With his very first article for Black Gate, Richard C. White shot right to the top of the charts with the most popular article for the month, “World Building 101: The Village.” Here’s a sample: Just because you have water doesn’t mean you can put any number of people in an area. The Cahokia Mounds in Illinois were believed to have held up to 40,000 people which would have made it the biggest city in North America until the 18th century. However,…
Jay Maynard’s “A Proposal: An Award for SF Storytelling” was the most popular post on Black Gate last month. It’s been read over 30,000 times since September 10th, and garnered nearly 500 comments. If there’s a topic BG readers really care about, it’s clearly SF awards. The #2 post on the list was our look at the breakout success of Cixin Liu’s novel The Three-Body Problem, the first Chinese-language novel to win the Hugo Award. #3 was Guy Windsor’s very…
If there was a predominate topic last month at Black Gate, it was unquestionably the Hugo Awards. Black Gate was nominated for a Hugo Award for the first time this year — an honor we declined on April 19. The Awards were presented at the World Science Fiction Convention on August 22, and our coverage of the awards and its immediate aftermath, written by me and Jay Maynard, produced the top three BG articles in August. In fact, those three…
While we wait impatiently for the next episode of the popular BBC series Sherlock, the best way to pass the time seems to be to talk about the show with other fans. Bob Byrne proved this with the #1 post at Black Gate in July, his July 13th article “The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Sherlock Season 3 – What Happened?”, in which he observes the negative fan reaction to the third season: Season three (finally) arrived. Hoo-boy. Not only…
Everyone loves an underdog, and last month the underdog was definitely Irene Gallo, the Creative Director of Tor Books and Associate Publisher of Tor.com. Ms. Gallo had a rough month in June, as she endured a series of scathing attacks from Sad Puppies, writers, and others who took offense to a personal comment she made to a friend on her Facebook page. The industry rallied strongly to her defense, however, and the two articles we wrote covering the affair, “Internet…
M. Harold Page had a good month in May, with two of the Top Three articles. His detailed breakdown on choreographing dramatic combat, and mastering the conflicting demands of narrative and blow-by-blow description, “How To Write a Good Fight Scene,” was our #1 article. And just to show how easy it is, he also nabbed the #3 slot, with a look at the similarities between Edmond Hamilton’s pulp classic Return to the Stars and Ridley’s Scott SF masterpiece, in “Blade…
Looking over our traffic stats for last month, I want to give a shout-out to M Harold Page, who managed to heroically crack the Top 10 without once mentioning the Hugo Awards or Rabid Puppies. Well done, Mr. Page! He was the only one to accomplish that extraordinary feat, however. Every other article in the Top 10 for April (and more than a few in the Top 25) directly addressed the ongoing Hugo Awards controversy, which began on April 4th…
I keep hunting for themes when I tabulate the most popular articles on this website every month. But you Black Gate readers, you’re inscrutable. One month you want all the secrets of writing fantasy trilogies, the next it’s all about the origins of Dungeons and Dragons. Seriously, I’d love to know what articles I should be planning for this blog… but after seven years like this, I give up. Well, I suppose it’s good that you have diverse interests, anyway….
Last month we had a look at the Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2014, our most popular articles for all of last year. The most popular blog posts from February include several that are guaranteed to make the Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2015, as they garnered enough traffic last month alone to rival those near the top of our 2014 list. At the top of the heap was “The Known World D&D Setting: A Secret History,” Lawrence…
2014 was a pretty good year for Black Gate. Our readership nearly doubled, and we published a record number of articles. I was going to do an exact count of all the posts we made in 2014 so I’d sound a little more together here, but I lost count after 1,200. But trust me. It was a lot. At the end of every month last year, I compiled a brief report itemizing our Top 50 articles for the month (here’s…