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21 articles, and every word in them. Everything we have printed is listed below, newest first.
Cars destroy Oxford in the Tolkien nobody knew existed
He wrote it around 1960 and let it sit, suspecting the Latin jokes were thick enough to bury what he meant. It reached print last October at 144 pages, edited by his son, half of that somebody else's essay. Oxford is Bovadium, Cowley is the cow-pasture, and the motor cars are winning.
No dragons, no chosen one, and a magic system that can say no: The Torril City Mysterion reviewed
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.
Here you leave today: what Disneyland understood about doors
The sign above the tunnels has said the same thing since 1955: here you leave today. One man spent $17 million and 160 acres making that sentence literal, down to a ride that would not show you Snow White because you were meant to be her. Nobody has ever built a door this deliberately, and it holds.
The name of the unfinished: fifteen years of waiting at the Waystone
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.
Enough with the prophecies
A prophecy is a host announcing, at length and in verse, what you are about to be served and precisely how much you will enjoy it. We have spent thirty years reading books that spoil themselves on page nine, and we have agreed, for some reason, to call it structure.
Sword and sorcery did in a short story what fantasy now needs a trilogy to do
Before fantasy meant a map, a prophecy and three volumes, it meant a hired blade, a sorcerer with a grudge and a story finished in one sitting. The form born in the pulp magazines of the 1930s eventually lost the bookshops to the epic.
Titus Groan was written by a painter, and its pictures are worth the slow going
Mervyn Peake drew his characters as he wrote them, and his first novel can be seen more clearly than almost anything else in the genre. It also takes its time, and some of its sentences take more than they need. A plain reader's case for reading it anyway.
The Zelda games have never agreed with each other. That is the achievement
Hyrule works the way Arthur works: the same sword and the same names, retold by people who never agreed on the details. With a Zelda film arriving in 2027 and sequels certain if it lands, the question is whether anyone will be brave enough to keep it that way.
Twelve thousand lines, carried by hand for twenty-eight centuries
The Odyssey was sung before anyone wrote it down, and the text did not settle for another five hundred years. Latin literature begins with a translation of it that survives in 46 lines. Twelve thousand one hundred and nine lines reached us anyway. This is the ledger of how, and of what it was built to carry.
The friendship that wrote two worlds, and the argument that separated them
Lewis's first note on Tolkien, in 1926: "a smooth, pale, fluent little chap" who "only needs a smack or so." Thirty-seven years later Tolkien called his friend's death an axe-blow near the roots. Between them came a night walk that converted one of them, and an argument about allegory that split their worlds.
The long shadow of the boy who lived: what Harry Potter did to the rest of us
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.
The floor that sings: Lian Hearn's masterpiece, twenty-four years on
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.
Baldur's Gate 3 cannot be retold, which is why HBO and T. Kingfisher are both going around it
The game's hero is whoever happens to be playing, and its ending is the one that player chose. A prequel novel published at the end of September stops before the story starts, and HBO's series will begin after it finishes, but the show still has to settle a question the game left to every player.
Narnia keeps failing on screen, but the lion was never the problem
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?
The Wheel of Time was cancelled in its best season. What comes next should worry you more
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.
The most famous plotting grid in fantasy has no column for magic
Brandon Sanderson published his laws. Patrick Rothfuss keeps a chalkboard of calculations for the energy needed to boil gold. Ursula Le Guin began by asking whether there were colleges for young wizards. Not one of them started with a list of what the magic can do.
An AI cover reaches the book through the stock library, not the art department
Two novelists were taken out of a major fiction prize last November over artwork neither of them commissioned. Three years earlier a science-fiction imprint licensed a cover from a reputable stock house and found out afterwards what had made it. The same hole runs through both.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is science fiction, and calling it fantasy is doing it harm
A world belongs to the genre of its laws, not its props. The props here are goblins, mana and loot. The laws are a published rules set with an owner, an administrator and a complaints procedure, which is why two science fiction juries have already reached the verdict the book's readers keep resisting.
Alchemy with a link cable: Kanto, and where the line between fantasy and science fiction actually falls
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.
Nine hundred thousand books and no way to read them: Borges, interviewed
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.
Hidden Gems: Silverlock, Wizard of the Pigeons and The Raven Tower all deserve to be found
A shipwrecked businessman adrift in a country made of books, a homeless wizard who keeps watch over Seattle, and a god who happens to be a very large stone: the first of the desk's occasional introductions to fantasies that deserve far more readers than they have.