Times are tough. We’d like to mean that it’s a great time for pulp magazines, that they are spreading as an epidemic. That’s not the case. As people are confined at home in China, Europe and the rest of the world, COVID-19 seems for now containable only with great efforts and sufferings.
Pulpmagazines.org too suggests you to follow the directives of your authorities on prevention and social distancing.
The epidemic genre
Long time readers of pulp fiction are used to being disclosed to world diseases, pandemics, and potential human extinctions…usually (but not always) till the hero comes and save his heroine and us all. All this, with due variants, did happen so often that some argues there is room for a distinct literary genre: the epidemic, also known as VOIF (viral outbreaks in fiction). Prominent examples we like to remember are H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (1927), the great Matheson’s classic I Am Legend (1954), The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean (1965) and Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969).
Wuhan’s COVID-19
Recently an intriguing news has surfaced: the “epidemic” novel The Eyes of Darkness (1981, revised in 1989), by Dean R. Koontz, makes reference to the “Wuhan-400” virus, apparently predicting the exact location where COVID-19 would emerge in 2019. We are not saying that the author accurately foretold the coronavirus disease. Koontz’s “Wuhan-400” is, probably, just another example of coincidence of which literature abounds.