Spring 2022 Reviews

There were two magazines this year that have issued numbers labelled seasonally instead of monthly or with simple numbers, the first I’ll consider is Cirsova. Vol 2, Issue #10: Spring, 2022. (Amazon (softcover) • Amazon (Kindle) • Lulu (softcover) • Lulu (hardcover).

 

First, I’ll address the proverbial elephant in the room. I have been told, but have yet been unable to independently confirm, that the publishers and/or editors of this magazine have some connection with the notorious and execrable Theodore Beale (or “Vox Day” as the racist styles himself). I have also been told that the connection is tenuous.

 

I ultimately decided to review the sword and sorcery stories in this magazine because it is my project to look at all the sword and sorcery published this year. It seems probable to me that if someone in Beale’s camp undertook a similar task, they would ignore or excoriate fine work because of the politics of the authors or of the stories. But as Michelle Obama famously said, “when they go low, we go high” (of course, we saw how that worked out). I do not know the politics of the authors of four sword and sorcery stories in this issue of Cirsova, though the stories themselves certainly all evince the conservatism that sees the preservation or return to the status quo that, to be fair, mars much fantasy.

 

So, on to the stories.

 

Jim Breyfogle’s “The Flying Mongoose” is competently, if banally, written. It tells the story of a pair of would-be dragonslayers entering the service of a mountain full of smiths who are so close to Tolkienesque or D&Desque dwarves that the author might as well have just called them that. There’s an exciting aerial battle. This is apparently part of a series.

 

Another series story is Adrian Cole’s “Serpent God of Mars” (which actually has a hotlinked footnote reminding me of those captions in older comics: “See Adventures of Hawkman #61 –ed.” that sort of thing). Again, competent writing here. It has a lot of the trappings of sword
and planet but is essentially sword and sorcery at heart. It concerns an evil body-hopping sorcerer (who apparently barely survived the previous entry in the series) being hunted by a soldier who has mental powers, which stand in for sorcery.

 

The use of music and high magic are the highlights of an otherwise unremarkable story by Jeffrey Scott Simms, “An Ayre by Landor.”

 

Owen G. Tabard (nice last name for a fantasy writer) uses the mythology and history of ancient Egypt in “The City of the Crocodile God.” Another series story, but in this case that’s not really distracting. The climax depends upon a very fine point of plot that is easy to overlook, but to be frank, the prose isn’t vivid enough to bother reading carefully enough to “catch” it. The villain is defeated in favor of another villain secretly gaining ascendence.

 

All in all, I didn’t find anything reprehensible in these stories, which was a relief, and I will continue to read and review the magazine. At the same time, I’m not sure this issue is worth three bucks for the sword and sorcery content.

 

Now, on to something much more exciting!

 

Whetstone issued their fifth issue this past spring with nineteen (quite short) stories and one poem. The magazine can be downloaded for free at the previous link, and there’s more than enough here to reward your time.

 

Whetstone is a labor of love undertaken by editor and scholar Jason Ray Carney and his associates. It proudly proclaims its status as an “Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery” on the cover. The obvious sense of “amateur” here is the original borrowing from the French. The first attestation in the Oxford English Dictionary in English dates to a 1757 letter of Sir W. Freeman’s, who wrote: “We make a tolerable concert for Amateurs, and thus entertain ourselves whenever we have an inclination.” This clutch of sword and sorcery offered by Carney, his colleagues, and his cohort of writers is certainly entertaining, and I’m glad everyone involved in the project show that they “have an inclination” towards the form.

 

For the sake of time and space, I’ll not offer thoughts on every single one of the stories published. Suffice it to say, they range from serviceable to outstanding. The challenge of writing stories this short (almost all the stories come in at seven pages) in any genre is to make the pieces something more than theme and special effects. Or, here, something more than a fight scene with some set dressing thrown in. Pretty much all these stories match that description to some extent or another, but all of them also evince subtler effects and, thankfully, effects that are hella fun!

 

The poem by Anthony Perconti, “Black Hearts Beneath Red Skies” offers some lovely imagery in the style of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth tales but then adds a Lovecraftian Mythos kick in the final lines. Nice work. The god Hastur, who also figures in the Mythos (most fully in August Derleth) is given a complete makeover in one of my favorite stories in the issue, “Eyes and Teeth” by the Reverend Joe Kelly. This story, like all the best here, manages the neat trick of having a beginning, a middle, and an end in a very brief tale. Another that pulls that off is “Arena of the Death Cult” by B. Harlan Crawford, which very much has the feel of a first episode in a series, which I would welcome given the rich characterization of the two protagonists. Also, they fight a giant pig. “The Riddle of Spice”

by Patrick Groleau is delightful with its unconventional narrator/hero, his unconventional solution to a deadly threat, and some wonderful language to boot. Anytime you read of adventurers described as “skullduggers and road agents,” you know you’re in good hands. Great lines actually abound throughout the issue. One of my favorites is this: “If I was going to die, I suppose it ought to be strangely, if it could not be bravely.” That’s from J. Thomas Howard’s arena story, “Gladiators of Ill Satal,” which reminded me, in a way, of A Princess of Mars. It’s as if the first battles fought by John Carter and Tars Tarkas were told from the green Barsoomian’s point of view. Another of my favorite lines can be found in “The Smoke Ship” by Nathaniel Webb. “A fresh southwesterly breeze whipped past the burning cutter, making flame-reddened horses of foam on the water and snapping Farager’s hair around her face.” Flame-reddened horse of foam. That’s the real stuff right there. Some of the remaining stories don’t quite fit my definition of sword & sorcery, but they’re all honest and efforts, some of them making effective use of real-world cultures and histories for inspiration and others taking place in wholly invented settings.  

 

I very much recommend taking a careful look at this magazine and feel confident that you’ll be glad you did.

 

Bonus content: Earlier this year, Oliver Brackenbury interviewed Whetstone’s editor, the aforementioned Jason Ray Carney, in an episode of his So I’m Writing a Novel podcast. You can listen to the informative and interesting interview here.