The Titanic Mummy Curse—have you heard of it? I hadn’t until recently. It’s a chilling urban legend tied to the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912. According to legend, a cursed ancient Egyptian mummy—or more accurately, the painted wooden mummy-board known as the “Unlucky Mummy” (an actual artifact from the British Museum)—was secretly brought aboard the Titanic. This supposedly malevolent artifact belonged to a Theban priestess of Amun-Ra. According to the legend, the mummy had already brought ruin to every owner, photographer, or journalist who had either handled or even written about it since its arrival in England in the late 1890s. Desperate to be rid of the cursed thing, someone allegedly shipped it to an American buyer via the “unsinkable” Titanic. When the liner struck the iceberg and sank with over 1,500 lives lost, sensationalist newspapers quickly blamed the mummy’s vengeful spirit for dooming the vessel—claiming its curse had followed the ship across the Atlantic.

Despite the marvelous story, the legend is pure myth: the British Museum’s records show the “Unlucky Mummy” (just a coffin lid, no actual body attached) has never left the museum since its 1889 acquisition. The Titanic’s manifest lists no such item aboard. The truth seems to be that a journalist named William T. Stead (who perished on board) entertained passengers with mummy-curse tales during the voyage.

The story is an artifact wrapping together Egyptomania, mummy lore, and post-disaster sensationalism—all hot topics during the very early 20^th century. The Titanic Mummy Curse remains a haunting reminder of how tragedy and ancient mystery can fuse into immortal folklore.

Curious to find out more about the unlucky mummy’s ghostly adventures aboard the Titanic? There’s a good article here: https://theverbaldiarist.wordpress.com/2021/07/30/the-cursed-mummy-of-the-titanic-by-oliver-giggins/

For the past several years, my research and creative work have been quietly converging into a single structure. Some of you know pieces of it through the Rocketeer Podcast, others through essays, talks, or the occasional glimpse behind the scenes of a book project. Until now, however, I haven’t gathered these threads together in one place.

What follows is a foundational essay describing the method I use to study, preserve, and reconstruct pulp-era popular culture—a process I call pulp archaeology. This approach informs both my historical research and my creative work, from essays and exhibitions to fiction and visual art.

Pulp Archaeology

I’m sharing this here under Historical Notes because it reflects the thinking behind many of the investigations you’ve already encountered. It’s not a manifesto, and it’s not nostalgia. It’s a description of practice: how careful study becomes a way of bringing older imaginative worlds back into focus without flattening them into pastiche.

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.

This essay also serves as an introduction to the Lucina Press Exhibition Hall, a public research space where completed case studies, ongoing investigations, and curated mini-exhibits are presented in detail.

If you’d like to explore the work visually and archivally—or follow future case studies as they’re added—you can visit the Exhibition Hall here.

The Exhibition Hall is the permanent home for this research. What appears here on Substack is part of an ongoing conversation; what appears there is built to last.

“Logan’s Run” the tv series isn’t half bad. I remember it from when it first came out in the late ‘70s. It was a journey through a post-apocalyptic world. The show had a nice variety of pulpy plots. Psychics were highlighted, also small communities that had regressed past technology. There was a very nice episode about a time travel cause and effect loop that I like a great deal.

Logan and Jessica had an android side-kick. I liked him then and even more now.

“The Fantastic Journey” was another similar show that I also liked.

There were a bunch of sci-fi series in the 1970s with interesting ideas. Strangely, in the 1980s sci-fi on TV changed significantly. I wonder why…