WHY do we have “Pop Lit” in our name? What’s that about? Isn’t anything pop scorned right now? (In truth, isn’t it because most well-hyped pop music at the moment is corporate-produced generically-imagined garbage?)

The great thing about the word “pop” is it has several meanings depending upon context. Popular. Populist (with a political edge). Pop Art in the Andy Warhol sense.

At its most basic, pop means fun. A word which seems to have been chased out of today’s literary scene in our time of snobby profs and conformist critics to whom writing is synonymous with “work”– meaning, a serious drudge, images of stony-faced monks or mandarins behind thick walls forcing themselves through “difficult” writing– the most dull and inaccessible examples possible. (Think Virginia Woolf staring monotonously at lighthouses.)

“Let’s be serious, people. Art isn’t supposed to be fun!!!”

ANYWAY, today we have a short sci-fi tale about creatures from outer space: “Quest of the Globules” by John Haymaker. A colorful story which is fun, and maybe a quick commentary on our crazy society besides. By the end of it, you might be saying, “We want the Globules!” We hope you enjoy reading it.

A vibrant sound had reached Globiliad, a planet 10 billion trillion light years from Earth and inhabited by a highly evolved alien species known as Globules. Their commander, General Nimble, organized a quest to locate the sounds’ source. His assembled forces, a brigade of multicolored Globules the exact size of tennis balls, streaked across space fleet as a comet’s tail. . .