If there’s a movie that comes closer to the Shadowrun vibe than Netflix’s Bright, let me know, wouldja? Released last year, this Will Smith vehicle starring Will Smith playing Will Smith in a Will Smith movie takes place in an alt-earth version of LA where magic exists and the...

Michael Tierney is one of the brighter stars in the constellation of Cirsova authors. The dreamtime fight for survival of his “Shark Fighter” story in issue #2 demonstrated to me that the magazine had a lot more to offer than just blasters, space knights, and weird tentacles. Over the...

What if the supervillains won, and then hid behind a front-facing good-guy façade? That could be an interesting premise for a TV show*.  Particularly so given the ongoing revelations about the private peccadillo’s and past-times of the real world’s elites.  We live in a time when the panopticon allows the...

That Thomas Plutarch, what a prodigiously productive writer! The latest in the shared-universe series, Heroes Unleashed dropped into the market this week, and it’s a little bit different from the previous fare.  Morgon Newquist’s Heroes Fall and Kai Wai Cheah’s Hollow City took a more traditional and fast paced approach...

Do you like the Rocky refence in the title?  Sorry, it’s got nothing to do with today’s naked shilling for the fourth issue of StoryHack Magazine. If you think you know what happened last night at O’Reilly’s, you don’t know the half of it. This issue features the third...

Watching Amazon’s The Boys – more on that soonish – reminded me of my last desperate days stuck under the thumb of the Dinosaur Publishers.  Back in the bad old days when I only rarely dipped my toes into NYC publishing waters in search of a rare good read,...

It turns out that rebuilding an sf/f publishing civilization from the ruins left behind by the Boomer generation requires a lot of effort on a lot of different fronts.  The one that we upstarts in the publishing world seek to rebuild is a complex civilization, and carving our own pale...

Is it just me, or did this feel a lot like a Stephenson novel? It features the weird future of Snowcrash and the abrupt lurch of an ending of… Well, pretty much every novel Stephenson ever wrote. Not a complaint.  Just an observation.  Nick Cole’s first-person spycraft novels typically feature...

Gag stories.  They’re a lot harder than most writers realize, particularly when the joke at the core of the story has to sustain several thousand words.  Not joke stories that amount to one long setup for a snappy punchline, but full blown shaggy dog stories that revolve around an...

This might be my favorite story in this issue of Cirsova.  Xavier Lastra, the author of The Elephant Idol, is a good friend of mine.  He has edited a few of my short stories, and his blog has played a vital role in improving my writing.  Reading this story reminds...