Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds Live on Kickstarter!

Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds is live now on Kickstarter!

Ours is a culture that adores the elephantine, the cyclopean, the Brobdingnagian. Bigger is better, we are told, and the biggest is the best. People love big stories, with a cast of thousands, and Vista-vision widescreen special effects. Heroes must be larger than life, and devils blacker than they are painted, and entire worlds must be set aflame to create an ever-growing hunger for spectacle.

Oh, says I, that’s interesting. But that’s not what I do.

I write short stories, about little people in small worlds. That’s what you’ll find in this collection. In a couple of cases, they are literally small worlds, flyspeck heavenly bodies far out in space. In others the constraints are more metaphysical, worlds bounded by the vision of their inhabitants, an event horizon close enough to almost touch.

But one mustn’t suppose that the Lilliputian character of these stories means that nothing of significance happens in them.

Small worlds need saving, too. – Misha Burnett

Cirsova Publishing is proud to present Small Worlds, a brand new anthology of fiction [much of it previously unpublished], from short fiction master Misha Burnett. 

Small Worlds has all of the hallmarks of Misha Burnett’s fusion of SFF with classic weird, inviting the reader into the uncanny realms where the mundane has been pervaded by the strange, but also brings to the table his unique brand of white-knuckle thrilling adventure sometimes seen in the pages of Cirsova Magazine.

This collection features “Better Off Dead,” an all-new novelette-length Erik Rugar fantasy-noir thriller, “This Green and Pleasant Sky,” a novella about farming… on an asteroid populated by women prisoners, “My Grandfather’s Grandfather Balled Goddesses,” a Sword & Sorcery adventure set in the world of Cha’alt, and much much more!

The Stories

• Josef: A Fable – What happens when Society has officially decided that you’re just not good enough?
• Better Off Dead – In an all new Erik Rugar adventure, Dracoheim’s premier agent investigates a potential undead uprising that coincides with the return of a legendary serial killer!
• 284 Miles to Empty – A mysterious phone call from out of time brings two strangers together!
• Johnny and the Nightmare Machine – Johnny discovers that farming gold in an abandoned MMO somehow pays out real cash! But where is the money coming from, and what is the catch?
• They Delved Too Deep – Construction workers in an underground parking garage accidentally break into forgotten catacombs!
• The Irregular – The last survivors of human kind wage guerilla war against the aliens who have occupied earth!
• This Green and Pleasant Sky – Todd Allard is given a debtor’s sentence to an asteroid penal farm, only to find that it has already been run into the ground by the women prisoners who have made it their playground! Can he turn things around before they’re all liquidated?!
• Fragile – A technician with brittle bone disease on a remote space outpost must face off against a deadly femme fatale!
• The Fall of a Storm King – Luther lives his life overclocked so he can pilot around the rings of Saturn until an accident forces him to find new work!
• My Grandfather’s Grandfather Balled Goddesses – An unlikely duo must join forces to survive the wastelands of Cha’alt!

Rewards

$3 – Small Worlds eBook

Receive digital copies of Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds.

$20 – Small Worlds Pocket Paperback

Receive a pocket paperback copy of Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds + ebook.

$20 – Small Worlds Trade Paperback

Receive a paperback copy of Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds + ebook.

$40 – Small Worlds Hardcover

Receive a linen-wrapped hardcover copy of Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds + ebook.

$70 – All Formats

Receive all physical formats of Small Worlds + eBook.

Add-Ons

$10 – Digital Add-on Pack

eBooks of An Atlas of Bad Roads, Endless Summer, and Bad Dreams and Broken Hearts

$10 – Signed Bookplate

Bookplate signed by Misha Burnett

$10 – Audiobook of An Atlas of Bad Roads

Audiobook of Misha Burnett’s An Atlas of Bad Roads, read by Brandon Cassinelli! Be one of the first to get this DRM-free audiobook edition BEFORE it’s available anywhere else!

$10 – Audiobook of Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer

Audiobook of Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer, read by Brandon Cassinelli.

$10 – An Atlas of Bad Roads Trade Paperback

Add on a physical copy of An Atlas of Bad Roads. [US-only]

$10 – Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer Trade Paperback

Add on a physical copy of Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer. [US-only]

$10 – Bad Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Case Files of Erik Rugar Trade Paperback

Add on a physical copy of Bad Dreams and Broken Dreams. [US-only]

Risks and challenges

The Book is in the can! The biggest challenge is going to be fulfillment. Cirsova Publishing has a 7 year track record of delivering on high quality publications on-time and often early.

Epic Fantasy

I’ve been reading Footfall by Niven and Pournelle lately. It’s the second joint of theirs that I’ve read, the other being Mote in God’s Eye.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that they’re basically writing epic fantasy where they namecheck Carl Sagan.

>multiple POV
>world/empire-spanning action
>epic fate of the world stuff
>monsters and magic

One of the places where these works are different from most l’epic fantasies is that they’re self-contained works. You get all of your heroes, villains, factions and whatnot, and you get your complete story, beginning, middle, and end in one go.

Lately, there has been some very loud complaining that the market seems to be shifting against Epic Fantasy, and the blame is, naturally, being put on people like Martin, Rothfuss, and Jordan. Yes, sometimes authors never finish their foreverlong series cuz they get lazy or don’t have an ending planned and find they’ve written themselves into an inescapable corner. Other times, authors die, leaving their story to be completed by others.

But there’s also a general shift, I think, in what readers are wanting: stories with payoff. It’s not just a question of whether a series will finish, it’s a question of will it stick the landing and make the lead-up worth the investment. If a series goes for 5 books, and the ending sucks, readers might feel cheated by their investment in the previous 4 volumes. It’s been speculated that one reason Martin can’t finish his series is that he realizes he can’t offer any satisfying payoff in a series that was about destroying tropes and expectations of Epic Fantasies.

Conventional wisdom has been “Write long series to boost your numbers and milk the fans of your series.” There’s an assumption, with some data to back it up, that standalone books are harder to market than series, in part because series can build momentum.

But momentum is not exclusive to series: telling good stories and establishing a solid track record builds momentum, too. Michael Crichton only wrote one sequel, and he likely whiffed it to not become the series guy. Dick Francis’s stories were mostly standalone, though thematically tied. Tony Hillerman’s mysteries are part of a series, but they’re all standalone stories. There are not intense debates over the read order of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books.

While everyone loves Tolkien, and some will go out of their way to posit him as a herculean be-all, end-all of fantasy, one of the examples no one wants to follow is “write your story first.” Tolkien submitted Lord of the Rings as a complete work which his publisher broke into separate volumes due to the length. He did not write the first 20% of a story and hope it did well enough to justify writing the other 80%. But no, some would argue, it’s impossible to expect that authors wanting to follow in Tolkien’s footsteps, these hypothetical “Tolkien 2s” as some writers have referred to them, follow their idol’s example and write their whole damn story before asking for reader buy-in.

While it’s taken awhile for us to roll out Mongoose & Meerkat serially, it was actually brought to us as a finished work. It could’ve been published as a single doorstopper volume, but it worked out better for us, and hopefully for Jim, to publish the stories first serially in the magazine and then as collections as the serialization progressed. But the series has been in the can since at least 2017, and we’ve had the full publication arrangements for it in place since at least 2019.

Wild Stars is a bit of a different animal, and I think that the realities of today’s market is what makes it a tougher sell for us. While Wild Stars is unfinished, we stepped in as publisher VERY late in its history [nearly 35 years in, to be exact], yet 2/3s of the Wild Stars in print now has been both written and published in the last 4-5 years. If anything, our own publication schedule has been slowing Michael down since his retirement, but we can only manage serializing and publishing one Wild Stars book a year. This year, we begin serialization of the 7th installment, collection of the 6th, and Michael has already shown me the draft for the 8th book in the series. While most of the Wild Stars adventures work as stand-alone stories, the length and history of the series, not to mention the drastic shift in mediums might make entry into the series somewhat daunting for new readers.

However, if you are waiting for Wild Stars to be finished before committing to the series, please know that I do not think you are, as one FamousTM Epic Fantasy writer so recently put it, an “entitled little shit.” Instead, let me say that I hope that you will check out the series when it is finished, which should be around 2028 at this rate. By then, we will probably have 3 coffee table omnibus collections, each collecting four volumes of Wild Stars. If you’re wanting to give the series a shot now, however, you can pick the first omnibus up for $68 + S&H if you use the promo code WELCOME15 at checkout.

Or, if you just don’t like huge sprawling epics or even series at all, we invite you to check out Misha Burnett’s upcoming anthology, Small Worlds, or his Chinaski Award-nominated An Atlas of Bad Roads (audiobook coming soon), Erik Rugar, or Endless Summer.

Coming Soon: Misha Burnett’s Small Worlds

Ours is a culture that adores the elephantine, the cyclopean, the Brobdingnagian. Bigger is better, we are told, and the biggest is the best. People love big stories, with a cast of thousands, and Vista-vision widescreen special effects. Heroes must be larger than life, and devils blacker than they are painted, and entire worlds must be set aflame to create an ever-growing hunger for spectacle.

Oh, says I, that’s interesting. But that’s not what I do.

I write short stories, about little people in small worlds. That’s what you’ll find in this collection. In a couple of cases, they are literally small worlds, flyspeck heavenly bodies far out in space. In others the constraints are more metaphysical, worlds bounded by the vision of their inhabitants, an event horizon close enough to almost touch.

But one mustn’t suppose that the Lilliputian character of these stories means that nothing of significance happens in them.

Small worlds need saving, too. – Misha Burnett

Coming soon!

C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith as Han Solo?

I recently found my paperback collection of Northwest Smith. It had gone missing half-way through reading it [it got buried in various Kickstarter supplies earlier this year], but I’m happy to be able to get around to finishing the last couple stories in it.

I know we’ve seen a common refrain that Northwest Smith is ‘the inspiration’ for Han Solo, but I don’t know you guys…

Reading Lost Paradise, I get this mental image in my head:

“The Millennium Falcon is the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs…”

>the entirety of the Easy Rider graveyard sequence plays

“…and we’re NEVER doing that again, right Chewie?”

Like almost all of CL Moore’s writing, Northwest Smith is DEEP in the neo-gothic tradition of early weird and turn of the century orientalism. Space becomes the new backdrop for the alienness of the harems, mosques, and bazaars of the middle east. With the Orient being rapidly brought into global affairs to the point of becoming nearly prosaic, space allowed for a more timeless and universal setting than, say, Tangier. It allowed for a haunted Arabian Nights setting an a world of modernity and rapidly advancing technology.

Smith is a raygun slinger, sure, but he has more in common with Lovecraft’s protagonists than he does Leigh Brackett’s space merc adventurers from just a few years later. He may be more of a chad than Randolf Carter or HP’s other poindexter POVs, but ultimately, Smith is there to experience and be subjected to the weird.

One of the key elements of horror is denial of agency, and Northwest Smith has that in spades. He has “adventures” but they usually end up with him being presented with mind-breaking horrors and cruelties he is incapable of doing anything about.

But about Han Solo…

“Chewie, when the rabbit bites its own head off, I want you to throw that fucking radio into the tub with me.”

There are similarities, and before I’d read much Northwest Smith, I took them at face value, but I really don’t think they go beyond the surface. They pretty much begin and end with “freelance space smuggler who has a fast spaceship and an alien partner.” You might end up with a Han Solo if Lucas had heard of Northwest Smith but not read any of the stories. Or even if he was wholly unfamiliar with Smith but was aware of the idea of the rugged freelance space smuggler [which is hardly unique, even if Smith was an early example].

I think what may actually be more likely is that Star Wars created a boom in readership that led to a rediscovery of CL Moore in paperbacks by younger readers in the late 70s and early 80s [my paperback copy is from 82 and is the same as the one posted above]; those readers found Northwest Smith and then identified him with Solo.

Now, was Lucas aware of Smith? Maybe! Shambleau was one of Moore’s most frequently reprinted stories and had been present in collections and Best Ofs for years leading up to Star Wars, and that particular story has Northwest Smith’s most Han Solo-like setup and characterization [though it’s fairly incidental to the story itself].

Even if he did take those characterizations and apply them to Han, that’s really about as far as the similarities go. Mostly because Moore was writing in a gothic framework despite the “dashing spaceman with fast ship” characterization.

So, while we can call him an ‘ur example’ or whatever, Northwest Smith no more resembles Han Solo than Jirel of Joiry resembles Red Sonya. And comparing Smith to Solo actually really undersells Smith and what Moore was doing with him.

[As an addendum, one of our bros, MegaBusterShepard has pointed out that Han Solo actually has a lot more in common with E.C. Tubb’s Earl Dumarest character from the Dumarest of Terra books. I can’t confirm as I haven’t read them, but I am aware of them by reputation, and what I do know about them and given their timeframe, that sounds more plausible.]

Wild Stars V Out in All Formats

Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars V is out now in all formats.

• eBook
• Softcover
• Hardcover

Need to catch up on Wild Stars? Really, at this point, the cheapest and easiest way is with the Wild Stars Omnibus. Use promo code WELCOME15 at checkout for 15% off. This tome contains all 4 previous volumes of Wild Stars in a single coffee table format.

Submissions Question: How long does it take to hear back?

Here’s a question we get sometimes: When should I expect to hear back from you after I’ve submitted my story?

It’s kinda hard to say, since I’m the one reading all of the stories. If we get a lot of stories, it takes longer to hear back from us.

First of all, we will always send a confirmation of receipt email once we’ve received and downloaded your manuscript. If it has been a few days and you have not gotten a short, polite “Thank you for your submission, blah blah blah,” it means we probably didn’t receive your manuscript, in which case, try to follow up no later than the 10th of August. We’ll allow for some grace depending on the circumstances, but it depends on more factors than I can really outline here.

Now, regarding rejections and offers:

If you submitted to us on the first day of submissions and it’s taking awhile to hear from us, it likely means we’re still considering your story but haven’t reached a final decision based on our budget and space constraints.

If you submitted to us on the last day of submissions and it’s taking awhile to hear from us, it likely means we haven’t gotten to your story yet. We really do try to give everyone who submits a fair shake, but there does come a point where I’m pretty happy with a stack of stories that I’ve read, and every story I read after that stands a chance of getting in means bumping off something I’d already been strongly considering, possibly even set my heart on!

So, it’s not a bad idea to submit early if you can! [and by early, I mean on the first day that we are open, not before we open–please don’t do that].

I’ll try to have everything settled by the end of September: that’s the target. Earlier would be nice. If we’re still holding onto your story by sometime in September but we haven’t contacted you with an offer yet, we may contact you to let you know that you haven’t been forgotten about and are still under consideration.

Again, the biggest factor is how many stories we get. Could be a hundred. Easy peasy. We get nearly 200 or more like we have some years? That makes it tougher. Like I said, we try to give all the stories a fair shake, but we’re really limited in how much we can afford to buy and place. And yes, I will play favorites with past contributors and IPs I’m personally a fan of, but there’s never a guarantee.

Don’t forget to support An Atlas of Bad Roads in the meantime! It’s the absolute last chance for Cirsova to make additional on-hand cash for 2023 acquisitions!

Cirsova Interview with Dave Martel of Bizarchives

In this interview, we talk Cirsova deepest lore, going back to even before we found Jeffro, plus music, and dunking on bad SFF covers!

This was a lot of fun. Check it out!

Don’t forget to check our Mongoose and Meerkat on Kickstarter! Time is almost up for pre-orders!

Cirsova on Wordcraft Podcast

We were on the Wordcraft Podcast last night with Kat Rocha and J. Ishiro, plus a drop-in appearance of Fiannawolf. It was a lot of fun: check it out!

Jim Breyfogle was on a surprise Superversive stream with Ben Wheeler! You won’t want to miss either of these shows. [Ben turns his fan off after the first couple minutes, please bear with it!]

Advertise in Our Fall Issue!

The Summer issue of Cirsova is out now! That means the Fall issue of Cirsova will soon be upon us!

Advertising rates can be found here: https://cirsova.wordpress.com/cirsova-magazine/advertising/

We’re accepting all ads except for back cover [which has already been sold]

We’re still hoping to do submissions during the first week of August, but I just got hit with about $4k in plumbing expenses. The good news: I’ve got the money. The better news: Cirsova is already front-loaded with 75K words of fiction for 2023 by special arrangement. The bad news: Unless we get a major cash injection soon, we’ll probably be just looking at around 100k words and 2 issues next year, or kick back Open Submissions/go invite-only.

The two fastest ways for us to get the cash we need in time to buy things in August:

• Back Mongoose and Meerkat: those funds will clear by mid July, just in time to give us a shot in the arm
• Take out an ad in the Fall/Winter issues

Cirsova Summer 2022 Paperback Available on Amazon Today!

We’re two days late because the price drop didn’t process within the 72 hour window, but you can now buy the Summer 2022 issue of Cirsova on Amazon for $14.99. You can still get it from Lulu (on nice paper) for $14.99, or $34.99 in linen-wrapped hardcover. But I know a lot of people just like to buy stuff from Amazon [I’m kind of one of them], so rock on with it!