The paper exists because fantasy is typically reviewed either as a marketing category or as a battlefield, and we find that discomfiting and a disservice to the works, themselves.We are interested in getting up close and cosy with them. Finding out what the story is really doing, and what insights we can glean by examining them and their authors with a little more care. Couple this with timely news and a passion for the genre, and you get Neo-Fantastica.

The books, films, games and people we write about are real, and the pieces are sourced. Where a claim is checkable, we have checked it. Our chart, What’s Sparkling Now, is compiled from published bestseller and trending lists rather than assembled by taste, and the lists it drew on are printed underneath it.

The bylines are another matter, and we would rather say so plainly than have a reader work it out and feel misled. Our writers utilise invented personas, and the paper is written as though its mythos were reality. The reporting and the judgements underneath are the paper's own.

Perhaps that sounds interesting to you? If so, you might want to join the team.

Neo-Fantastica keeps its offices in Barrel Town, the largest and least restful city on Theriv, where the mighty canals run from the mountain locks all the way down to the sea. Bulk cargo, gossip and the occasional drunken magician arrive by water at all hours. It is a chaotic place to print a newspaper but an excellent one to hear things first.

None of our correspondents were born here, which is rather the point. Each of them arrived by a different contrivance: a cellar door that should have led to the coal, a lock that opened on the wrong water, a flute somebody had been advised twice not to play, and one wish made carelessly and out loud. Barrel Town collects such arrivals the way a harbour collects driftwood, and the paper has found them to be excellent hires. Nobody notices a convention faster than somebody who has just fallen through one.

From here we keep an eye on a good many worlds, Earth chief among them. We find its fantasy writing more interesting than it generally finds itself: enormously inventive, argued over with a seriousness we admire, and produced by people who must have extraordinary imaginations, because to our knowledge magic does not exist there. This paper is our report on the doings of Earth dwellers, for anyone who cares to read it.

Let's begin with what the paper is for, because everything else follows from it. Our goal is for readers to find factual, up-to-date, enlightening stories on the genre they love most; free of marketing spin, and free of an agenda. This is our north star.

Positioning

Like any publishing house, we also have a line, and we would rather you knew it going in than worked it out later. Neo-Fantastica sits deliberately in the middle ground. We do not write from either wing of the political spectrum, and a review here is not an ideological soapbox.

In practice that means prose, structure, character, craft and insight are the subject. It means every work we evaluate is evaluated on its own terms, and that we assume our readers are adults who do not need instructing on what to think.

To that effect, the critical school that reads a novel chiefly through identity, power and oppression is not the one this paper writes in. We are not interested in retrospective moral scoring of dead authors against present-day standards, and we treat activist vocabulary as a position rather than neutral analysis.

Artificial intelligence

It is formidable technology with a great many legitimate applications, and writing this paper is not one of them. We do not commission generated articles, and we reject anything that is clearly machine written. Of course, verifying authorship from the outside is very nearly impossible, so we take our contributors at their word and rely on knowing the people who file for us.

None of this is meant as an insult to critics who work that way. It is simply a different question from the one we are asking.

Summed up

This is our line. The register is the good broadsheet critic; measured, curious, fair to people we disagree with, and never sneering, who states the other view accurately and at its strongest before answering it. Facts are never negotiable, including when they cut against us. And where a piece does touch contested ground, the test we apply is simple: would a thoughtful reader who disagrees with us still find this fair, accurate and worth reading?

The standing desk is listed on the authors page. Beyond it we are building a roster of contributors, readers who know the genre and can argue about it well. Commissioned pieces are paid, topics are offered rather than assigned, and you are welcome to propose your own.

If that sounds like your kind of paper, the terms and the form are on the write for us page.