New Pulp has no flagship. No Admiral on Earth could keep
these particular frigates from sailing joyously off in whatever direction they
please. But…if New Pulp DID have a flagship, it would probably be
Cirsova. Under P. Alexander’s
leadership, the magazine has acquired a wide enough following to lock down a
Hugo nomination, and will soon publish its seventh issue.
Issue #5 is seen by many as a particular bright spot for
Cirsova, with stories nominated for both
the Planetary and Ursa Major awards.
Recognizing the opportunity to achieve a wider readership, the editors
elected to make the issue free via Amazon for a week.
I like New Pulp, for the most part.
I like free things even more. I jumped at the
chance.
Cirsova #5 is divided
more or less evenly between standard tales of pulp adventure and a thematically
linked series of stories from Misha Burnett’s “Eldritch Earth” universe. The editor describes the concept as a sort of
Lovecraft-Burroughs fusion: the setting
is the Earth during the Triassic era, at the tail end of its occupation by
squamous alien entities who have not yet retreated to their slumber beneath the
glaciers. The Great Race are still hanging around their back porches, where
they shake their pseudopods irascibly at the kids in their yards, while various subject races of their
creation squabble for control of the primordial world. One of those subject
races is humanity, and it’s on that basis that the writers seek to wed the “sword
and planet” heroic fiction concept to the Lovecraftian milieu.
I struggle with this idea, and Mr. Alexander’s own notes
at the outset of the issue anticipate my objection:
“I have found cause
for gripe about a lot of fiction that’s labelled ‘Lovecraftian’—the biggest
being that it is not particularly Lovecraftian at all. To a large extent,
‘Lovecraftian’ falls into the same rut as Steampunk, only instead of gluing
gears to everything, it’s tentacles.”
This begs the question:
what IS Lovecraftian fiction? For
me, the defining characteristic is a cosmic horror born of the sudden
realization that humanity is not, in fact, at the top of the food chain;
indeed, that from a universal perspective, we’re not even insects. Lovecraft posits that entities exist whose
motives are not exactly malevolent, but so far beyond our understanding that to
even encounter them is a sanity-shattering experience.
Bluntly, I don’t know that this leaves much room for the
heroic. I don’t think Lovecraft’s
stories would have been improved if Randolph Carter had been handed an SMG and
he’d started mowing down shoggoths. New
Pulp is a celebration of human ability and potential. Lovecraft’s message is “your abilities are
irrelevant in a cosmic context, and you are potentially something’s dinner.” I don’t think, in short, that heroic fiction
can be made Lovecraftian by gluing some tentacles to it.
All the stories of Cirsova
#5 are well-written on a line-by-line level, but there are times when the conceptual
tensions show. The stories work least well when they try to transplant Robert
E. Howard to the Triassic, with brawny iron-age heroes mowing down scads of
enemy henchmen and advancing towards boss fights. Additionally, the whole Eldritch Earth
concept is still in an early stage developmentally, and as with other such
experiments (notably Baen’s Grantville) there are times when the authors
involved seem to be proceeding from fundamentally incompatible concepts of how
the story’s world works. I can just about
buy that humanity was designed as a slave race by Mind Flayers, but what’s up
with all these other late-Pleistocene mammals popping up all over the place? The horses?
The dogs? The tapirs? Or even Cretaceous critters such as birds,
for that matter? These aren’t story-killers, but they’re anti-atmospheric and destructive of reader immersion, and
the Eldritch Earth stories will become more fun for readers once the authorial
community leaves the tropes of iron-age Earth behind.
Now, all that aside, there is some damned good stuff in
here. In fact, in spite of my conceptual
misgivings, the Eldritch Earth stuff is as a whole the better half of the
issue. Three stories in particular stood
out to me. My favorite is actually not
one of the two award nominees; rather, I’d opt for the Eldritch Earth creator’s
own contribution, IN THE GLOAMING O MY DARLING by Misha Burnett. Burnett’s tale
is, for me, the most Lovecraftian of the bunch, in the sense that it places its
two young protagonists in a helpless position at the mercy of alien enemies
with inhuman agendas. The pathos of their situation is well-conveyed; both
characters pop as individual personalities and earn the audience’s rooting interest.
In addition to being a skilled crafter of characters, Burnett shows a
willingness to abandon the conventions of heroic fantasy when doing so serves
the story.
Schuyler Hernstrom decidedly does not abandon the conventions of heroic fantasy. But why the hell
would we want him to? Some people are
just right for their role, and Hernstrom is unmistakably right as an author of New Pulp.
The Planetary Award-nominated THE FIRST AMERICAN is a story born of a
genuinely brilliant twist on the Eldritch Earth formula, the nature of which is
foreshadowed in the title. Unmistakably Barsoomian in its approach, the story
is action-focused in the extreme, the plot not so much advanced in stages as
shot out of a cannon. And only a fool
would wish it to be otherwise. In the passages above, I’ve been dismissive of
the “slaughter henchmen en route to the boss” formula, but damnit, we NEED that
sort of story sometimes, and there’s a huge difference between seeing that sort
of story done well and seeing it done badly.
Hernstrom does it so well that I worry he may have been born seventy
years too late to find his audience. Hernstrom is potentially the
paradigm-defining author of New Pulp.
I was also a big fan of S.H. Mansouri’s Ursa Major-nominated
BEYOND THE GREAT DIVIDE, the title of which describes the author’s daring
decision to adopt the perspective of the insectile Slagborn, one of humanity’s
rival races. Looking at humanity through
segmented eyes, Mansouri successfully conveys a very Lovecraftian sense of
human fragility and impossible odds, but succeeds nonetheless in conveying a
sense of hope. In particular I respect Mansouri’s judgment in rejecting the
obvious authorial decisions—rather than going with the “hive mind” concept, he
adopts a more interesting perspective that fuses individual identity with
collective reasoning, and rather than rejecting emotional influences on his
perspective characters, he permits them to be influenced by them in insidious
ways, with full awareness, as if anger were a drug.
Cirsova #5 is,
above all else, a reminder of what wonderful days these are to be an author and
a reader. Even five years ago, these authors would have been scrambling to
shape their unique visions to a corporate audience, and those who enjoy their
work would have been subsisting on inferior scraps from other sources.
Technology truly has proven liberating for both creators and their audiences.
Here’s hoping that Cirsova’s still
around to scratch its readers pulp itch for a long, long time.