Henrik Refsnes

A logotype image picturing curved text that reads: Tales of THE OLD WORLD by Henrik Refsnes. The lettering is dark red with a light, thin beige outline, against a near black background.

Before Pilgrim. Before the Clergy.

When Magic had a name: Technology.

Sign up to unlock four standalone pulp sci-fi stories from the distant past of the world behind Heroes & Horseshit PLUS an exclusive look at the first chapter.

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A hand-inked image that looks like an old vintage pulp magazine, of the red planet Mars against a backdrop of space. In the foreground is a man in a brown suit with a look of pure shock on his face. The tile text reads MONDAY MORNING ON MARS in big bold, yellow lettering. The letter O in MORNING is replaced by a coffeecup, and some text on the coffee cup reads “I had fun on Titan.” A thin yellow frame surrounds the image and has the words “Henrik Refsnes”.

Monday Morning on Mars

Do you ever feel like Monday mornings at the office are the apocalypse? For systems analyst Patrick O’Malley, it really is.

Mars has been colonized for centuries. Long enough for budget-cuts and corporate bureaucracy to follow humanity across the stars, and the question that haunts everyone’s mind is what five things they did last week. Except this Monday meteors tear across the Martian sky and light up far more than the bottom line.

Patrick’s daughter is stuck at school, and he needs to get her out—preferably off-world—before civilization collapses completely. Standard operating procedure is out the window, the terraformers are about to go nuclear, and somehow the fate of an entire planet falls on an overworked dad and his still-empty coffee cup. 

With the network down, the race to the break-room coffeemaker is on in this irreverent take on the end of days. A darkly funny sci-fi short story of office politics, cosmic disaster, and one man’s desperate search for his daughter.

A hand-inked image that looks like an old vintage pulp magazine, with the hulking shape of an old spaceship against the backdrop of stars. In the foreground is a determined looking woman in a faded coverall. The title text reads LAST FLIGHT OF THE VALKYRIE in big bold, yellow lettering. A worn, stuffed unicorn plushie sits atop the word VALKYRIE. A thin yellow frame surrounds the image and has the words “Henrik Refsnes”.

Last Flight of the Valkyrie

The world ended and Riley didn’t make the evacuation list. Together with her dad she stole her way aboard the Valkyrie, a once-proud Martian warship turned lifeboat for humanity’s survivors.

Twenty years later, a string of missing people implicates her dad… and point to a sealed cryonics module that should never have come back online. With the Valkyrie breaking apart and fear spreading through the decks, Riley must dig through a mess of failing systems, military secrets, and red tape.

All under the watchful eye of the ship’s increasingly erratic computer.

With every power outage, someone else vanishes. Behind every bulkhead hides another truth. If she can’t unravel the mystery in time, she’ll lose her dad—and the last of mankind—to the void forever.

In this dystopian and mythology inspired short story, the problem with saving humanity is deciding who counts as human.

A hand-inked image that looks like an old vintage pulp magazine, of a neon lit city skyline, and in the foreground a street food vendor beneath a big sign reading “Som’s Zaab”. A large crowd under see-through umbrellas pass by in front of the food vendor. The title text reads RESTORE + ALT + DELETE in big bold, yellow lettering. A thin yellow frame surrounds the image and has the words “Henrik Refsnes”.

Restore + Alt + Delete

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A hand-inked image that looks like an old vintage pulp magazine, of a vast desert landscape beneath a starlit sky. Two figures, a man and a woman, dressed in desert clothing look out across the dunes. In the distance, smoke is coming from a crashed spaceship. In the sky above is a star constellation in the shape of a heart. The title text reads IVAN KOWALSKI returns in THE TRAVELER in big bold, yellow lettering. A thin yellow frame surrounds the image and has the words “Henrik Refsnes”.

The Traveler

When you live forever, everything eventually goes on repeat. Sometimes it’s better to start over. On a different planet, by rebuilding civilization. Although the last thing Ivan expected after crash-landing in the far reaches of unknown space, were other humans.

Even more surprising was the woman who saved him. Alien yet familiar, like a sweet memory left behind long ago. Her world—a culture steeped in bloodlines and sand—almost makes him forget where he was headed, and the cargo he stole.

Faced with losing the technology behind his immortality in the crash leaves him with only one option. Gift this world the future, even if they’re not ready for it. Perhaps even if they don’t want it.

In this story of love among the ruins, Ivan must brave the dune sea with a woman as guarded as the many secrets he keeps. Out there they’ll whip up a sandstorm. One that will carry through the ages.

Good news! You don’t have to wait for unreliable automatons to send emails. You can already read the transcribed audio logs of foul-mouthed Petty Officer Elizabeth Aran elsewhere on this site, where she finds herself the last woman in space, and possibly the last human alive.

A hand-inked image that looks like an old vintage pulp magazine, of a spaceship wreckage above the planet Earth, against a backdrop of space. In the foreground is a woman dressed in dirty military fatigues, holding a hand welder, and looking like she’s having a really bad day. The title text reads Petty Officer ARAN has THE WORST DAY SINCE YESTERDAY, in big bold yellow lettering. A thin yellow frame surrounds the image and has the words “Henrik Refsnes”.

The Worst Day Since Yesterday

The trip to Alpha Centauri was only supposed to take six years in suspended animation. For Petty Officer Elizabeth Aran, the cryogenic sleep lasted six hundred.

At least, that’s what the ship’s computer claims. Although it can’t seem to determine the exact date, which isn’t even the strangest part. She’s the only one awake. The only one alive—and the ship never left Earth orbit.

They never left.

All the escape pods are gone. The engines are dead. The ship is drifting on a slow, terminal descent into the atmosphere, where it will burn. Communications are down. Earth is silent. So are Mars, the Moon, Io, Europa, Callisto, Rhea, Titan, Phoebe. Every world has gone dark. No one in the entire solar system is answering.

That’s still not the worst of it.

She’s only awake because the ship’s computer doesn’t want to die alone.

400 Bad Request

[2026-09-24T00:13:37Z] [error] [pid 4821] [client 127.0.0.1]
Segmentation fault (SIGSEGV) in mod_session.so

Request: POST /api/v2/session/validate HTTP/1.1
Host: tales-web-03.internal
Content-Length: 8192
Request-ID: 9f3c1d4a-22b6-4f9a-8d1e-1c4aa9e2a001

Fault Address: 0x0000000000000024
Error: Invalid memory read (null pointer)

Stack trace:
ypngd qhcwi xzxav zjgcv vdfoj mtgry ohocn oemrg lfstk rugpf qiiep peuax cpsnf cvifi ktskz uhcnn arxle zktui nboeg vswyv znaks gmgaq wuwmq imktz rfngp asyor sbbng zaqwf qlqkj sxmxk gukwu vmgi

Last log:
[warn] token signature mismatch
[error] null pointer dereference

Process terminated. Core dumped.
Restarting worker…