Ah, June. Not a bad month at all, now that I look back on it. For one thing, M Harold Page pointed out how Osprey Publishing made a compelling argument for the true location of the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, otherwise known as the Battle of Chalons, in “OMG They Found It! Osprey’s The Catalaunian Fields AD451.” That casual revelation was enough to catapult Martin’s article to the top of a crowded field, giving him our most popular blog post last…
Black Gate had 1.16 million page views in May, slightly more than our monthly average last year. We’ve gotten used to significant traffic increases year after year, so it’s actually something of a relief to have traffic stabilize for a bit. Nonetheless, we’re grateful to you, our readers, for all the time you spend with us each month, and we hope we keep things interesting for you. How did we keep things interesting last month? Our top story for May was Black Gate‘s second Hugo…
Good to see Star Trek is still enormously popular with our readers. The most widely read post at Black Gate last month was William I. Lengeman III’s review of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the latest installment in his ongoing Star Trek Re-Watch (his review of ST III was #2 last month). Or maybe we’re just old. The most popular category last month was Vintage Treasures (that’s my favorite too!) When I get old enough, my eyesight will fade enough that I can’t…
The number one post at the Black Gate blog last month was Sean McLachlan’s report on the historically fascinating castles of Gondar, Ethiopia. Sean’s adventures in Ethiopia certainly captured the attention of our readers — he also had the #3 post, with his photo-essay on the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela. Coming in at #2 was the fifth chapter in William I. Lengeman III’s ongoing Star Trek re-watch, on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. I’ve been re-watching the early…
Being an avid Black Gate reader, you know that we devoted a lot of attention to the various works of Conan’s creator last year with our ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series. I was very much a latecomer to Conan, as well as Howard in general. I’ve made up a lot of ground on Solomon Kane, El Borak and others, but I’ve still got a slew of Tor paperbacks featuring the Cimmerian that I haven’t read yet, among other stuff. However,…
There’s a massively successful Conan Kickstarter wrapping up this week. I’m a fan of Mongoose’s Conan RPG. It ran from 2004 through 2010, with over three dozen books between the 1st and 2nd Editions. It used the Open Game License. Well, dice rollers will once again be wreaking havoc throughout the Hyborian Age. Modiphius Games seems to have hit the jackpot with Robert E Howard’s Conan: Adventures in An Age Undreamed Of. The base goal of $65,344 was to produce the Core…
The top article at Black Gate last month wasn’t even a BG piece, strictly speaking. It was a brief link to Matthew David Surridge’s essay The Great Hugo Wars of 2015, at Splice Today. Based on the overwhelming traffic to that article, and the high number of comments, it seems our readers are still more than casually interested in the Hugo Awards. Number 2 on the list was M Harold Page’s look at Fool’s Assassin, and How Robin Hobb Writes Lyrical Fantasy…
As you can see from the list of prior essays in this series down below, we’ve wandered all over the Robert E. Howard landscape. But we hadn’t touched on Howard’s science fiction. Dr. Fred Adams goes off-planet for us and examines one of Howard’s cult classics, Almuric. Blasting off… In his novel Almuric, published in Weird Tales in 1939, Robert E. Howard presents a one-shot protagonist named Esau Cairn, a man in many ways typical of Howard’s barbarian warrior-heroes, but…
The most widely read article at Black Gate last month was Andy Duncan’s obituary for Tor senior editor David G. Hartwell, the founder of the World Fantasy Convention and one of the most accomplished editors this field has ever seen. In the last few weeks we’ve compiled several articles on David’s most popular books, including: The Masterpieces of Fantasy The Dark Descent and The World Treasury of Science Fiction The Early Horror Paperbacks Foundations of Fear and The Ascent of…
BG blogger M Harold Page had a fabulous month in December, with three of the top four posts for the month, all dealing with Medieval Worldbuilding: How to Get From Worldbuilding (or Research) to Story An Adventurer’s Guide to the Middle Ages: What if There’s No Room at the Inn (or No Inn Whatsoever?) Three Classic Books for Medieval Worldbuilders and Armchair Time Travellers Mr. Page has clearly fired the imaginations of all the aspiring medieval novelists in our audience (and…