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Small Worlds
Cirsova Publishing is proud to present Small Worlds, a brand new anthology of fiction 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!
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!
190 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2023
3 people want to read
About the author
Misha Burnett
67 books61 followersI want to write stories unlike any that have ever been written before.
Yes, I know that there are only a few basic plots and everything has been done before, but I think there is still room for a personal vision.
I have always been fascinated by writers who invent their own worlds, their own cosmologies. That's my goal as a writer, to take my readers on a trip to a place where they have never been before, a place where no one has ever before.
I believe in that place, and I think it's all around us, just around the corner. I think the world is a stranger place than we imagine, a more dangerous and a more beautiful place than can imagine, and I want to share my world with you.
Come with me, I'll show you...
Yes, I know that there are only a few basic plots and everything has been done before, but I think there is still room for a personal vision.
I have always been fascinated by writers who invent their own worlds, their own cosmologies. That's my goal as a writer, to take my readers on a trip to a place where they have never been before, a place where no one has ever before.
I believe in that place, and I think it's all around us, just around the corner. I think the world is a stranger place than we imagine, a more dangerous and a more beautiful place than can imagine, and I want to share my world with you.
Come with me, I'll show you...
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 24, 2024
This collection of speculative fiction contains, apart from a brief 'Introduction', the following stories~
1. Josef— A Fable: A strange tale that went nowhere. Inauspicious beginnings, one might say.
2. Better Off Dead: Gritty, noirish tale featuring Erik Rugar.
3. 284 Miles to Empty: Supernatural, but even more poignant a tale, that leaves the reader with lots of questions, but also fulfills him in a way.
4. Johnny and the Nightmare Machine: An actual fable involving second chance.
5. They Delved Too Deep: Sharp, suspenseful tale dealing with urban legends.
6. The Irregular: Dystopian tale of an invaded earth.
7. This Green and Pleasant Sky: Best story of this book, with very well-realised characters and a solid plot.
8. Fragile: Space kills, but it also creates unlikely heroes, as we see in this compact and breathtaking tale.
9. The Fall of a Storm King: Another sharp story involving a fallen star rising to the occasion.
10. My Grandfather's Grandfather Balled Goddesses: Charming story set against a game-world.
Overall, I found this one to be a genuinely enjoyable book.
Cirsova has produced the book really well, but a few illustrations could have made it even better.
Highly recommended.
1. Josef— A Fable: A strange tale that went nowhere. Inauspicious beginnings, one might say.
2. Better Off Dead: Gritty, noirish tale featuring Erik Rugar.
3. 284 Miles to Empty: Supernatural, but even more poignant a tale, that leaves the reader with lots of questions, but also fulfills him in a way.
4. Johnny and the Nightmare Machine: An actual fable involving second chance.
5. They Delved Too Deep: Sharp, suspenseful tale dealing with urban legends.
6. The Irregular: Dystopian tale of an invaded earth.
7. This Green and Pleasant Sky: Best story of this book, with very well-realised characters and a solid plot.
8. Fragile: Space kills, but it also creates unlikely heroes, as we see in this compact and breathtaking tale.
9. The Fall of a Storm King: Another sharp story involving a fallen star rising to the occasion.
10. My Grandfather's Grandfather Balled Goddesses: Charming story set against a game-world.
Overall, I found this one to be a genuinely enjoyable book.
Cirsova has produced the book really well, but a few illustrations could have made it even better.
Highly recommended.
July 7, 2023
Burnett combines strange situations with characters who embrace hard work as a virtue, drawing together a range of examples of the weird being wonderful.
This collection contains ten short stories in a variety of genres:
“Josef: A Fable”: Josef, an ordinary man of ordinary accomplishment faces the question of whether his existence is worthwhile. Evoking the same faceless bureaucracy as Kafka and Gillam’s Brazil but without the same vaulting absurdities, Burnett captures the tawdry horror of feeling not quite good enough.
“Better Off Dead”: When a series of attacks by the undead echo a closed case, Erik Rugar fears a necromantic serial killer has returned to Dracoheim. Set in a city that lies in the liminal zone between cosmic horror and cautionary fairy tales and featuring a classic cynical detective protagonist, this story is a fresh and engaging noir perspective on urban fantasy. While it contains enough references to other other Rugar tales, thus offering little knowing joys to fans of the hero, Burnett skilfully maintains the same sense of internal completeness that Conan and many other classic pulp universes display, allowing readers unfamiliar with some or all of the other stories the same immediate access.
“284 Miles to Empty”: A long-distance lorry driver receives a series of phone calls, each apparently a wrong number but each supposedly from very different times. While this can be read as a metaphor for the rootlessness of people who travel for a living, Burnett keeps this very much a tale about specific people rather than simply indulging in magical symbolism.
“Johnny and the Nightmare Machine”: Coming across an old computer while clearing out a storage unit, Johnny discovers that the MMO he thought went offline many years ago is apparently still receiving—very odd—updates and, even more unexpectedly, someone will pay him to play. Burnett’s tale is for the less-than-realistic world of old computer games what Burroughs; Naked Lunch was for typewriters, creating a world that revels in the inexplicably weird while maintaining the feeling that there is a coherent truth if the reader can just delve a little deeper.
“They Delved Too Deep”: While renovating a basement, a group of construction workers break through a wall that isn’t on the plans into a complex filled with fantastical creatures and structures. Combining practical Twenty-First Century protagonists and high fantasy tropes, Burnett creates a variation on the classic modern man transported to another world narrative that smoothly avoids taking a stance on whether science or magic is ultimately true.
“The Irregular”: With the Earth taken by alien invaders and their strange flora, a mechanic joins a group of guerilla fighters in hope of securing new home. Superficially, this story is a working joe’s War of the Worlds; however, the combination of sweeping descriptions of alien power and intimate focus on human minutiae create a tense feeling humanity is merely struggling against the inevitable rather than the underlying imperialist hope of Wells.
“This Green and Pleasant Sky”: Sentenced to five years on the maintenance crew of an orbital farm, Todd Allard discovers that the ecosystem is collapsing under years of neglect and that he is the only man on a station full of women. Blending details of what a self-sustaining space habitat might be like with things likely to be familiar to anyone who has tried to unclog a sink or fix a problem with their hands, Burnett skilfully evokes the claustrophobia of being trapped both physically and socially.
“Fragile”: After years of voluntarily alone on a distant outpost, a technician allows a seductive pilot to pierce his isolation. With devious criminals, a dame with a history, and a protagonist who is on the fringes due to a deep-space medical condition, this story might best be described as sci-fi noir.
“The Fall of a Storm King”: Body and mind engineered to run at four times human norm, Luther makes a living flying impossible routes through Saturn’s rings—until an accident leaves his reactions a fraction of a second too slow to keep his license. Burnett manages to evoke the experience of living a life orders of magnitude faster than the readers in a way that is immediately accessible, creating a story that is both fast-paced adventure and exploration of what it is like to go from being exceptional to not quite exceptional enough.
“My Grandfather’s Grandfather Balled Goddesses”: A mercenary guarding a demon merchant on their journey across the wastelands of Cha’alt finds himself stranded with only an acolyte and a parasite after a customs raid goes wrong. Embracing all the glorious excess of the roleplaying setting from which he draws inspiration while forgoing the LitRPG focus on stats and other meta-narrative, Burnett presents the neon techno-fantasy of Heavy Metal art from the perspective of characters who accept cities built on the backs of dead gods and gun-robots fighting sorcerer-pirates as their normal.
Burnett’s author note claims this collection is not united by a theme in the way his other are, and he is correct: these stories are not all sci-fi, all cosmic horror, or all magical gonzo roadtrip. However, he is also wrong in that they are all united by being Burnettian: a protagonist who has a job that uses their body rather than just their mind, faces something that’s odd or just plain wrong, and decides to buckle down and get on with trying to do something rather than allow introspection, fear, or moral relativity to slow them down. Thus, while a reader might consider the motivations of some mean they are not heroes, they are all practical and determined men who choose to do what is they think is right.
They are also each gloriously and delightfully not mundane. Whether the weirdness is front-and-centre or a subtle haze, they are each window into a world that is not the same as the one the reader considers ordinary.
Thus, while not a single official genre, they are both a collection where enjoying one will probably mean enjoying all, and an insight into how each of the genres is likely to feel in Burnett’s hands.
I enjoyed this collection immensely. I recommend it to anyone who wants to enjoy themselves without the downsides of ingesting bug powder or mugwump-derived substances.
I purchased this collection and was not asked to write a review. However, in the interests of full disclosure, the author’s stories appear in a few anthologies that I have edited.
This collection contains ten short stories in a variety of genres:
“Josef: A Fable”: Josef, an ordinary man of ordinary accomplishment faces the question of whether his existence is worthwhile. Evoking the same faceless bureaucracy as Kafka and Gillam’s Brazil but without the same vaulting absurdities, Burnett captures the tawdry horror of feeling not quite good enough.
“Better Off Dead”: When a series of attacks by the undead echo a closed case, Erik Rugar fears a necromantic serial killer has returned to Dracoheim. Set in a city that lies in the liminal zone between cosmic horror and cautionary fairy tales and featuring a classic cynical detective protagonist, this story is a fresh and engaging noir perspective on urban fantasy. While it contains enough references to other other Rugar tales, thus offering little knowing joys to fans of the hero, Burnett skilfully maintains the same sense of internal completeness that Conan and many other classic pulp universes display, allowing readers unfamiliar with some or all of the other stories the same immediate access.
“284 Miles to Empty”: A long-distance lorry driver receives a series of phone calls, each apparently a wrong number but each supposedly from very different times. While this can be read as a metaphor for the rootlessness of people who travel for a living, Burnett keeps this very much a tale about specific people rather than simply indulging in magical symbolism.
“Johnny and the Nightmare Machine”: Coming across an old computer while clearing out a storage unit, Johnny discovers that the MMO he thought went offline many years ago is apparently still receiving—very odd—updates and, even more unexpectedly, someone will pay him to play. Burnett’s tale is for the less-than-realistic world of old computer games what Burroughs; Naked Lunch was for typewriters, creating a world that revels in the inexplicably weird while maintaining the feeling that there is a coherent truth if the reader can just delve a little deeper.
“They Delved Too Deep”: While renovating a basement, a group of construction workers break through a wall that isn’t on the plans into a complex filled with fantastical creatures and structures. Combining practical Twenty-First Century protagonists and high fantasy tropes, Burnett creates a variation on the classic modern man transported to another world narrative that smoothly avoids taking a stance on whether science or magic is ultimately true.
“The Irregular”: With the Earth taken by alien invaders and their strange flora, a mechanic joins a group of guerilla fighters in hope of securing new home. Superficially, this story is a working joe’s War of the Worlds; however, the combination of sweeping descriptions of alien power and intimate focus on human minutiae create a tense feeling humanity is merely struggling against the inevitable rather than the underlying imperialist hope of Wells.
“This Green and Pleasant Sky”: Sentenced to five years on the maintenance crew of an orbital farm, Todd Allard discovers that the ecosystem is collapsing under years of neglect and that he is the only man on a station full of women. Blending details of what a self-sustaining space habitat might be like with things likely to be familiar to anyone who has tried to unclog a sink or fix a problem with their hands, Burnett skilfully evokes the claustrophobia of being trapped both physically and socially.
“Fragile”: After years of voluntarily alone on a distant outpost, a technician allows a seductive pilot to pierce his isolation. With devious criminals, a dame with a history, and a protagonist who is on the fringes due to a deep-space medical condition, this story might best be described as sci-fi noir.
“The Fall of a Storm King”: Body and mind engineered to run at four times human norm, Luther makes a living flying impossible routes through Saturn’s rings—until an accident leaves his reactions a fraction of a second too slow to keep his license. Burnett manages to evoke the experience of living a life orders of magnitude faster than the readers in a way that is immediately accessible, creating a story that is both fast-paced adventure and exploration of what it is like to go from being exceptional to not quite exceptional enough.
“My Grandfather’s Grandfather Balled Goddesses”: A mercenary guarding a demon merchant on their journey across the wastelands of Cha’alt finds himself stranded with only an acolyte and a parasite after a customs raid goes wrong. Embracing all the glorious excess of the roleplaying setting from which he draws inspiration while forgoing the LitRPG focus on stats and other meta-narrative, Burnett presents the neon techno-fantasy of Heavy Metal art from the perspective of characters who accept cities built on the backs of dead gods and gun-robots fighting sorcerer-pirates as their normal.
Burnett’s author note claims this collection is not united by a theme in the way his other are, and he is correct: these stories are not all sci-fi, all cosmic horror, or all magical gonzo roadtrip. However, he is also wrong in that they are all united by being Burnettian: a protagonist who has a job that uses their body rather than just their mind, faces something that’s odd or just plain wrong, and decides to buckle down and get on with trying to do something rather than allow introspection, fear, or moral relativity to slow them down. Thus, while a reader might consider the motivations of some mean they are not heroes, they are all practical and determined men who choose to do what is they think is right.
They are also each gloriously and delightfully not mundane. Whether the weirdness is front-and-centre or a subtle haze, they are each window into a world that is not the same as the one the reader considers ordinary.
Thus, while not a single official genre, they are both a collection where enjoying one will probably mean enjoying all, and an insight into how each of the genres is likely to feel in Burnett’s hands.
I enjoyed this collection immensely. I recommend it to anyone who wants to enjoy themselves without the downsides of ingesting bug powder or mugwump-derived substances.
I purchased this collection and was not asked to write a review. However, in the interests of full disclosure, the author’s stories appear in a few anthologies that I have edited.
October 17, 2023
There's only ten pieces in this collection, but each packs an impressive entertainment punch. Reminiscent of classic TV shows like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits or Alfred Hitchcock, “Small Worlds” treats us to intimate epics featuring space pilots, criminals, ghouls and aliens rubbing shoulders with ordinary guys. Each tale is immersive, satisfying and crafted with a masterful touch. Burnett's range encompasses the eerily enigmatic: “Josef:A Fable”, to the spooky but charming “284 Miles to Empty”, to urban crime/ paranormal in “Better Off Dead” (probably my favorite, would love to see more of this world), to rollicking space opera in “My Grandfather's Grandfather Balled Goddesses”. Highly recommended and I look forward to checking out his other collections!
October 25, 2023
Great, fun, and quick little stories to easily digest and read.
Nice balance of humor and suspense.
Nice balance of humor and suspense.
August 13, 2025
every story was really really good thank you
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews