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Category: Editor’s Blog

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

Vintage Empires: James Nicoll on Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two, edited by Brian W. Aldiss

Vintage Empires: James Nicoll on Galactic Empires, Volumes One & Two, edited by Brian W. Aldiss

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Galactic Empires, Volume One and Two (Orbit, October 1976). Covers by Karel Thole

My fellow Canadian James Nicoll continues to be one of my favorite SF bloggers, probably because he covers stuff I’m keenly interested in. Meaning exciting new authors, mixed with a reliable diet of vintage classics.

In the last two weeks he’s discussed Kate Elliots’s The Witch Roads, Axie Oh’s The Floating World, Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, and Emily Yu-Xuan Qin’s Aunt Tigress, all from 2025; as well as Walter Jon Williams The Crown Jewels (from 1987), Wilson Tucker’s The Long Loud Silence (1952), C J Cherryh’s Port Eternity (1982), and John Brunner’s 1973 collection From This Day Forward. Now that’s a guy who knows how to productively use his leisure time. Not to mention caffeine.

But my favorite of his recent reviews is his story-by-story breakdown of Brian W. Aldiss’s massive two-volume anthology Galactic Empires, which made me want to read the whole thing all over again.

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Interviewing the Champion of Heroes, Jason M Waltz of Rogue Blades Entertainment and Foundation

Interviewing the Champion of Heroes, Jason M Waltz of Rogue Blades Entertainment and Foundation

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Jason M. Waltz has published 16 Books under Rogue Blades Entertainment (RBE), another 3 under Rogue Blades Foundation (RBF), having lured in authors Such as Brandon Sanderson, Orson Scott Card, C.L. Werner, Glen Cook, Steven Erikson, Ian C. Esslemont, William King, Andy Offutt, and spurred the writing careers of dozens. Not all are Sword and Sorcery (S&S), with weird western and pirate anthologies appearing, but most are.  Two of my favorite introductions to anthologies cap the ends of the RBE series: Return of the Sword (2008) and Neither Beg Nor Yield (2024 BG reviewed by Vredenburgh and Mele), the latter JMW refers to as his Swan Song marking a shift toward focusing on his own writing. Coincident with that, he has recently sunsetted the related RBF.  We’ll discuss some of his works to date, but note that he has three stories seeing publication in July 2025!

He’s mingled with the Black Gate crew in many ways over the years, invited John O’Neill to pen the introductions, published many contributors here, and now he is interviewing them. Yes, you will be glad to know that even as he steers from publishing to writing more, he is still actively building the community through his 24 in 42 podcast [broadcasted via the Rogue Blades Presents YouTube channel]. Heck he is even hand in the game by guest editing Raconteur Press’ first Sword & Sorcery anthology.  He never tires.

As we salute his heroic efforts, let’s learn more about his journey!

“Heroes are those who continue to do the ordinary in extraordinary times, and to do the extraordinary in ordinary times.” –  JMW 2008

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Get it While You Can: Manly Wade Wellman’s Cahena Going Out of Print

Get it While You Can: Manly Wade Wellman’s Cahena Going Out of Print

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Cahena by Manly Wade Wellman (DMR Books, November 1, 2020). Cover by Lauren Gornik

I’m hearing reports that Manly Wade Wellman’s final novel Cahena, out of print for nearly 35 years until DMR released a handsome new edition in 2020 with a striking cover by Lauren Gornik, is on the verge of going out of print again.

Cahena is an overlooked gem in Wellman’s distinguished catalog. A historical novel with fantasy elements, it tells the tale of the legendary Berber queen who lived in the 7th Century in North Africa, and led her people against the Romans and later Muslim invaders. The Cahena, as she was known, was said to be both a sorceress and prophetess, and she led an army forty thousand strong in a valiant struggle to save her beleaguered people.

DMR’s rights to the book expire this month, and at the end of May it will not longer be available. Morgan Holmes says that with this final novel, “Wellman went out on top.” If you’re a Wellman fan, or a fan of quality adventure fiction, grab a copy while you can. Don’t wait another thirty-five years for the next reprint! Order directly from DMR Books here.

Howard Andrew Jones, July 19, 1968 – January 16, 2025

Howard Andrew Jones, July 19, 1968 – January 16, 2025

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John O’Neill and Howard Andrew Jones at the World Science Fiction Convention, Washington DC, December 19, 2021

Howard Andrew Jones is dead.

It’s hard to write those words. Howard has been a huge part of my personal and professional life since 2002, when I opened a submission to Black Gate magazine and found a long, rambling, and extremely enthusiastic cover letter from him, expressing his delight at finding a quality magazine devoted to heroic fantasy. The letter ended with “I want in, bad,” and was attached to a terrific tale featuring two adventurers named Dabir and Asim.

We eventually published three Dabir and Asim tales in Black Gate, and within a few years Howard’s editorial contributions had become so essential to the magazine that we named him our first Managing Editor. He ran our non-fiction department, single-handedly recruiting and managing over a dozen contributors to fill some 80 pages every issue with thoughtful essays, book reviews, gaming coverage, and much more.

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The Failed Giant: Five Tributes to Barry N. Malzberg

The Failed Giant: Five Tributes to Barry N. Malzberg

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Barry N. Malzberg

Barry N. Malzberg died on December 19. In his Black Gate obituary, Rich Horton wrote:

Malzberg was in his unique way a true giant in our field. Barry himself, in his later years, seemed to regard his career as a failure, but it was no such thing. He may have stopped publishing novels out of a feeling the publishing world wasn’t receptive to his work, but the best of what he did publish is outstanding, and thoroughly representative of his own vision.

Tributes and reminiscences have poured in over the last week, and many amplify Rich’s comments, especially in regard to both the importance of Malzberg’s work, and his embittered attitude towards the field near the end of his career. Several writers, including Adam-Troy Castro and Gregory Feeley, have generously granted permission for me to reprint their lengthy comments here, including several fascinating anecdotes.

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Merry Christmas from Black Gate

Merry Christmas from Black Gate

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This has been a milestone year for our little website. In 1999 my friend Wayne MacLaurin helped me register the blackgate.com domain, and we launched the site to support our ambitious fantasy magazine. This year we quietly celebrated a quarter-century of continuous operation and quality fantasy coverage, and in the process added several talented newcomers to our small staff of regular bloggers, including Neil Baker, Jeffrey Talanian, Charles Gramlich, William H. Stoddard, and Ian McDowell. We also welcomed back David Soyka, one of our founding bloggers, after a long sabbatical.

Over the past 25 years the site has evolved significantly, and when the print magazine died in 2011 it became our sole focus. Five years later George R.R. Martin presented us with an Alfie Award, and that same year we won a World Fantasy Award, a pair of singular honors I still find a little hard to believe.

Over the long years our focus has changed dramatically. In the early years it was all about growing the site and increasing traffic, and we achieved success I never dreamed of, peaking at over 2 million page views/month. But in the last fifteen years I’ve come to understand that the true rewards of a site like this aren’t in ever-increasing site metrics. They’re in the people I’ve met along the way, and the countless way my own love of the genre has deepened and expanded.

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G.W. Thomas on Science Fiction of the 30s by Damon Knight

G.W. Thomas on Science Fiction of the 30s by Damon Knight

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Conan the Barbarian: Archie Style! From Everything Archie
#111 (May 1984). Art by Stan Goldberg and Larry Lapick.

G.W. Thomas has gradually become my favorite genre blogger. Not just because of his constant stream of content — he posts every two days at Dark Worlds Quarterly, and has been doing so for nearly a decade — but because of his endlessly zany topics. In the past few months he’s covered Haunted Houses in 50s comics, the Top Ten Ghostbreakers from Weird Tales, Werewolves of EC Comics, Space Heroes of the Golden Age, Fearless Vampire Killers of the pulps, Top Ten Fantasy Fight Scenes from 1980-1985 sword & sorcery flicks, Plant Monsters, Conan in Archie Comics, and so, so much more. For pulp and comic enthusiasts of a Certain Age, G.W. has tapped a nostalgic mother lode.

He also delves pretty deep into more serious topics of real interest, like that time he wrote a one-sentence review of every story in Damon Knight’s classic anthology Science Fiction of the 30s, complete with the original pulp illustrations.

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Make Room For Harry Harrison: Anthony Aycock on a Forgotten SF Master

Make Room For Harry Harrison: Anthony Aycock on a Forgotten SF Master

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Make Room! Make Room! (Berkley Medallion, July 1967). Cover by Richard Powers

Harry Harrison was a true believer. Like Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr, Donald Wollheim, Gardner Dozois, Lin Carter, Damon Knight and a handful of others, he dedicated his life to science fiction, and in a multitude of roles, as writer, editor, critic, and scholar.

His fiction, however, has been largely — and unjustly — forgotten, and in the dozen years since his death in August 2012, all his books have gradually gone out of print, including once-popular novels like Make Room! Make Room! (filmed as Soylent Green in 1973) and The Stainless Steel Rat, one of the top-selling SF novels of the 60s, which spawned a hugely popular series that ran for twelve volumes.

So I was delighted to see Reactor (still known by fans under its secret identity, Tor.com) shine a long-overdue spotlight on our boy Harrison late last year. In “Make Room! Make Room! For Harry Harrison!” Anthony Aycock provides a brief overview of Harrison’s career, and introduces modern readers to his best work.

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Merry Christmas from Black Gate

Merry Christmas from Black Gate

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It’s been another trying year at Black Gate. In early January we had a serious site outage (caused by poor backup management that built up 900 Gig of site backups); in February we realized our WordPress package couldn’t handle any more growth, and upgraded to a (much more expensive) dedicated server; and just four days ago we suffered a malware attack that rendered the entire site inoperable for 48 hours (traced back to an obsolete WordPress plugin).

It’s things like this that make me question why we still maintain the site. After 24 years of continuous operation, maybe it’s time to declare success, close up the Black Gate offices, and retire.

We’re not going to do that. There are lots of reasons, of course. Over the years we’ve achieved the kind of success I never dreamed of, surpassing two million pages views a month at our peak. But I’ve learned that true success isn’t captured in traffic metrics. The most rewarding part of running this site — by far — has been the amazing things our readers have taught me. It’s been in the surprising and endless ways this little website has enriched my life, by introducing me to so many wonderful folks who share my love of reading, and fantasy.

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Dread Monsters and Sinister Menaces: The Worlds of James H. Schmitz

Dread Monsters and Sinister Menaces: The Worlds of James H. Schmitz

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Telzey Amberdon-small Agent of Vega & Other Stories-small Eternal Frontier-small


Three Bean omnibus reprint volumes featuring James H. Schmitz:
Telzey Amberdon, Agent of Vega and Other Stories, and Eternal Frontier
(March 2000, November 2001, September 2002). Covers by Bob Eggleton

Two years ago I created a Facebook post about a Black Gate Vintage Treasures article on James H. Schmitz’s 1979 novel Legacy. One of the interesting things about Facebook is that you’ll occasionally get comments years later, and that’s what happened this time. On November 3rd of this year Allan T. Grohe Jr. responded to that ancient post with two intriguing questions for me.

John: do you know of any 1/ interviews with Schmitz? — other than the one in Moebius Trip #15 from 1972, which I’m aware of but seems pretty difficult to find, or 2/ literary studies of Schmitz’s works?

I first read Schmitz about 15 years ago, via Eric Flint’s Baen collections, and he ranks up there with Herbert as a worlds-builder, in my estimation! 🙂

Unfortunately I don’t know of any interviews with, or studies of, James Schmitz. But that comment did lead to a broader and very rewarding conversation with Allan, in which I learned about his own writing on Schmitz.

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