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Category: Editor’s Blog

The blog posts of Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones and Editor John O’Neill

Asimov’s SF and Analog Magazine Switch to Bi-Monthly Publication

Asimov’s SF and Analog Magazine Switch to Bi-Monthly Publication

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asimovs-science-fiction-april-1993-smallWay back in January 2009, F&SF edition Gordon Van Gelder announced that his magazine would be switching to bimonthly publication. Instead of 11 issues a year, including a special double-sized issue every October, F&SF would publish six double issues a year, in an attempt to reduce mailing costs and other overhead. At the time there were ominous rumblings and dire prophecies, but it seems to have worked out nicely for the magazine, which has been been publishing regularly every since.

Since then I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop — meaning, when would the two remaining print SF magazines, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction, follow suit? And on Wednesday Locus Online broke the news that both magazines would be switching to bimonthly publication starting in January 2017.

Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams explains in a forthcoming editorial that the magazines will now publish “six 208-page double issues” per year, a 16-page increase over current double issues. She expects the change will allow her to publish more novellas and a higher percentage of original cover art. Despite the change in publication schedule, she says readers “will receive the same number of pages of fiction as in the past,” and subscribers will “receive the same number of issue months” they purchased. Publishing bimonthly will allow them “to hold the current subscription prices a bit longer.” Both periodicals are published by Dell Magazines.

Speaking as someone who enjoys the big double issues, I view this as a positive development — and anything that helps the magazines save costs is a good thing. The current double-issue size is 192 pages, so the increase to 208 pages is another welcome change. However, it is a rather historic milestone for the genre. As Jonathan Strahan puts it:

Moving to a point where we have no monthly print fiction magazines left seems like some sort of turning point, though I don’t know towards what.

Visit the Asimov’s website here, and Analog here. See our November Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.

Seeking Solace

Seeking Solace

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howard-zebras-smallWhen assembling the first round of Black Gate bloggers one of the few rules I laid down was that we keep our personal politics and religion out of our posts. John and I both wanted to create a safe and welcoming space where people of all stripes could come together to discuss the genres we love.

Over the last week I’ve never found that admonition more of a challenge. You see, I’ve been grieving. Not for any one person’s loss, or even because the side I backed lost, but because it feels to me that an ideal has vanished. That ideal may not have been flawless, but I shudder at the manner in which the leading proponent of a replacement movement conducts himself. And for the first time in my life I’m not just disheartened by an election result contrary to my own wishes, I’m a little frightened.

I believe I’m in the letter of my own law still because I’m not here to proselytize. The preceding paragraph is solely for context so you’ll understand what it is that’s upset me. If, like me, the depth of your own grief and your anger and fear surprise you, you’ve probably been wondering how to cope. I wish I could give you a good answer. I can tell you that one of the things I’ve done is distract myself with the genres I love. The other was to create some art. That is one (and not the only) way I mean to act.

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Sarah Avery on “The War of the Wheat Berry Year”

Sarah Avery on “The War of the Wheat Berry Year”

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Sarah Avery’s story “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” first appeared in the Black Gate 15, our last print issue. Since then, Sarah has had a stellar career — winning the 2015 Mythopoeic Award for her novel Tales from Rugosa Coven, editing an anthology with David Sklar, and successfully Kickstarting The Imlen Brat, a novella featuring the heroine of “War of the Wheat Berry Year,” when she was a child adopted into a perilous royal court. Now Great Jones Street has reprinted a revised version of “The War of the Wheat Berry Year.” Here’s Sarah.

In 2003, I wrote a fantasy short story about.. a turncoat. I gave her many of the attributes we see so often — an army of followers who are Other to her, a homeland with blatant unresolved injustices, an offstage villain who is suitably repellent. But I gave her a few other things, too, that the usual turncoats don’t have.

She faces someone she loves on the battlefield. Someone she owes, who has done her lifesaving kindnesses she can never forget or repay. He’s angry, and his anger has its reasons. Quite apart from her betrayal of their nation, she has betrayed him, humiliated him, endangered him, put him in the position of having to make choices he finds unbearable. Worst of all, she has put him in the position of having to kill her or to die trying…

A few years later, “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” was my first professional sale. I sold the story to John O’Neill at Black Gate  —  he put me through three rounds of revisions for clarity, and I’ll always be grateful for his patience. In 2009, when the magazine was about to transition from print to online publication, my story appeared in the last print issue. Some things about the first published version of the story hold up pretty well, well enough that Great Jones Street picked it up for reprint this year.

Read Sarah’s complete article on the reasons for her revisions, “Conscientious Turncoats, Or Why I Stopped the Virtual Presses on “The War of the Wheat Berry Year,” at Great Jones Street.

Black Gate Wins World Fantasy Award

Black Gate Wins World Fantasy Award

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I’ve just returned from the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio, where I got the chance to meet up with several of our talented and far-flung contributors, including Bob Byrne, Patty Templeton, C.S.E. Cooney, Matthew Wuertz, Sarah Avery, Fred Durbin, Ellen Klages, Amal El-Mohtar, Derek Künsken, Brandon Crilly, Marie Bilodeau, David B. Coe, Jeffrey Ford, and many others.

But the highlight of the weekend — by a pretty wide margin — was receiving the World Fantasy Special Award in the Nonprofessional category. Here’s the text of the brief acceptance speech I hastily sketched out on my cell phone, just before the banquet ended.

Wow.

In 1996, I started SF Site, one of the first genre websites. It quickly grew to over 150,000 readers per month. By 1998, as the most innovative and forward-thinking publications in the genre were creating the first ground-breaking websites, we decided to do something REALLY forward-thinking: Launch a print magazine.

Black Gate lasted for 15 print issues, until 2011. In November 2008 our Managing Editor, Howard Andrew Jones, said we should revamp the magazine’s website. I was the voice of reason. “Seriously, who wants to read more than one article a month, Jones?”

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The Best British Fantasy & Horror from Salt Publishing

The Best British Fantasy & Horror from Salt Publishing

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With the surprising number of Years Best anthologies on the market these days — nearly a dozen, by my count — it takes something pretty darn special to get me to pry open my wallet for another one.

Salt Publishing has accomplished exactly that with their dual series, The Best British Fantasy, edited by Steve Haynes. and Best British Horror, edited by Johnny Mains. Where the other Years Best series mine the same American magazines and anthologies for the same batch of writers year after year, these books have the compelling advantage of drawing from a wholly different market. Featuring top-notch authors like Lavie Tidhar, Mark Morris, Ramsey Campbell, Sam Stone, Steph Swainston, Nina Allan, Guy Hayley, V.H. Leslie, Robert Shearman, Michael Marshall Smith, Helen Marshall, and many others, these books offer a refreshing change of pace for jaded SF and fantasy readers.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in September

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in September

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hall-of-bones-frog-god-smallThe most widely-read article last month — by a wide margin — was Bob Byrne’s look at classic role playing, “Why I Went Old School — or Swords & Wizardry vs. Pathfinder.” In fact, Bob’s piece is the most popular feature we’ve had at Black Gate all year (with the exception of our May announcement that we declined a Hugo nomination). He’s posted three recent updates to it so far, re-capping his group’s exploits in Matt Finch’s Hall of Bones adventure module, so check back if you haven’t recently.

Coming in at #2 was another gaming article, Carlos Hernandez’s “What No Man’s Sky Can Learn from SFF Worldbuilding.” Sometimes I wonder why we bother doing anything other than gaming pieces?

Rounding out the Top Five were our examination of Michael McDowell’s Blackwater serial novel from the 1980s, Thomas Parker’s fond look at the 1960s Batman, and Sean McLachlan’s writing confession, “When Researching Your Novel Scares You: Daily Life in the Third Reich.”

Violette Malan’s thoughtful look at one of the great 20th Century SF writers, “Andre Norton: Are Her Men Really Women?”, came in at number six, followed by Bob Byrne’s second gaming article for the month, “RPGing is Story Telling.” Next up was William Patrick Maynard’s review of his fellow Black Gate author, Josh Reynolds, who recently released two direct sequels to Philip Jose Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg for Meteor House.

Bob continued to hog the Top 10 list, coming in at #9 with “The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent).” And Barbara Barrett wrapped up the list with her look back at a neglected fantasy classic from 1991, HBO’s Cast a Deadly Spell.

The complete list of Top Articles for September follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles, online fiction, and blog categories for the month.

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The Wonders of Fairwood Press

The Wonders of Fairwood Press

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I first met Patrick Swenson, publisher and editorial mastermind at Fairwood Press, back in the late 90s. I think it might have been James Van Pelt who introduced us, after I wrote a review of Patrick’s magazine, TaleBones. I helped Patrick negotiate with a squatter who was sitting on the address he wanted for his website (unsuccessfully, as I recall.) At the time, Fairwood Press was a small press underdog, with only a handful of titles to its name, but a fast-growing reputation.

Fastforward about 17 years, to Worldcon in 2016. I was walking through the sprawling dealer’s room when I spotted Patrick sitting behind a table groaning under the weight of dozens and dozens of eye-catching science fiction and fantasy books, from some of the biggest names in the industry — including Robert Silverberg, Michael Bishop, Jay Lake, Carrie Vaughn, Devon Monk, Tom Piccirilli, Tina Connolly, James Van Pelt, and many others. Could this possibly be the same Fairwood Press?

Yes, as it turned out.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in August

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in August

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george-rr-martin-awards-and-alfie-award-to-john-oneill-of-black-gate-smallFollowing on our record 1.26 million page views in July, Black Gate had an even more incredible August. There were lots of small triumphs, but the big one was receiving an Alfie Award from George R.R. Martin at Worldcon (at right). In his blog post explaining this year’s awards, George wrote:

One of my special ‘committee awards’ went to Black Gate, which had 461 nominations in the Fanzine category, second among all nominees and good for a place on the ballot. But Black Gate turned down the nomination, just as they did last year, to disassociate themselves from the slates. Turning down one Hugo nomination is hard, turning down two must be agony. Integrity like that deserves recognition, as does Black Gate itself. Editor John O’Neill was on hand to accept the Alfie.

Our top article last month was my report on the Alfie Awards, with pics from the associated Hugo Losers party. Second was M Harold Page’s study on how to capture the magic of a great dungeon crawl in fiction. And third was our look at Michael McDowell’s classic horror novel Cold Moon Over Babylon.

Rounding out the Top Five were William Patrick Maynard’s review of The Midnight Guardian (“a hardboiled pulp yarn that is so good, it immediately makes you set the author to one side with a handful of other standouts”), and Neil Baker’s gaming piece, “How No Man’s Sky Has Reinvigorated a Gaming Generation (No, Not That One).”

Also in the Top Ten were our report on the 2016 Hugo Award Winners, Parts One and Two of Fletcher Vredenburgh’s Summer Short Story Roundup, our summary of the Top 50 Black Gate Posts in July, and Bob Byrne’s detailed history of the TSR classic Dungeon!

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The 2016 British Fantasy Awards Winners

The 2016 British Fantasy Awards Winners

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rawblood-catriona-ward-smallThe winners of the 2016 British Fantasy Awards have been announced by the British Fantasy Society. Tea and crumpets for everyone!

Since we forgot to report on the nominees three months ago, we’ll make up for it here by listing both the winners and the nominees in each category. Ready? Here we go.

Best Fantasy Novel — The Robert Holdstock Award

Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Macmillan)

Half a War, Joe Abercrombie (Harper Voyager)
Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho (Macmillan)
Signal to Noise, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Solaris)
Guns of the Dawn, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)
The Iron Ghost, Jen Williams (Headline)

Best Horror Novel — The August Derleth Award

Rawblood, Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)

Welcome to Night Vale, Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor (Orbit)
The Silence, Tim Lebbon (Titan)
A Cold Silence, Alison Littlewood (Jo Fletcher)
Lost Girl, Adam Nevill (Pan)
The Death House, Sarah Pinborough (Gollancz)
Rawblood, Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)

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The Mystery of New Dimensions 13

The Mystery of New Dimensions 13

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Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions was one of the most celebrated anthology series of the 70s. It published an impressive amount of award-winning fiction, including R. A. Lafferty’s “Eurema’s Dam” (1973 Hugo), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1974 Hugo), James Tiptree, Jr’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1974 Hugo), Suzy McKee Charnas “Unicorn Tapestry” (1981 Nebula), and many others.

New Dimensions 11 and 12 were co-edited with Marta Randall. The final volume, New Dimensions 13, was solely edited by Randall, and it boasted a dazzling range of writers, including Vonda McIntyre, Robert Silverberg, R.A. Lafferty, Lucius Shepard Michael Swanwick, Barry N. Malzberg, and many others. There’s just one problem with it, however: no finished copies are known to have survived. The entire print run was reportedly pulped, and the only copies that exist today were advance copies sent out to reviewers.

Why? That’s part of the mystery. Gunter Swain posted the cover above on Facebook today — the first image I’ve ever seen of the book. He reports the book “was published but was never distributed.” In the comments section, Marta Randall shed some light on the mystery.

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