Aegeon: Science Fiction for a New Heroic Age

1,114 words

Brendan Heard, Editor,
Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated
Aureus Press, Issues 1-10, 2022-2024

Voyage to the depths of space and fight a multi-headed hydra while piloting a gleaming land speeder over the snow-covered surface-tundra of a distant ice world or heroically fend off the denizens of a necromancer’s resurrections while saving the beautiful maiden resplendent in metallic-hued swimwear. The entire Western world, nay the universe, depends on the power of real science fiction infused with heroic vitalism, a prior essentialism tinged with fantasy, horror, and the primordial pan-psychism of our ancestors. This modern-day mythos with its infinite possibilities has been resurrected by Brendan Heard’s Aegeon, the best science fiction magazine on the planet (solar system?).

Aegeon has risen phoenix-like from the corrupted and commodified ashes of a lost age to begin anew:

The cutting scythe of natural selection demands a compost pile of the corrupted, to feed the new green shoots — to create the future. There must therefore be a great pyre made of bad and stagnated ideas, a mourning heap from which we will breed the seedlings of inspiration. Within the fertile flesh of your very brains will these shoots thrive.[1]

Brendan Heard sets out the resurrective mission for his science fiction magazine in issue one with three editorial essays that speak to his ethos and reasoning behind the importance of the heroic imagination for our people. While the mass-produced, attenuated versions of derivative creativity are spat out like globs of corporatized bile, Aegeon harkens back to the golden age of creativity that taps into an innate sensibility. Aegeon is fueled by masculine notions of what it means to be a hero and a villain, what it means to explore, innovate, and smash malevolently sentient machines in the face with a mailed, augmetic power fist to get the girl.

Aegeon is an entertaining whirlwind of creativity that ranges from science-fiction to fantasy to horror and all points in-between. There are lengthy pieces and vicious micro-fiction comprising a handful of pages. There are thoughtful editorials, hypothetical specifications for colossal battle tanks, horrifying commutes amid zombie-like commuters, underwater adventures, and the grasping tendrils of sentient tree creatures. The issues are replete with illustrations that harken back to the styles of the ‘zines of the past. There are comics, puzzles, a science-fact section, advertising for allied publications and music, along with the mailbag where Ramek —a Conan-like Cimmerian cyborg warrior— answers the queries of Aegeon’s readership creatively, intelligently, and hilariously. Across its ten issues, you will undoubtedly find something compelling that inspires while helping to relax and escape.

Aegeon’s authors and editors have metaphorically jettisoned the likes of J.J. Abrams and his corpulent green-haired feminist equivalents out of the sci-fi airlock into frigid void-space. Thankfully it’s only a matter of space-time before Abrams and his co-conspirators will be sucked into the inexorable pull of a whirling singularity. “Good riddance!” we say.  Brendan Heard delves into what forces are at work against true sci-fi and how it became lost to its true adherents. He writes:

. . .[S]cience-fiction appears to have experienced a take-over by those who are its natural enemies. Imposters, who only don the garb of an interested sci-fi or fantasy author to peddle social justice luxury causes, fetishist trans-humanism, and trite Harry Potter imitations.

But true art does not work along these political guidelines, and the chief value in creative fiction is a foundation in honesty and truth, not ideology.[2]

Heard goes on to write in this same editorial just how the woke-ideologues distort, subvert, and bastardize the genre for their own purposes:

It is these imposters who perpetually recycle and re-use those concepts of vigor from the stronger age. Anything with a scrap of vitality gets squeezed and re-imagined until it is quite dead. Most do not seem to notice their own total lack of originality or creativity. Yet they desire to control this genre, or at most keep it subdued, its only permitted outlet existing in the form of childish Marvel superhero films, or awful, committee-written Disney Star Wars excretions. Why do they do this? I imagine it is because, after decades of not understanding the genre at all, and ignoring it while the works of its golden age slowly withstood the test of time, and influenced culture from within, they now realize it has power.[3]

It is abundantly clear that Aegeon is a repudiation of all of that nonsense. It offers sci-fi adventure in any number of imaginative forms. Take the writings of Brendan Heard who created, for example, the whirling asteroid-borne civilization whose people are searching for a new homeland and grasping at resurrection.[4]

There’s Brett Sinclair’s featured story of an expeditionary team that makes planetfall on the surface of a world covered in a desert wasteland of corroding salt and cyclopean structures.[5] Sinclair describes the decent to the planet’s surface:

The silver egg-like vessel penetrated the dense yellow nitrogen clouds of Xys, to emerge before a barren white-ochre salt plain. The lander’s parachute opened, and they descended smoothly towards the planet’s surface.

Captain Gunn radioed the mothership as soon as the egg broke through the clouds. “Gunn to Orion, Drop successful, a bit rocky, but we survived.”

“Understood Captain Gunn, and congratulations on being the first to penetrate the clouds of Xys.”

“Thank you, Orion. We can see a flat plain, it stretches as far as the eye can see, just stark, it’s amazing” . . . [6]

Alas, I feel even now I’ve said too much. By way of this review, I would like to encourage you to pick up an issue or two of Aegeon for your own edification and enjoyment. From the exploits of Max Ryan and his team in the spore-forests of Horka’s World[7]; undead cryo-sleepers, subscription service cults, insectoid brain parasites, and heavy metal blood gods[8]; the Halloween issue’s doom, gloom, chills, fights, horrors, and funeral dirges[9]; to issue ten’s sunken cities of Atlantica, stoic sentries in an Imperial city at war, and the Mad Max-like heroics of Black Cobra[10]; there is something in Aegeon’s pages for you.

Brendan Heard, Aegeon, and Aureus Press can be found and followed on Amazon, Patreon, Telegram, X/Twitter, and Substack.

Notes

[1] Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated, no. 5 (Aureus Press, February 2023): back cover.

[2] Brendan Heard, “Editorial,” Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated, no. 1 (Aureus Press, May 2022): 4-5.

[3] Ibid, 5.

[4] Brendan Heard, “Gideon’s Ghost,” in Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated, no. 1(Aureus Press, May 2022): 10-23.

[5] Brett Sinclair, “Salt,” in Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated, no. 2 (Aureus Press, August 2022): 10-20.

[6] Brett Sinclair, “Salt,” 12.

[7] Luke O’Donnell, “Max Ryan: Hunter and Hunted,” Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated, no. 3 (Aureus Press, October 2022): 28-42.

[8] Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated, no. 6 (Aureus Press, June 2023): back cover.

[9] Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated, no. 8 (Aureus Press, October 2023): back cover.

[10] Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated, no. 10 (Aureus Press, September 2024).