily than the electrochemical weirdo problems coilguns are having firing up all those coils fast enough. Assuming both are viable, you'd likely see railguns as the "heavy" option, as some sci-fi already attests, because from what I know about the relative systems it's easier to scrape a big shot out of a battery on a rail system than a coil.

Artillery, barring the unforeseen, coils will be completely unable to compete, and rails have a ton of advantages over conventional artillery once you've got it hooked up to a sufficient power source. They'll be the king and honestly they'll eek a bit into rocket artillery's wheelhouse if you ask me. Everyone's aware of the ludicrous range of naval railguns, but what's less obvious is that electrical propulsion systems (be they coil or rail) accelerate a round consistently over the length and travel time of the barrel, as opposed to a regular powder charge which does impart some extra velocity over the course of travel time but the lion's share of the impulse is going straight into the round at the moment of detonation. So given the same muzzle velocity, you can pack a railgun shot with a lot more fancy, esoteric payloads and sensitive electronics (thank you Faraday effect) and do some fire missions previously relegated to far more expensive missiles and rockets

[transgenderer]

*blogs a little too personally, giving futuremen enough info to reconstruct me as a cyberslave in the technopocalypse*

[vintagegeekculture]

My old friend Rik Levins, a huge Superman fan, once told me that he believed “Superman Duels the Futuremen of the Year 2000″ was the last true appearance of the Golden Age, Earth-2 Superman in regular comics. 

It was the last story to say there was no Superboy and that Superman fought evil beginning as an adult, which is a characteristic of the Earth-2 Superman. By this point, the Fortress of Solitude had already been introduced (the defining cutoff point between Silver Age and Golden Age Superman, since Golden Age Superman had no such thing), however, this story shows that some stories were written about Earth-2 Superman after that “cutoff point.” 

[esonetwork]

Who is Captain Future?

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/who-is-captain-future/

Who is Captain Future?

The Big Bang Theory

This month (for me, anyways) has been all about Captain Future. I have been living, breathing, eating and sleeping Edmond Hamilton’s pulp era science fiction hero.

But who is Captain Future? Popular in his hey day, the 1940’s, the final decade of the pulp magazines, today he is an obscure character, encountered by the younger generation either through an almost equally as obscure Japanese Anime series or through the medium of the sit-com The Big Bang Theory as a somewhat prominent poster on display in Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment.

None of which answers the question: Who is Captain Future?

For that answer I turn to the Hugo award winning science fiction writer Allen M. Steele.

Cover art by Earle K. Bergey

“Captain Future is a creation of Edmond Hamilton,” says Steele. “The legend is that in 1939 at the World Science Fiction Convention the publisher of Startling Stories, Mort Wesinger, went to the convention in New York city and was so impressed by the turnout and the enthusiasm of the fans that, on the spot, he announced that they were going to create a new magazine called Captain Future.”

The actual story is a little more complicated than that, Allen explains. “By the time the World Science Fiction convention rolled around Better Publications had already decided that they wanted to publish a ‘hero’ pulp to compete with Doc Savage and The Shadow and The Avenger and other characters who were very popular at that time.”

Weisinger had come up with a character he called Mister Future who was the world’s smartest man and had this huge head. He lived on top of a skyscraper and he had an alien being named Otho who lived in his ring. He took his idea to science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton.

“Hamilton said: No this isn’t going to do, so he borrowed a little bit of Doc Savage and a little bit of Batman and various other creations that were out there and he came up with something entirely new. That was Captain Future.” Steele explains.

Cover art by Tommy Pocket

“The first issue appeared in late 1939. It was a quarterly magazine and Hamilton wrote all but three adventures. It lasted until the mid-1940’s and, like so many other pulps, was killed off by the wartime paper crunch. Some more adventures were published in Startling Stories for a couple of issues after that. Then he went away for a while. The series was briefly revived in 1950 as a series of short novellas, again, in Startling Stories.”

The character went away again in 1951. “They said: It’s going to go on a short hiatus,” Steele explains. “And that hiatus ended up lasting until I revived the character a few years ago. Basically Captain Future is a spacegoing version of Doc Savage. Doc Savage was an early predecessor to James Bond and a lot of other characters. He’s a troubleshooter. He’s a hero. Hamilton’s version of the character had him being a super scientist.

“He’s an adventurer, and he has this weird cast of characters, the Futuremen. They go about the solar system righting wrongs, protecting the common man and fighting the good fight. This is something that attracted me a great deal when I read those adventures when I was a kid.”

Cover art by M. D. Jackson

So much so, that Steele took over the mantle from Edmond Hamilton and began writing new adventures featuring the pulp hero. “One of the first Captain Future novels I read was Outlaws of the Moon. My first Captain Future, Avengers of the Moon, was very much an homage to that particular title.”

Avengers of the Moon was published by Tor Books in 2017. For Steele it was a dream come true and one he wanted to continue. Unfortunately the editor who signed off on the project died. His replacement was not as interested in continuing with the series.

Fortunately Steve Davidson and his Experimenter Publishing Company, picked up the idea. Steve, the publisher behind the revival of Amazing Stories Magazine, has been releasing a series of novels under his Amazing Selects imprint, and Allen Steele’s Captain Future novels are among those releases.

Illustration by H. W. Wessolowski

The books are fully illustrated, much like the Captain Future novels from the original pulp run. This is where I come in.

The second Captain Future novel began with a longer story called Captain Future in Love. It was serialized over two issues and I was fortunate enough to be tasked with producing the cover art for the second issue.

The story was re-printed by Amazing Selects, followed by the next two instalments of an overarching story. The Guns of Pluto continued the story as does the sequel, 1500 Light Years from Home. Both books feature black and white illustrations.

Illustration by M. D. Jackson

This, for me, has been an incredible opportunity to pick up where pulp artists Earle K. Bergey who painted the covers, and Hans Waldemar Wessolowski, credited as H. W. Wessolowski (also sometimes simply as as “Wesso”) who drew the interior illustrations. As a life long fan of the pulp magazines, this is obviously a dream assignment.

I have completed the illustrations for 1500 Light Years from Home and the book is scheduled to be released sometime in the next month. I am hoping to be involved in the fourth and concluding instalment which will be released either later this year or early 2022.

But there was to be an unexpected bonus this month. I had got wind that a magazine, The Pulp Fan, was on the lookout for artists to provide portraits of pulp characters. I contacted the publisher, Jim Main and asked if there was anything that I could do. He suggested that I could paint a portrait of Captain Future.

This was the icing on an already delicious cake. The Allen Steele Captain Future books have been “updated”. The science has been brought into line with what we know now about the solar system. Steele didn’t want to have the setting be the “quaint” one that Edmond Hamilton had created. Just as his stories reflected the science as it was understood at the time, so does Allen Steele’s Captain Future. So that the illustrations will not look dated or out of place in the 21st century, I adapted a similar esthetic.

This, then, for Pulp Fan was a chance to present Captain Future as he was back in the 1940’s, anachronisms and all. I am working on it was we speak and, I have to tell you, I am having a heck of a lot of fun with it.

The Pulp Fan issue #3 will be available soon from Main Enterprises.

Allen Steele’s Captain Future: 1500 Light Years from Home will be available from Amazing Selects. You can find that and his other Captain Future Books here.

[chernobog13]

Captain Ultra, the hero of a 24-episode television series that ran on Japanese TV back in 1967.

Despite the Captain’s name and red suit this series was not part of the various Ultra series from Tsuburaya Productions that started with Ultra Q.  This was, instead, a “filler” series ordered by Tokyo Broadcast System (TBS) to run when Ultraman ended until Ultraseven started.  TBS broadcast Captain Ultra in Ultraman’s time slot, which in turn had been the time slot for Ultra Q, so that the network would not see a fall-off of viewers.

Captain Ultra was very loosely based on Captain Future, a science fiction hero created in 1939 and featured in his own self-titled pulp magazine.  Captain Future was similar to Doc Savage as he is trained form childhood to the peak of human perfection, then dedicates his life to righting wrongs and battling super villains.  Like Doc, Captain Future had his helpers (called The Futuremen) : the disembodied brain of his parents’ best friend, a robot, and a shape-changing android.  These were also the three who raised him after his parents were murdered when he was still an infant.

Captain Ultra was a troubleshooter in the Space Patrol, an organization tasked with keeping the Solar System safe.  He is aided by Huck, a robot; Joe, an alien from the planet Kikero; as well as two Space Patrol cadets -the beautiful Akane and the young Kenji.

[futureman3]

"Kamishikimikumanoimasu Shrine" in Kumamoto Prefecture stands in a lush natural environment. There is a kind of temporal layer around us, and there is a mysterious atmosphere that makes us feel like we might come and go to that side. It was also the work that led me to draw the travelogue series, and I wanted to draw Futuremen who ran up the stone steps energetically. You can enjoy the atmosphere and climb. It is introduced in JCAT Gallery. https://jcat-gallery.com/pro…/kamishikimikumanoimasu-shrine/

[notpulpcovers]

Curt Newton and Otho plumb the perilous secrets of the Jovian Moon Europa -- where Ezra Gurney, friend of the Futuremen, has fallen prey to a mystic cult!

[trashmenace]

Captain Future: The Lost World of Time

The Futuremen race into the past to answer a cry for help that has traveled across a hundred million years! Follow Captain Future as the greatest enigma of all time transports him into the forgotten ages.

Kindle ebook from Amazon