Red Sun Magazine Issue 1

Red Sun Magazine is one of a handful of new up and coming short fiction SFF magazines that is aiming to bring back the action and excitement that the field was once known for.

They feature, in addition to a handful of stories, a few surprisingly high-profile interviews, including David Morrell, author of First Blood, and Margaret Weis, perhaps best known as ‘that Dragonlance author’.

Red Sun’s first issue also has several pieces of pretty cool looking full-color artwork.

The layout of Red Sun is really slick, but unfortunately the PDF uses a fake-sheen watermark that both made the pdf hard to read and difficult to print off, so I wasn’t able to get the full benefit of the layout work when I read it as a mobi. (which partly explains why it took me so long to finish reading it). They offer a print edition, so, as a fan of physical copies, I would recommend grabbing that for maximum enjoyment.

The stories may have been a little rough in spots that I would’ve wanted to see tweaked in this or that way (the Orion Incident, for instance, was great, but could’ve used a bit more satisfying ending), but they really set out to do what they aimed for and largely succeed. While Red Sun is not ‘retro’ or ‘pulpy’, it IS story-driven and action-packed Sci-fi. No fluffy think pieces or grim nihilistic tableau that don’t go anywhere. Red Sun contributors write the sort of stories I’d welcome in Cirsova, and Red Sun is the sort of publication that I would suggest my own contributors submit to when they have more stories than I have space for (I promise to only be a little jealous), and that’s really the highest recommendation I could give them.

I requested and received digital review copies of Red Sun Magazine. Cirsova was interviewed by Red Sun Magazine here.