Cirsova 7 – The Great Culling Emporium
Aw yeah, this is what it’s all about. Marilyn K. Martin writes science fiction adventure the way it was meant to be written. To call “The Great Culling Emporium” the story of a bounty hunter grabbing his prey in the midst of a neutral bazaar is as accurate as...
More on Genre Bending
As stated previously, I’m a fan of StoryHack Magazine first as a reader and second as a writer and third as a writer who has graced its pages. Sure, one of my stories appeared in Issue 0, and another will show up in Issue 2. I don’t submit to...
Cirsova 7 – The Legend of Blade
Hoo boy. Jason Scott Aiken. “The Legend of Blade”. This is going to be a tough one, because Aiken shows a lot of promise. He has a great imagination, and hits all the right pulpy beats in this post-apocalyptic story of three friends cast out into the wilderness. It’s...
Cirsova 7 – The Iynx
Michael Reyes hits Cirsova 7 with an urban fantasy tale told well enough to hold the interest of even a reader who doesn’t care for the genre. While wandering the sf/f desert of the early aughts through the mid teens of this century I flirted with urban fantasy and...
Incoming! StoryHack 2
The big shot independent authors tell me that in order to make enough money to quit our day jobs and write full time, we have to don a creative straight jacket. You see, Amazon’s algorithms have churned through two decades of data and discovered that readers are one trick ponies. ...
Cirsova 7 – Galactic Gamble
Yeah boi! Been chomping at the bit to talk about the latest edition of my favorite sf/f magazine. We’re going to take these stories one at a time. Dominika Lein kickes things off with her usual talent for leaving huge swaths of a story open to the reader’s imagination. I...
Dixon Projects
In addition to being a talented and prolific graphic novel author with credits that include Savage Sword of Conan (the best of the post-Howard Conan properties), Batman, and Punisher, Chuck Dixon also has a line of prose fiction novels available on Amazon. Over the last few weeks I had...
On Heroism
Writing heroes is easy, if you have the courage to do it. Always keep the Seven Virtues in the back of your mind, and refer to them whenever you’re not sure if you hero is acting heroic. A recent brush with the struggles of a left-wing author left me...
A Soft Pass
Galaxy’s Edge was fun and different while it lasted, but it’s just too dang dark for me. After the grind of living inside Goth Sullus’ broken head for 300 pages in Imperator, I had hoped Kill Team would mean a return to the straight-ahead action of Legionnaire or the...
Cirsova Containment Status: Broken
It’s the most wonderful time of the year – time for a new issue of Cirsova. I’ve read a lot of anthology magazines over the last year in the hunt for new writers and new takes on fantasy and sci-fi, and don’t really talk about most of them because…well,...