I was on with James Krake last night, and we discussed what makes a good short story, how the format differs in what you can do from the novel format, and what sorts of things we’d be looking for in a submission!
“You wish to find what is true, and I’m afraid you’re going to find damned little; I want what is false, and I’ve found plenty.”
–The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Among SF and fantasy fans, there are few who have not heard of the Loch Ness Monster. Most of these have also heard of sea serpents, although this reviewer has met few who believe them to be real. While this review is not about the “reality” of Nessie or other monsters, it does concern a topic of interest, which we’ve visited before: the role of real and imagined apex predators in real and imagined worlds.[1] What are sea serpents, their lake-kin included? What do they do? And what stories can we tell about them?
British writer F. W. Holiday, author of books about dragons and goblins, turns his attention to Nessie in The Great Orm of Loch Ness. This volume, published in 1968, surveys the available anecdotes and blurry photos.[2] His baffling conclusion is that the “fish without fin” is a Tully monster[3], a tiny creature from the Pennsylvanian. Of course, first of all, the Tully monster was only a few inches long, and second of all, it’s been extinct for three hundred million years. Nevertheless, GMs and writers will find much inspiration in the tales of various creatures which flop and crawl around the loch in this book. An entire story could be made of the attempts to find, kill, or save some such monster.
In the Wake of the Sea Serpents is a much more exhaustive, and exhausting, book. Written by founding cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, also an author of books on the Kraken and on surviving Neanderthals, it surveys literally all accounts of sea serpents and other monstrosities from early times until the post-WWII era (1969) when the book was published. The reader must wade (if you will) through a number of nearly-identical accounts of strange encounters, but some may skip to the end, which has a detailed account of several types of purported sea monsters, and would be most useful for tale-tellers and GMs.
What can we salvage from the wrecks of cryptozoology? Well, the general theme of these reviews is the same: the fantastic is constantly retreating from us. Where Heuvelmans could imagine krakens and serpents in the deep sea, we have the miserable news of declining fish stocks. But the worlds of our imagination, at least, are endless, and these books might help an avid world-maker. Recommended with reservations.
I finally took the plunge and decided to read Isom #1. I ended up live-tweeting it, which was a lot of fun to do. The TL;DR is that Isom #1 is terrible.
You can read the full thread here:
all right. i'm gonna do it. i'm gonna read Isom.
i confess, so far, i have only seen parts taken out of context that specifically highlight the "bad" parts.
no one was able to tell me what is good about it, so i'm gonna have to see for myself.
— Cirsova – Summer Issue Out Now! (@cirsova) June 17, 2024
Here’s the “review” part that came after the live-read:
Okay. Is Isom #1 the worst comic I’ve ever read? No. The Purple Snit, Radio Boy, Aristocratic etc. Thieves, are all way worse than Isom.
It’s not very good, though. For how long it is, very little interesting actually happens in it. The art is ugly and soulless but serviceable. The backgrounds and angles are terrible, but better story would make it easier to overlook.
It reminds me of some of the more mediocre late 90s, early 00s comics I’ve read, just a bit more decompressed. We don’t get a lot of reason to care about Avery nor do we get any idea of what’s going on that he’s trying to avert.
He’s speed-running what killed a lot of mainstream interest in comics around the time I was in highschool.
Anyway, I wish this girl was in more than two pages because I dig her and she is the best part of Isom #1.
Anyway, that thread got Alexander Macris of ACKS fame interested in having me do the same for his comic, Ascendant: Star Spangled Squadron, so he sent me a review copy.
My read through of Ascendant can be found here:
Okay, so, after this thread, @archon asked if I'd live tweet a read of his new comic, Ascendant: Star Spangled Squadron.
— Cirsova – Summer Issue Out Now! (@cirsova) June 20, 2024
It wasn’t perfect, but for the most part, it was pretty rad. After my live-read, here’s my review:
Okay, so, overall, I really enjoyed this book. I think that the first half to two-thirds of it could’ve been tightened up; the first part had A LOT of Manticore and setting things up. Also, too many pages were spent building up Stiletto, whose characterization would have come through anyway later during the fight and the short epilogue.
Like I said, the best characters are the ones we get those small glimpses of but who we know who and what they are from seeing them in action rather than reading their thoughts and watching them solo.
The art, overall, is better-than-serviceable at its worst, and pretty damn cool at its best. My only real complaint is that the last 30 pages are so fucking rad that it’s a shame you have to read the first 60 to get to them.
It has structural issues that integrate a lot of my pet peeves about modern team books and supers comics, BUT I think that maybe they got a lot of them out of the way in this first issue so that in the second issue, we will go straight to rock and roll.
Is this book perfect? NO. It’s got some issues and it’s got some eye-rolling cringe. On the other hand, YES this book is worth checking out, YES it was better than ISOM #1, and YES, I would be interested in seeing where it goes.
People have said that the Rippaverse spinoffs are better, but I don’t honestly care. To me, the biggest problem is that Isom feels like a supporting character in his own book, where most of the interesting things are used to setup spinoff books instead of giving us a reason to be interested in and care about Isom.
If you stripped out every part of the book except for Yaira fighting Alphacore and kicking the crap out of Isom, it would’ve worked as an okay Yaira #0.
We never really get to see Isom be cool and he only overcomes the mooks in the second fight because the plot demands he not lose a second time despite not doing anything different and not actually coming in with any sort of a plan.
Any criticism of “bad” right-wing art is seen as deleterious to “the movement.” It’s why Isom has been such a hot potato: it wasn’t a good comic, the emperor has no clothes, but criticism levelled against it is criticism of someone who is “standing against wokism in comics.” Even if his business acumen is spot on, it’s a bad book, but saying so throws off a lot of people’s Friend or Foe indicators. Does that make Eric July a bad person? No, man, it’s just a really bad comic, and some of y’all are crazy for stanning it like you do. Just like the people who obsessively stalk and harass him at every opportunity for writing a bad comic and still making a shitload of money off it are crazy, too.
As for Ascendant? Look, even despite its flaws, this book was a LOT of fun and there were a lot of cool things I could point out and say “this is awesome! this is cool! this is worth it! I want to see where this is going!” To that extent, I DO endorse Ascendant and am looking forward to the next installment.
Readers of SF seldom wonder where the genre came from. Some few might trace things back to Frankenstein or H. G. Wells. Others might point at Hugo Gernsback or “Doc” Smith, but the name of Edward Page Mitchell is seldom mentioned in such conversations. In The Crystal Man, SF historian and editor Sam Moskowitz presents the work of this forgotten 19th-century magazine folklorist and SF author. (A historian of SF, Moskowitz himself is nearly forgotten today; his works Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow should be better known.)[1]
A Maine native, Mitchell lived in several places as a child and eventually settled in New York. After his “Back From That Bourne” appeared in the Sun, he sold stories on a regular basis. Since they appeared without a byline and were not always labeled as fiction(!), tracking down Mitchell’s work was extremely difficult when Moskowitz decided to do so. Mitchell continued to write stories for the Sun and Scribner’s, becoming editor-in-chief of the Sun in 1903. He was editor when the Sun published the famous “Is There A Santa Claus” editorial in response to a letter sent by Virginia O’Hanlon. He died in 1927.
So, how are the stories? The best known is probably “The Tachypomp”, lauded by Moskowitz as the first mention of faster-than-light travel[2]. However, rather than being on a spacecraft, the machine uses the “racecar-on-a-train” effect. The titular tale deals with a man who becomes invisible via mad science, along with his clothes (unlike the later Wells tale). In “The Balloon Tree” the tree is a lost-world “intelligent alien,” and it saves the narrator. And so on. The fantasy stories, as we’d call them, are often reminiscent of Poe, who was as important to Mitchell as to many other authors. They are often well-written, with “The Shadow on the Fancher Twins” an example: the twins are linked by a mysterious power, and this anticipates the several stories of twins having telepathy, which became common in SF at one point.
So, Mitchell, as interpreted by Moskowitz, was a SF/fantasy pioneer, an inventor of key concepts which were later picked up and developed by other writers at greater length, and with more narrative authority. His ideas were first-rate; he may well have inspired Wells, Burroughs, and other writers. The excellent historical detective work which has uncovered his authorship remains among the landmarks in SF historiography, even if the stories themselves are not the best writing that the Sun ever featured. Recommended for enthusiasts of SF history.
[1] As well as Under the Moons of Mars, an anthology of early sword-and-planet work.
A fantastic review of our Summer issue just dropped on Upstream Reviews.
Cirsova Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense has outdone itself in this issue….There is something for everyone in this issue as fate and the Fae vie for life and death while men struggle in the trenches. Bizarre and humorous calls to late night radio shows featuring the weird and mysterious lighten the mood, while tales of fleshy monsters and dark demons will ensure you never want to wander the halls of academia without a weapon to hand.
The Creek Tumors By MARK PELLEGRINI Strange and disgusting fleshy masses begin to wash up near the University! Is it a dead body, biological waste, a chemical spill, or something much, much worse?!
No-Rooms at a Kellogg Inn By ANDREW MAJORS A drifter finds a mysterious cabin isolated in the woods! The well-stocked cottage becomes his personal paradise until he discovers the secret in its basement!
Range of Deceit By JOSEPH W. KNOWLES Clive, a US Marshal, and his former Deputy are investigating a series of cattle killings at the Daniels ranch! But these don’t seem to be the work of ordinary rustlers!
Songs of Loss and Love By JIM BREYFOGLE Edward lies mortally wounded in No Man’s Land… When Edward drinks from a fetid puddle, a dying water sprite offers him aid and reprieve on one condition!
The Death of Robespierre By DANIEL J. MINUCCI The campus of Braidwell College is closing down for the holidays… A Professor is left with a simple task: tend a lantern belonging to a dead author in the archives!
Flyboy By BLAKE CARPENTER Reed Diesel’s plane goes down while dogfighting over the Pacific! His leg injured, he must rely on the aid of the island’s natives… a tribe of beautiful women!
A Most Exquisite Specimen By J. Manfred Weichsel A renowned lepidopterist seeks out new prizes for his university’s collection when he makes an astonishing find… A stunning young woman with butterfly wings!
The Twilight Delve Home Owners Association By MISHA BURNETT Pete and his family have recently moved into Twilight Delve, a lovely community of good people, good amenities, good schools… So what’s the catch?
Mystery in Egyptian Blue By JEFFERY SCOTT SIMS Sterk Fontaine, professional procurer of arcane curios, has a simple job: convince a collector to sell an ancient cat statue to him and not a psychopathic necromancer!
Midnight Caller By J. ISHIRO FINNEY It’s AM Dusk Till Dawn with Bart Shale, where the odd and alien take over the talk radio airwaves! One caller has a close encounter of the darndest kind!
Requiem for a Revolver By RODICA BRETIN A hundred years, the Revolver has kept its story, of men who went over the top, of a family destined to fight in eternal conflict… a story it tells to Kayla Blackmoon!
The Superior Griefs (Part 2) By MICHAEL TIERNEY With the help of itinerant Wild Stars princess Atlanta, Gigwanator-Superior has hijacked the Gravedigger 2! The Superior Grief’s plan is set in motion for a rendezvous at the Damocles Relay Station to evacuate a pack of deadly Sword Griefs!
My Name is John Carter [Part 18] By James Hutchings
Ben Espen just posted an amazing in-depth review of Jim Breyfogle’s A Bad Case of Dead!
A Bad Case of Dead Book Review 🧵
Jim Breyfogle's A Bad Case of Dead is in some ways a very traditional romance in a Victorian setting. We find a grim and dirty, but quite lively London with many economic opportunities available to the bold and the lucky. pic.twitter.com/ibk2u8EcSv
Cirsova 