Tag Archives: James Hutchings

Spring 2023 Issue Out Now!

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The Spring 2023 Issue of Cirsova is Out Now!

The Unshrouded Stars
By DAVID SKINNER
When an astronaut confronts a lamia, she has a proposition for him: she will refrain from eating children for an entire year…if he will take her into outer space!

Hunger in the Void
By ANDREW GALLANT
Allan Buxley, a daring-hearted Voyager, ventures into an Orion Gate with his robot companion Sigma-6 in the Sagan-12… and finds a black hole on the other side!

The Gold Exigency
(Part 1 of 4)
By MICHAEL TIERNEY
A race of birdlike alien humanoids are being hunted and murdered for the gems grown in their skins! A cop seeking answers and looking to stop the killings is approached by an unlikely benefactor: Achilles Hister of the Artomique Corporation!

Quicksilver
By J. COMER
Cartmill Station has an outbreak of a deadly virus! Can a daring rescue mission to deliver nanomedicines using a dangerous experimental rocket reach them in time?

Comes the Hunter
By BILL WILLINGHAM
Following the trail of dead, the hunter closes in on his quarry: the last of the wizard knights! His magic exhausted, can he defeat his dastardly foe with his wits alone?!

Starring Hedy Lamarr
By TROY RISER
An alien intelligence on the moon with the ability to possess victims engages in an all out secret war against Earth! It’s up to a secret world-wide conspiracy to stop it!

The Feast of the Fedai
By JIM BREYFOGLE
Kat is intent on raising an army to reclaim Alness! Can she and Mangos arrange to recruit an elite core of highly trained Fedai in Alomar before her secret gets out?!

Egg
By JAIME FAYE TORKELSON
A geo-seismic research team is stationed on the strange moon Epsilon Epsilon Six, better known as Egg, a smooth and volatile body that could go at any moment!

Search Pattern
By WILLIAM SUBOSKI
A strange woman seemingly miraculously cures a man’s terminal cancer! His son has devoted his life to data sciences, but can he follow the clues to track her down?!

My Name is John Carter (Part 15)
By JAMES HUTCHINGS

Cirsova Issue # 1 Line-up Announcement + Other Updates

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I’ve gotten an amazing response from the SFF writing community over the last month and some change. I’m finally ready to announce the contributors to Issue 1 of Cirsova.

The hardest part of this has been holding my tongue until now because of how much I’ve wanted to sing the praises of the Cirsova authors. Seriously, these guys (and gals) rock, are totally amazing and certainly names to be on the look-out for.

Issue one of Cirsova will feature the following:

Short Stories
The Gift of the Ob-Men by Schuyler Hernstrom
This Day, At Tilbury by Kat Otis
Rose by Any Other Name by Brian K Lowe
Late Bloom by Melanie Rees
The Hour of the Rat by Donald Jacob Uitvlugt
At the Feet of Neptune’s Queen by Abraham Strongjohn

Novelette
A Hill of Stars by Misha Burnett

Poetry
My Name is John Carter by James Hutchings

Feature Column
Retrospective: Toyman by E.C. Tubb by Jeffro Johnson

The magazine is moving into phase two now. I’m soliciting artists for the first issue. As much as I would like to offer a fully illustrated first issue, I will probably only be looking at cover art at this time so I can keep the per-issue costs low for readers.

During this time, I’ll be doing some minor layout stuff and calculating available adspace. I will try to keep adspace unintrusive, mostly using it to fill white space between stories with a page or two devoted to potential sponsors.
Hopefully phase two will go as swimmingly as phase one did. Once that’s taken care of, I’ll be moving to phase 3: Kickstarter. When I initiate the Kickstarter for this, I want to have an almost finished product ready; once I get advertisers locked in and their advert images placed, I can go straight to print.  This will NOT be one of those Kickstarter debacles where a project is “almost finished and going to ship soon” for months or years.  Layout will be more or less done, all authors have been paid, the artist will have been paid, things will be almost ready to go BEFORE we Kickstart.  The Kickstarter will be about investing in the FUTURE of the Cirsova zine.  Any profits it makes will go toward making a second issue.

That said, there’s not going to be stretch goals, T-shirts, stickers, secret forums or skype calls; just what I know I can put in your hands: a high quality SFF adventure magazine full of great stories.

In other no less exciting news, in a week, Cirsova will have a guest post by Matthew D. Ryan, author of the excellent Drasmyr books!