Cirsova magazine is subtitled “Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense.” Editor P. Alexander certainly attempts to deliver on the magazine’s description. It is hard to believe the magazine has been around for six years already.
Summer 2022, Volume 2, No 11 is 172 pages. Cover illustrating D. M. Ritzlin’s “Vran, the Chaos Warped” by Apriyadi Kusbiantoro. The issue contains two short “novels,” one novelette, five stories, and two poems.
D. M. Ritzlin’s “Vran, the Chaos Warped” is a sword & sorcery tale with the titular character deciding the sorcerer Foad Misjak has to die. The sorcerer does some really vile stuff. An accident sends both warrior and sorcerer to another world inhabited with cave men and goblins. Vran falls in the with the cave men while Foad Misjak commands the goblins.
Michael Tierney’s “Orphans of the Shadowy Moons” is part 2 of a 4 part serial. This is a sword & planet tale with a Tarzan sort of feral child, Strazis finding his destiny. This reminded me of the stuff DAW Books would publish in the 1970s.
“Death and Renewal” by Jim Breyfogle is the newest of this Mongoose and Meerkat series. There are now thirteen of them. “The Prince of Alomar has won a slave from the Bursa… Kat and Mangos must ensure the slave’s silence at all cost, but on one condition: they cannot kill him!”
Jeff Stoner’s “What Price the Stars” is a throwback to 1930s science fiction. “Jorgen Pangloss offers the promise of the unthinkable: faster-than-light travel! To what lengths will potential investors go to win Jorgen monopoly. . . and its fetters?”
I know J. D. Cowan from his “Between Wastland & Sky” blog site. “Dead Planet Drifter” is an interplanetary tale of a dead planet with ghosts are harnessed and transformed into energy. The story is a mixture of futuristic adventure and the supernatural. Interesting blend of ideas.
“The Last Khazar” by Rev. Joe Kelly goes back and forth from WW2 and the relationship between a German officer and a Polish Jew. The story goes back and forth in time to the Khazar Khaganate that existed around the Black and Caspian Seas and north of the Caucasus Mountains from the 7th to 10th Centuries. If you ever read Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe, you know the Khazars converted to Judaism. There is an element of racial memory on the lines of Jack London’s The Star Rover and Robert E. Howard’s “James Allison” stories. There is some shield-wall action in medieval times.
“Melkart and the Crocodile God” by Mark Mellon is part of new series to me. This is old school sword & sorcery with Melkart of Tyre. He has travelled to Kush in Africa where Sosostris, a sorcerer with the shape of both human and crocodile is terrorizing the capital of Meroe. This might be my favorite story in the issue.
Cirsova Summer 2022 is a wild issue. It is anything but boring. These are writers in the apprentice stage. Some will go on to bigger things. You can order this issue of Cirsova in Kindle format, softcover, or hardcover.
There is a lot of great stuff in this issue, and you’re absolutely correct when you say it is anything but boring. Thanks for the post.