Great stories published back in the day are all well and good, but isn't there a contemporary source for that old time fun? Yes, there is, but as is so often the case these days it comes out of the crowd of true rebels. To use a high school analogy, it isn't the people rebelling against Dean Wermer in carefully constructed and socially acceptable ways. It isn't the jocks thumbing their noses at an administration they know needs their on-field talent. It isn't the cool party types or even the counter-cultural types of The Current Year (be they hippies, slackers, or Berniebros).
It's the nerds. The guys who might care about social acceptance or fitting in or even dropping out in the right ways, but for whom all of that takes a distant back seat to an interest in ideas, theory, and a quest for knowledge. Those guys, the ones who go off and do their own thing and the world can go hang, those are the ones pushing boundaries today. The first biggest rejection of SJW entryism wasn't sports, it was video game nerds.
Turns out the poindexter crowd has learned some valuable lessons and. Not content merely holding the safe ground of video games, they are moving to recapture lost ground in a variety of areas. To the surprise of no one, literature - and specifically sci-fi and fantasy - is near the top of the list.With the major publishing houses going full retard a huge untapped market has developed for stories written to fit the aesthetic of sff from back in the pre-golden age days. Filling that need, a challenger enters the arena.
Cirsova. A magazine of sc-fi and fantasy.
A hundred pages of short fiction that includes everything from Conan-style barbarians, to long form epic poetry (that had great rhythm and that rhymes and yes that is important), to Burroughs style planetary adventure/romance, it has everything a fan of just plain adventurous fun could want. Cirsova doesn't play games with gender or lecture the reader about politics. It just gives you a string of good men struggling to do the right thing in the face of evil.
The first issue of Cirsova was so much fun, I threw down ten bucks to support the Kickstarter for the next issue. Forget 'on a scale of 1 to whatever', on a scale of 'would you pay good money for more of this', Cirsova rates a solid YES.
Footnote: Despite sci-fi/fantasy being my first love, and that so many of the big classic pulp titles are sci-fi/fantasy, I don't intend to spend much time talking about those sorts of genre fiction on this blog. With so much great commentary and analysis available at Jeffro Johnson's Blog and at Castalia House, there isn't much to add. The focus here is on detective, crime, and action/adventure stories written for an unapologetically male gaze.
