Cirsova Four, Part Three

Great news for Cirsova Fans: Issues Five and Six are fully funded.  The Kickstarter managed to beat it's goal by more than 25%, and we get another year of great short fiction.  Let's celebrate with some reviews!

The Witch of Elrica

A nice light read featuring an illegitimate prince who falls for a foreign sorceress.  Stories like these are the glue that hold a magazine like Cirsova together.  This isn’t a deep or particularly meaningful story, but it hits all the right notes.  It’s a straight ahead fantasy that gives you a taste of politics, a bit of magic, and a fight where the stakes are real and important.  It also features a cast of sympathetic royal characters struggling to find a path through trouble caused by old customs and an easily riled populace.  Jennifer Povey’s unpretentious style here is a welcome breath of fresh air.

The Vault of Phalos

The light read of The Witch of Elrica is followed by a heavy handed tale, and it works.  You’ve had your palette cleansed, and you’re ready to sink your teeth into something meaty, and Jeffery Scott Sims is there for you, man.  His comma-filled prose is wordy, dense, and almost poetic:

A company of armored legionnaires trooped down the rocky defile from the chill forest into the green valley wherein lay Maronais amidst its budding fields.  At their helm, on powerful steeds, rode two of Dyrezan’s finest, the aristocrats Nantrech and Morca, the former a wide-ranging scholar esteemed for his legendary mind, the latter famed for his prowess in battle.  Both belonged to the highest rank among magicians, and their sending into such an isolated region indicated the importance, and understood in their distant home, of this undertaking.

The two have been dispatched to deal with a demonic disease-cult ravaging the small bucolic land of Maronais, and the answer to their quest lies within the titular vault.  The whole story reads like that paragraph, and that strange style takes a few paragraphs of getting used to.  It’s strong, heady stuff that gives the story a mythic air and turns a routine story about an investigation into a disease-themed death cult into a gripping read.

The Bubbcat
This is the sort of story that makes me love Cirsova.  The seventh story in Cirsova’s Winer 2016 issue represents the first no-foolin’ science-fiction story.  The Sands of Rubal-Khali hints at a broader sci-fi setting, but the story has its feet planted firmly in a pre-gunpowder fantasy setting.  The Bubbcat takes place in a near-future that feels very much like today’s world, only more so.  The general plot is a chase scene featuring a protagonist holding onto a powerful MacGuffin, and always trying to stay one step ahead of the billionaire tycoon that wants the MacGuffin for her own. Alex Monaghan tells this story with a deft touch, packing a lot of information into very few words.  The whole story – plot, motivation, setting – is presented in a casual, almost off-handed manner that forces the reader to pay close attention and fill in a lot of gaps.  The resulting slow reveal gives the end of this story a lot more punch than it should.  Given the shortness of the story, it’s astonishing how much investment Monaghan draws out of the reader.

A Suit of Haidrah Skin

Here’s another story that cheerfully dances along the line between fantasy and science-fiction, gleefully pulling ideas and touches from both and mashing them together into the pulpy style of adventure that just feels right.  An ancient wizard’s tower/rocket ship returns to the planet from whence it was banished after a long and terrible war.  When the great heroes die casual deaths fighting the menace head-on, a barbarian girl gets some advice from an oracle that leads to a much more convoluted heist/assassination mission.  Rob Lang’s writing doesn’t leap off the page the way Jeffery Scott Sims or Schuyler Hernstrom’s does, given that this adventure tale features so many new and imaginative creatures, villains, tricks, and traps, that’s actually a good thing.  The prose remains unobtrusive and allows the weirdness of the setting and characters to take center stage.

We Need to Talk About James Hutchings’ Poetry…

…And of course when I say, “We need to talk,” what I mean is, “I need to lecture you about.”

The mastermind behind Cirsova Magazine knew what he was doing when he commissioned “My Name Is John Carter” and spread it out over several issues.  He’s got me hooked on this literary drug, and every time he offers up another hit of this story, I’ll be right there sitting on the curb outside the Circle-K taking a hit.

For those of you who aren’t aware, “My Name Is John Carter” starts from a very simple premise: What if you retold “A Princess of Mars” not in prose form, but as a Homeric poem?

You might cringe at the blasphemic notion of twisting one of the all-time great books into long form poetry.  Sacrilege!  You would probably do that if, like me, your potential love of epic poetry was strangled in the crib by an education system that loves literary gimmicks above all else, that premise probably sounds tedious.  If, like me, your main experience with poetry consists of listening to the litanies of pointless phrases and empty alliteration spouted by “Poet Laureates” at the inaugurations of the God-Emperor’s predecessors or the dreary exercises thrust upon students in classrooms, you might even roll your eyes at the notion.

Slow that roll, my dude!

Hutchings strings rhythm and rhyme together to present a rollicking tale of adventure that is Homeric in scope, but that doesn’t pay the price of two thousand years of language and culture drift.  His wordplay is thoroughly modern, but no less epic.  Many writers fall head over heels in love with their own cleverness, but Hutchings dodges that trap by never letting his ingenious word choices overshadow the story itself.  To compare him to another classic poet, he writes poetry with the grace and style of a modern day Kipling.

I know what you’re thinking, but hold that thought for a few paragraphs.  Kipling’s neglect in American High School English classes is borders on child abuse.  Telling kids that poetry is great and then not exposing them to Kipling is like telling kids sculptures are great and then not showing them anything from the Renaissance period.  No art instructor worth his salt would fail to show students Michelangelo’s David as a prime example of just how good sculpture can be, and yet countless English teachers commit the same by showing students the literary equivalent of a statue made of used tampons.

Seriously, if the English teachers of America truly wanted to instill our youth with a love of poetry, they’d cram Kipling down their throats early and often, and leaven that fare with a light spice of Chesterton.  Trying to pawn off Maya Angelou as a worthy successor to these guys is like trying to pass a Big Mac off as prime rib.  Maya Angelou ain’t half bad.  Her craftsmanship is adequate, and her choice of subject matter is mostly inoffensive pap.  She might just be the best of what the modern poetry field has to offer, but holy cats is that damning the culture with faint praise.

Let’s get back to comparing Hutchings to Kipling.  Clearly, Hutchings comes off as second best in that comparison.  For one thing, Hutchings isn’t even telling his own tale – he’s ripping off Burroughs!  Granted, Kipling’s poems speak to universal truths of the human conditions and provide cutting and incisive insights into everything from war to romance and everything in between.  Kipling was a sage, a prophet, a patriot, and a realist all rolled into one.  Hutchings is just presenting a great tale, well told.

That aside – and admittedly it’s a pretty big “that” to set aside – Hutchings shares something very important with Kipling.  His word craft is clear and readable.

You wouldn’t think that would serve as high praise, and yet we’re talking about one eyed men in the land of the blind.  Like Kipling, Hutchings stands out amid a desolate wasteland of poetry marked by literary gimmickry specifically designed to block the reader’s attempts at understanding.  The modern way of poetry is to mystify, obscure, and block comprehension and understanding.  Modern poetry is an exercise in battle – the modern poets defy the reader to understand what he’s REALLY talking about, and the more obtuse the writing, the better.

Hutchings will have none of that.  There are four armed aliens to fight, princesses to save, and buckles to swash, and his rich and accessible word craft is as clever as it is unobtrusive.  Granted, his word choices often make me laugh out loud in awe at the sheer audacity of his writing, but it is the pure laughter of discovering an oasis in the midst of a desert.  That laughter is an expression of marvel that poetry could be used to such electric effect.  In Hutchings hands the choice of epic poetry fits hand in glove as a natural fit for retelling the saga of John Carter.  It harkens back to the days of oral tradition when poetry, rhythm, and rhyme were used to lend weight and meaning to the epic legends and histories.

In the end, and in the hands of James Hutchings, that simple premise gets turned on its head.  The question is not why tell John Carter’s saga in this manner, but why did it take so long to happen?

The only answer can be that it took a man with the talent and creativity of a Hutchings to get around to it.

Cirsova Four, Part Two

My continuing quest to review every story in Cirsova’s fourth issue has me feeling a little nervous.  I fell in love with the first two issues, and enjoyed the third, but this one is off to a rocky start.  The first story was so-so, the second one pretty darn good, and now the next two have me wondering where the magic went.

The Unfolding of the World, by Harold R. Thompson

This is a short story that felt like a small story.  The basic premise, a soldier of fortune exploring the buffer-state hinterlands, is solid.  Somehow, despite the large scale of the tale, it just felt too darn small.  Exploring a poorly mapped area at the edges of an empire, and clashing with the great civilization beyond should evoke a much greater scale and drama than this story manages to achieve.  A one paragraph side trek or two, or maybe a short passage stretching out the journey there or back again, would have gone a long ways towards establishing higher stakes in the story.  Had the fantasy nation been fleshed out as well as the characters, this would have been a real gem of a story.  As it is, it feels more like a lone wanderer finding a strange small town, and escaping from it to no real purpose.  Harold’s characterizations are great. His writing is solid, and it isn’t a bad story.  It just felt small and inconsequential. 

The Sands of Rubal-Khali, by Donald Uitvlugt

A woman captured by slavers who escapes into the hands of a bounty hunter and then clashes with an ancient sorcerer in his tower fastness hits all the right notes, but this story has the opposite problem of the previous.  There’s just too much going on.  Our heroine is on a fantasy world, but she is a spacer from another planet, and there are references to historical cultures as well.  Throw in at least one alien/fantasy species that isn’t given quite enough description, and you wind up with a lot of extraneous detail that interferes with the story itself.  This reads like a short story written for people who are already familiar with the setting and its background.  It feels like there’s this big, beautiful setting out there, but we get the barest hints of it, few of which are particularly germane to the story before us. Combine that with the constant uncertainty of where the heroine is going and why, and you get a tale that feels far more disjointed on first reading than it really is.  While writing this review, I went back and re-read it, and that second reading – when I knew why everyone was behaving as they did – was an improvement.  Unfortunately, saying the story needs to be read twice to be enjoyable just shifts the criticism to a new angle, leaving this story not quite up to Cirsova’s typical high standards.