The Pegasus Pulp Sampler

Introduction In 2011, e-books were taking off and electronic self-publishing was becoming a viable alternative. Like many other writers, I took note and decided to dip my feet into the self-publishing pool, starting with three previously published stories to which I’d gotten the rights back. And this is how Pegasus Pulp Publishing was born. So why did I decide to call my one-woman publishing company Pegasus Pulp Publishing? Well, there is a Pegasus on the Buhlert family crest. Furthermore, the Pegasus is associated with the muses in Greek mythology, so it seemed like an obvious choice. A quick Google later, it turned out that there were already several companies, including some publishing companies, named Pegasus something or other. Therefore, I eventually named my imprint Pegasus Pulp Publishing, because I have long been a big fan of the pulp era with its huge variety of genres and stories and wanted to evoke that good old pulp spirit with my new publishing venture. Over the past nine years, Pegasus Pulp has published more than 130 stories, novellas, novels and collections in multiple genres and two languages. Pegasus Pulp Publishing is still very much a one-woman operation, though I publish two authors now: Cora Buhlert, i.e. me and Richard Blakemore, a pulp writer of the 1930s, who is also me. This collection is intended as a sampler to show you the broad spectrum of what Pegasus Pulp has on offer. Within, you will find several series starters to wet your appetite, so to say. The In Love and War series is a romantic space opera. It’s the story of Mikhail Alexeievich Grikov and Anjali Patel, two elite soldiers on opposing sides of an intergalactic war, who fall in love and decide to run away together. Predictably, their respective commanders are not at all happy about this. The In Love and War series is represented in this sampler by two stories. The prequel novella Evacuation Order is set eighteen years before the main series and features a very young Mikhail — though he still goes by Misha at this point — and Captain Brian Mayhew, the man who will become Mikhail’s mentor, commanding officer and the closest thing to a surrogate father Mikhail ever had. The short story Baptism of Fire is another prequel, which is set a few years before the main series and follows Anjali on her very first mission. Shattered Empire is my other space opera series, which tells the story of the rebellion against an evil galactic empire (is there any other kind?). It is represented here by Mercy Mission, the first story in the series proper, in which Holly di Marco, a mercenary in the employ of the rebellion, saves the life of disgraced aristocrat Ethan Summerton and gets far more than she bargained for. The Day the Saucers Came… is an oral history told by the survivors of a B-movie type alien invasion in the 1950s. It is represented by Acacia Crescent, which is the story of a boy named Kenny for whom an alien invasion was not the worst thing that happened on June 9th, 1956. Iago Prime is a series of science fiction holiday stories (well, only two so far) set on the newly inhabited planet of Iago Prime. It is represented by Valentine’s Day on Iago Prime. Alfred and Bertha’s Marvellous Twenty-First Century Life started out as a parody of the overly infodumpy science fiction you sometimes find during the so-called Golden Age, particularly in the pages of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction. The idea was to write a perfectly mundane story — in this case about a couple arguing at the breakfast table — and explain every bit of technology with which the characters interact in great and exhaustive detail. Initially, Alfred and Bertha were intended to star only in a single short story, but eventually the series grew to four stories with a fifth forthcoming. It is represented by The Four and a Half Minute Boiled Egg. However, I write not only science fiction and fantasy, but in other genres as well. My second love is the crime and mystery genre. Over the years, I’ve written quite a few mystery stories. One of the stories featured Detective Inspector Helen Shepherd, an officer of the Metropolitan Police, and her team. When I found myself writing another crime story a bit later and needed an investigator, I thought, “Why not reuse Helen Shepherd?” Eventually, the series grew to thirteen stories with more forthcoming. It is represented here by the very first story, The Cork and the Bottle. The Two-Fisted Todd Donovan series was inspired by the men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s and 1960s with their lurid covers and even more lurid headlines such as “Weasels ripped my flesh”. While flipping through a book about the lurid cover art of these magazines, I found myself wondering what the stories inside those covers were like and decided to write a story inspired by one of the images in the book. And thus Todd Donovan, freelance troubleshooter who travels the world in the early 1960s to solve other people’s problems — mostly involving attractive women — was born. The series is represented by The Crawling Death. The Silencer series is my homage to the pulp heroes of the 1930s like The Shadow or The Spider. It’s the story of Richard Blakemore, a pulp fiction writer in Depression era New York City, who dresses up as his own character, the Silencer, to fight crime. The series is represented by the very first story, Countdown to Death. In one of the Silencer stories, it is established that Richard Blakemore is an avid reader of Weird Tales and would like to try his hand at writing sword and sorcery some time. Some time later, when I found myself writing a sword and sorcery story about a sellsword named Thurvok, I idly wondered whether this was Richard Blakemore’s lost sword and sorcery story. And so the idea was born to publish the Thurvok stories under the Richard Blakemore byline — with myself as the editor who rediscovered them. Thurvok starts out as a loner in the Conan mold, but by the end of the first story he finds a friend in Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin. Over the course of the next few stories, Thurvok and Meldom pick up two more companions, the sorceress Sharenna and Lysha, Meldom’s childhood sweetheart whom our heroes rescue from the gallows. So now I had a quartet of adventurers who would go on to fight monsters, seek treasures and rescue the occasional damsel — or man — in distress over the course of eleven stories and counting. The Thurvok series is represented by the first story The Valley of the Man Vultures, where Thurvok is still a wandering loner, though he does meet Meldom at the end. The Hallowind Cove series is cozy fantasy set in a permanently fog-shrouded seaside town where very strange things keep happening. The first Hallowind Cove story was written for a shared world anthology, which fell through. So I removed all references to the shared world and published the story myself and eventually wrote several others in the same setting. The Hallowind Cove series is represented here by the first story, The Revenant of Wrecker’s Dock. The final story The Kiss of the Executioner’s Blade is not part of a series in the traditional sense. The background is that in the early 2000s, I wrote several historical adventure stories prominently featuring damsels in distress for a magazine called Man’s Story 2. I’ve long since gotten the rights to those stories back and republished them myself. The Kiss of the Executioner’s Blade is the first of those stories. I hope you’ll enjoy this taste of what Pegasus Pulp had to offer. For more about our books, visit the website or subscribe to the newsletter.