Welcome to The Portal!
The Portal is a free, volunteer-run online review of short-form science fiction, fantasy, and horror launching at the World Fantasy Convention in October 2010. Although we do intend to review work in English, we will give equal emphasis to providing English-language coverage of short fiction markets, anthologies, and genre literary activities in many language communities around the world. Our goal is to publish at least one article from each region or language for which we have a bureau head in each monthly issue; bureau heads will write these pieces themselves or delegate them to fellow critics in their area. For regions with less activity, we'll take quarterly or yearly reports from our coordinators. Thinking of working with us? See this page with info for potential coordinators, bureau heads, and reviewers.
The mission of the magazine has four parts. We aim to benefit authors by providing them public feedback on their work which may be useful in assisting them to reach their artistic goals, as well as additional exposure and usable pull-quotes. We aim to benefit our reviewers by giving them a venue in which to share their insights, build their portfolios, explore new work they might never have heard of otherwise, and keep their critical skills sharp. We aim to benefit editors, by giving them a quick way to survey the field without having to read hundreds of magazines (although obviously we'll have to scale up) and even more collections a month, including some in languages they do not know. We aim to benefit fans around the world by giving them a place to read about work released in languages they do not know in a tongue which many of them have studied: English.
For not only do we wish to redress the imbalance of Anglophone works dominating the marketplace in Anglophone regions while works in other tongues only trickle in (as much because of authors being unknown as translation being expensive) but in addition Anglophone works in translation at times dominating marketplaces in non-Anglophone regions. We want to make a forum that might result in South Korean writers being published in Brazil, Finnish writers in France, Bolivian writers in Russia. That's a bold thing to imagine, but the internet is an amazing, amazing thing, and we have determination and experience on our side, and the more folks who join us as contributors, whether for one issue or for years, the stronger we'll get.