Elizabeth Mapp-Flint of Tilling is approaching her fiftieth birthday, and plans a party to celebrate the event. However, as so often happens in Tilling, things don't go entirely according to plan, as Major Benjy, her husband, over-refreshes himself at the party, and presents her with an entirely unwelcome birthday gift. Meanwhile, Emmeline ("Lucia") Pillson and her husband Georgie, together with the rest of Tilling look on as Elizabeth's sister, the existence of whom had been hitherto unsuspected, visits Tilling and exposes a few family secrets.
Mapp at Fifty is written in sincere tribute to the original Mapp and Lucia novels by E.F.Benson, comic but yet sympathetic portraits of middle-class society in England in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1926 the launch of Amazing Stories introduced a new genre of science fiction in the form of a pulp magazine. Writers like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and even Stephen King began their careers in magazines like these. Let's take a brief look at some of the trend-setting pulp science fiction magazines which are well remembered, and highly valued, today.