When I am not being a very small cog in the gigantic all-conquering machine that is Nature, I get to edit my very own journal.

No, it’s not Nature Religious Mania; neither is it Nature Science Fiction (for which I did a serious proposal and a costing…) nor even Nature Reviews Tapes Of Kittens Being Impaled On Red Hot Skewers (but, on the other hand, after a depressing day spent doing nothing but rejecting papers, honestly, sometimes I just want to be loved) but Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Society.

I took this over last autumn when the previous editor, realizing that against the power of the Ring, there can be no victory, threw himself (and all the magazine’s records, current submissions and so on) into the Cracks of Doom.

What I found was a once-great journal that had degenerated into … well, something rather degenerate. Pseudo-scholarly articles rambled on and on with no discernible point, punctuated by twee scrawls of elvish whimsy, and poems of quite trancendental vogonity.

So I redesigned it, cut the pagination while increasing and improving the content, doubled the publication frequency (it comes out twice a year) – and banned poetry. Mallorn 45 came out in January.

Reaction, so far, has been positive (though with an upcoming Tolkien Society AGM, I expect to have to defend my redesign with vigor). But now the time has come for Mallorn 46, and here is where you can help.

I have some terrific scholarly articles, and more promised, but what I could really do with are short reviews of books, films, games and so on – and some original short fiction (not fanfic, though).

One of my aims is to broaden Mallorn from a magazine read only by consenting Tolkien fans, to one that covers a wide range of fantasy and SF. It doesn’t have to be all hobbity, folks – anyone seen The Spiderwick Chronicles? Send me a review. Anyone going to see The Colour of Magic? Send me a review. And it would be wonderful were someone to write a retrospective on the entire Harry Potter canon (are you there, Maxine?)

Now – and this is important – I don’t pay any money for contributions. Nothing. Zero. Zip. But that’s true for a scientific paper, too, and Mallorn does get cited, now and then. It has a proper peer-review process that’s genuinely double-blind, in that I shut both eyes when reading contributions.

And just think of the karma you’ll get by contributing to a literary review with a long and distinguished history, that’s rising from the ashes of neglect. Don’t just take my word for it – the apotheosis of my zenith, at least for this week, was learning that Mallorn is Fanzine of the Month in the April edition of SFX (a little box in the corner of page 36, easily read with a microscope). And if that isn’t geek chic, I don’t know what is.

Author guidelines from me on request – copy deadline 21 June. A day for wrath! A day for ruin, as the Sun rises!