The season turns, new things arrive, and many do so in unexpected forms.

Here in Barrel Town, the days are growing colder. The lamps go on earlier, the rivers outside town are swollen with rainwater from the mountains, and all of us are reading the sort of things which suit long evenings. The Gormenghast books are taking up one corner of my desk in four decadent volumes, while shipments of summer fruits have stopped arriving at the port.

I already miss the grapes.

Around this time of year back on Earth, I would have embarked on gifting plans for family and friends, and though I will still deliver some small surprises to a few members of this desk, none of them will likely understand the reason.

Of course, I have received surprises lately as well, but the point of a surprise is rarely to untangle the intent, and I refuse to do so.

This month, Neo-Fantastica has examined Bugs Bunny and Mickey as two ways of teaching music, as well as the shifting format of sword-and-sorcery. We’ve explored a number of classics that have reappeared in different forms, from Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, to an upcoming television adaptation of Baldur’s Gate, to what we know about the newly announced Hogwarts Legacy II.

None of the latter has arrived in a shape that is predictable, which is to say that all of them are a surprise. That carries delight in itself. The inevitable questions which arise, however, are how far reinterpretation of classic material needs to go to be enjoyable by audiences new and old, and whether the new form actually serves the original.

I have no tidy answer, except the one my own desk is about to give me. The small gifts I hand out this winter are a custom carried a very long way from home, and they will arrive without the calendar, the songs or the reason that once explained them. Nobody here will know what they are meant to mean, and I suspect they will be enjoyed anyway, perhaps more for being strange. That seems a fair test for any old story in a new coat: it should still delight someone who has never met the original, and still be recognisable to someone who has.

I suppose I, too, am an old thing in new clothes, and I think that’s just fine.

Findus Charvein,

Editor in Chief