the gazette of fantasy
Volume I
Greetings, most distinguished reader! A warm welcome to the first issue of Neo-Fantastica! The paper you are reading was assembled in a rickety old publishing house in Barrel Town by people who mostly arrived here by…
Four studios, three decades and $1.58 billion have not produced a Narnia franchise, because the books are the wrong shape for the machine that keeps buying them. Is Greta Gerwig the first adapter to grasp that? Or are we in for another disappointment?
Two books, more than ten million copies, and a prose style exact enough to teach from. Then nothing. In 2007 Patrick Rothfuss told an interviewer that the other two volumes were already written and would come out one a year. What the fifteen years since have done to the work, to the readers, and to the man.
Everything on the surface of Kanto is science fiction, and none of it is ever explained. Thirty years on, the first Pokémon games remain the clearest proof available that a world belongs to the genre of its laws rather than the genre of its machines.
This month I could not conduct an interview, because the man I wanted has been dead forty years. So I read the transcript instead. What Ronald Christ got out of Jorge Luis Borges over several afternoons in July 1966 is the most useful hour on record about what the fantastic is actually for.
Nineteen years after the last book, the genre is still arranged around a series that finished in 2007. On Christmas Day 2026, the whole thing starts again on television, for a projected decade. It is worth asking what the first adaptation cycle actually left behind.
James McLeod's independently published fantasy-adventure has been finding its readers one book fair at a time. It is a first novel built to throw out almost every default setting the genre still runs on, and that is something it does remarkably well.
Lian Hearn's 2002 novel is the finest thing the genre has produced on the subject of listening, and it is built around a single piece of joinery: a floor engineered to betray anyone who walks on it. Twenty-four years on, almost nobody under thirty has read it.
Amazon killed the show a month after its strongest run of episodes, on arithmetic rather than quality. The rights have now landed back with the company Robert Jordan himself distrusted, and the first image of the animated revival looks as though a machine drew it.
