The latest issue of Cirsova Magazine was published (in England) on the 15th December. Here is a full review of the stories in the issue. It’s a long review because there are a lot of stories to cover. If you want a shorter review, I would just say “Great stories, buy it.” But if you want the luxury tour, it’s all here in black and white. 

Stealing the Alchemist Stone by Richard Rubin
Sword and Planet!  Burke Fletcher, the only Earthman to survive a crashed starship, is a sellsword on an alien planet. Married to a fledging alchemist, they heist The Philosopher’s Stone, a gem of unimaginable power. The story starts fast, with the duo fleeing the Baron’s palace after grabbing the stone, escaping in a sleek Burroughsian flyer. As they fly Mr. Rubin fleshes out his story, and we begin to understand the colourful world these two thieves inhabit.

Soon they are fighting and fleeing new opponents. Their ship damaged, his wife wounded, our hero is captured and taken to a high castle. There, he is brought before a beautiful blue-skinned woman, but not before a fight with some robots that is straight out of Magnus Robot Fighter. Robots, fisticuffs and at least one robot down. Ms. Blue-Skin simultaneously threatens and propositions Burke. If our hero thought the Baron was bad news, he is now launched into the machinations of alien alchemy/science as a weapon for global conquest. Much worse.

Despite moving at considerable speed, the author manages to include all the exposition we need to make sense of this exotic alien world. He also makes clever use of some classic Sword-and-Planet tropes to keep the narrative exciting. I really enjoyed this story and so am resisting writing spoilers, but the story works so well because of one particularly smart and original use of well-worn pulp science/magic.  

What also makes this story such a fun read is the completeness of the alien world. Mr. Rubin makes his world rich and exotic and one gets a real sense of strangeness, danger and adventure. Sword and Planet done with colourful panache and great spirit.     

To the Sound of a Silent Harp by William Huggins
Ciaon works as a courier/hired gun in a megapolis that has many eager users of Harp. Harp is a terminally addictive drug which Cavan, Ciaon’s psychopathic narcissistic boss, discovered on an alien world. Harp has built Cavan a criminal empire and given him power over many lives.

What starts out as a-day-in-the-life of a courier in Cavan’s Harp empire, quickly turns into a disturbing journey through the dark evil motivations of a drug kingpin. Along the way we start to get insights into Ciaon’s character. The author does this well, short, powerful passages about Ciaon inserted into the ongoing story of selling and muleing Harp. Imagine Sin City (the movie) but with flying cars and 200-floor luxury mega-complexes. Ciaon becomes our default hero, despite not being so heroic himself.

Ciaon is uneasy about the way things are happening, new disruptions of ongoing business. What starts as unease quickly become a horrifying mystery of hidden dangers and untold secrets. Ciaon’s ability to keep his life separate from Cavan’s dealings is tested. The story starts with an unpleasant tension which now becomes a sense of danger and death which permeates every line. The reader senses that someone is on borrowed time, but who?

“Harp” is a disturbing and spiky piece of Future-Noir. It’s skilful writing. “Harp” plays the reader like a fish on a line, hinting at the perils that lie just below the surface of these people’s lives. Until their troubles break the surface. A bleak future world, rendered with real emotional power.

Harmonious Unity Burns by Jed Del Rosario
A future city of alien races, with separate zones for each race, creating a “multi-cultural paradise”. So far, so cynical. The Dikri, a six-legged, part animal, part crustacean race, have burnt down their zone in an internecine conflict. They have their councilman trapped and intend to burn him too. He calls for rescue and the older races that rule the city send a trio of bio-augmented Earthman mercenaries to rescue the councilman. Everyone knows using Earth mercenaries is not standard operating procedure but no one knows why these men in particular are being sent. Hmmm.

So we get three heroic grunts, with impressive weaponry and even more impressive bodily augmentations, traversing a burnt-out war zone looking for the councilman. There’s a leader, plus a long time sidekick, and a new boy who is pretty much a living weapon. The leader is a human bio-weapon and looks suitably weird. The sidekick is the seen-it-all grunt. He gets the funny lines. The new guy, well you have to read the story, but he has skills.  There’s a workaday heroic quality about these gents. Not fools, they know the mission stinks but they intend to rescue the councilman, rioters and all. In fact the action sequences of this story are refreshingly original, relying on the mercenaries clever augmentations to quell their enemies. Well, these three soldiers get into big trouble and that trouble centres on what is really stinky in the Dikra zone. 

“Harmonius” is a Mil-Tech SF story with some pleasingly new and clever flourishes. I found it to be an enjoyable read. The author is Jed Del Rosario, who doesn’t go in for much in the way of political correctness. The cynicism of the plot/back-story makes a salty contrast to the based behaviour of his trio of mercenaries. And he doesn’t hold back with the ultraviolence. The fights are vividly described, brutal and definitively lethal. It will be interesting to see more of his stories.

Queen of the House by J. Manfred Weichsel
If this story were anymore old-school, it would have been found in a time capsule buried in 1950.  A suburban housewife in a space-age future opens the front door to a door-to-door salesman. Think a “Jetsons” vibe with a snotty housewife who is a bit too self-regarding. The salesman is selling a Quantum Vacuum Cleaner, which can clean any dirt or grime. The house Robo-maid is slightly on the fritz, so our housewife invites the salesman in for a demonstration. What starts well soon turns into multiverse pandemonium.  It’s an extravagantly funny story.    

I loved this story. Back in the Sixties, the great SF editor Groff Conklin used to produce big fat paperback anthologies full of SF stories like this. Short, snappy, funny and sharply observed. This story could have come straight out of one of those anthologies. I have been meaning to read some of J. Manfred Weichsel’s stories for some time. This is a good introduction to his work.       

Thorwyn Stapledon and “The Mellifluous Phoenix” by SU-RA-U
Our story starts with a friend of Thorwyn Stapledon giving us a brief history of the great man. Stapledon is (was) an SF super-fan in the forties and fifties, who became an editor in the sixties. Mysterious, and very odd even by the standards of SF fans, he broke cover in 1972 (at an SF Convention) to announce a forthcoming anthology of stories, titled The Mellifluous Phoenix. One hundred writers would each write a short story under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug. 

Having established the story with more than a few jibes at the expense of ‘70s SF and its fans, the tale then moves into the eighties and nineties. At first it appears that the “Phoenix” anthology was stillborn. Then it is discovered that a few copies were produced. However, our protagonist now suspects that the anthology is actually the seed of a terrible alien evil. The story now proceeds to recount the anthology’s creation in an attempt to prove what it really is.

So this is a weird tale, part shaggy-dog story, with a McGuffin and a plot device so outrageous even A.E. van Vogt would shy away from using it. But it is still a very engaging story. You remember that night you sat in a quiet bar and that slightly crazy drunk guy told you about the aliens who secretly control America?   This is the Cirsova equivalent of that evening. The author is someone named SU-RA-U. I guess the question has to be, does he/she drink in bars?

For We Are Many by Paul Lucas
Zak travels across multiple universes killing people. Zak is from a world which is ruled by a rigorously exacting Christian fundamentalism. Partly to blame for a devastating cross-universe accident which caused a portal-gate to explode, Zak goes on the lam through multiple worlds. He takes a device which can be used to scan people.  It then determines if they capable of redeeming themselves. Zak discovers that there are many Christian worlds and many versions of himself that are incapable of shedding their evil natures. Zak makes it his job to kill them all. A force of Christian hunters pursue him through many worlds, attempting to stop him. Zak wrestles with the true nature of good and evil while on a long multi-world killing spree.

For me this story was a low point in an otherwise fine anthology. I couldn’t engage with the lack of story connection between the theological arguments and the killing spree. The story becomes a slog. That Zak the keyboard-jockey nerd becomes a deadly killing machine seemed implausible, given the context of realistic parallel worlds.  And to be honest, my heart sunk at reading yet another story about the evils of repressive doctrinaire Christianity. I am not a Christian, but Christianity-as-fascism is the most tired theme in Science Fiction and really needs to be retired.

Fail Early, Fail Well by W.L. Emery
Oh Hell, but this was good. Stories that manage to skewer government waste, political appointees and management consultants all at the same time must be few and far between. And truly precious.

Vinellius is an ecological science project manager who is dutifully working on a eco-power-plant project. He and seven other team members are drinking in a bar, in the full knowledge that the completed power-plant will be an ecological and humanitarian disaster. It is being pushed to completion by the dead hand of political finagling and corporate greed. Not sure if “humanitarian” is the right word here, because the author makes it clear that Vinellius is an alien and works amongst space-faring alien cultures.

The only way to save the current situation is if the project can be deemed a failure and stopped.  So Vinellius decides to become a project failure consultant. But first he needs a failure. How to do that? Well, read and enjoy. With one failure under his belt, Vinellius becomes a secret success. His services are in demand, secretly. 

This is a savagely funny story at the expense of corporate creeps, corrupt management consultancies, crooked research agencies. Author W. L. Emery delights in a villain’s tale of Vinellius meeting with incompetent politicians, fraudulent “scientists” and just plain old crooks, and deftly manoeuvring his way around them. An appropriate story for our times. The ghosts of Robert Sheckley, Lloyd Biggle, Jr. and Christopher Anvil are up in Heaven applauding this satirical tale.

She Saw It Creeping Up the Stairs by Mark Pellegrini
Horrific.

I was tempted to leave that one word as the review of Mr. Pellegrini’s tale, alone with the admonition “don’t read this story in the dark”. Luckily my apartment is on one level, there are no stairs, so I reread the story for this review. Mark Pellegrini’s tale is the cover story for this issue of Cirsova, which speaks well of Alex’s editorial judgement. But “Stairs” is a truly evil story.

Lisa and her mother are obliged to move into her grandmother’s large, slightly decrepit suburban house. Lisa is nine, her mother is divorced. Lisa’s grandmother has had a stroke and is mostly bed-bound. She has a large bedroom on the upper floor of the house. Lisa and Mom have bedrooms on the ground level, along with a lounge, kitchen, bathroom etc.

When Lisa is not at school, her mom presses her into service, helping Gran in and out of bed, making tea for her, etc. But Lisa soon realises that upstairs is “different”. The air is thicker, there’s a strange smell, the wood creaks. Lisa soon begins to fear going up the stairs.

The months go by and by July, it’s clear that Gran is losing her faculties. Lisa’s mom is not much better. She is jumpy, her hands tremble and she has the jitters. She has long emotional fearful telephone conversations in her closed bedroom, though Lisa can never find out with who. Now Lisa can clearly hear someone walking about upstairs, the creak of the floorboards sounding at all hours of the night. 

In August Gran has to be taken to a care home. Lisa still hears the creak of footsteps at night.    

That’s all the story summary I can provide without spoilers. The flat tone of the story, told from the perspective of a nine year old girl, froze my blood. Mr. Pellegrini ratchets up the tension with some evil story devices. Walk-on characters, harmless in themselves, impart information that manages to be both mundane and disturbing at the same time. Lisa’s own imaginings lead us into dark places, and we tell ourselves that she is just a child.

This is a masterpiece of a horror story. Evil. Horrific.

The Wreck of the Cassada by Jim Breyfogle
Jim Breyfogle’s Mongoose and Meerkat adventures are a mainstay of Cirsova Magazine and a new story is always welcome. Sword and Sorcery adventures lightly seasoned with a dash of irony, Mangos and Kat’s tribulations now include helping the very deadly Terzol, Hand of Bursa, with a shipwreck. There are two problems with this job. Firstly, Mangos has a hangover that would floor an ox. Secondly, he doesn’t like the water.

What sounds like a simple job of retrieving an important item soon turns into disputes with swords. Trouble starts even before the trio get to the wreck and the full scale of the problem becomes apparent. Mangos and Kat do what they do best and the bodies start to pile up. But something more than swordplay is required to make this mission a success. No spoilers here, so I’ll just say that the item they must retrieve is on the wreck and that in itself is a problem. Mangos has reservations about this job from the beginning and now he’s really unhappy.

“The Wreck of the Cassada” is a neat story with a knowing smirk to it. There’s a nicely worked piece of dark comedy around the phrase “Abandon Ship”. Overall “Cassada” is a solid adventure and gives us just a little more insight into our two mismatched adventurers.  

Wychryst Tower by Matthew Pungitore
Matthew Pungitore will be familiar to readers of the DMR Books blog where he writes considered articles about pulp writing and folklore. His story “Wychryst Tower” is anything but considered.

A mad raucous tale of a man named Dulf Abbandonato, who goes adventuring in the Caribbean with a mysterious explorer, Doctor Ildeffonso Alvarez. In the Dominican Republic they are ambushed by fierce tribesmen, encounter evil shamans and demonic witches. Dulf finds an ancient chest with the name Wychryst engraved on it. This he finds scary and foreboding, as he is a friend of the Wychryst family back in Hingham, Massachusetts.

Now what makes this story so ingenious is that the action takes place in 2015, yet the entire story is written in the archaic English of the late 17th Century. It’s as if Pungitore is channelling the language of Robert Louis Stevenson and pirate captains. And odd as it might sound, this makes the story work extremely well. There is a persistent sense of the unknown, devoid of any reference to modern technology or culture. Descriptive passages dwell at length on the morbid rank darkness of the jungle, sinister hidden caves and horrors hidden for centuries, all written in a lost idiom. The effect is to distance the reader from the modern age, make us receptive to Dulf’s eerie plight.      

After his wild adventures, Dulf returns to America in 2016 and contacts his friends the Wychrysts, who invite him to stay. He arrives and meets the beautiful Ealhswitha, walking in the foggy grounds. Then things become very strange. Something is haunting the mansion. The Wychrysts are missing. Then evil entities of cosmic horror appear. Dulf has to fight for his life and soul.

If the Caribbean first half of the story was a wild extravaganza, everything in the cosmos gets dropped in the pot in the second half. To describe the story any further would simply invite spoilers which would mar the beauty of the tale. This is a horror story but trying to classify it would be pointless. “Wychryst” is pure pulp, wild, colourful, with a mad logic that moves the story along at breakneck speed. I read it a second time to ensure I understood the story and liked it even more. This is a definite original. Enjoy.

The Creation of Science Fiction by Michael Tierney
This short beautifully written non-fiction article by Michael Tierney is an absolute gem and helps make this an outstanding issue of Cirsova Magazine. It is a short history of a man named Bob Davis. Davis started out as a composer of lead type for a newspapers, back in the early 1900s. When lead type disappeared with the advent of linotype machines, he became a successful reporter. Then he became a pulp editor. He fostered and nurtured many important writers of the early pulp era. But most important of all he discovered and fostered Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is no exaggeration to call Bob Davis the Godfather of Science Fiction.

The article has a twinkle in its eye, points out that for all the acclaim lavished on Hugo Gernsback, he would have not have succeeded so well without the monumental foundation built by Bob Davis. It hits the high points of Bob Davis’ career, especially his relationship with ERB and just how significant their contribution was to early SF.

I am John Carter (Part Ten) by James Hutchings
James Hutching’s epic poem, “I am John Carter”, continues with Part Ten of Captain Carter’s sojourn on the red planet. Deja Thoris is a prisoner, Carter knows not where. In this instalment Carter’s inability to find and rescue the woman he loves weighs heavily on him.

Notes from the Nest
The issue is completed by an end-note from P. Alexander, Cirsova’s publisher and editor. There’s no denying that Cirsova have had a roller-coaster year. They produced some great work, most notably Julian Hawthorne’s The Cosmic Courtship and Jim Breyfogle’s The Paths of Cormanor. They dissolved their relationship with the printer-who-shall-not-be-named and reorganised their printing and distribution. This end-note gives some glimpses into what is coming from Cirsova in 2022. Looks very promising.

John Gradoville writes Fantasy and Science Fiction stories. He lives in a quiet down-at-heel seacoast town in the south of England. His Lost World Fantasy story “The Gold of Palladias” will be published by Cirsova Magazine in 2022. His Martian Pulp Stories will be (self) published in 2022.