Sean McLachlan was the Black Gate MVP for November, with two articles in the Top 5: “Happy Halloween! Here’s Some Nightmare Fuel” at #3, and “Ten Ways You Know Your Evil Empire Is Doomed,” which scored the #5 slot. Hot on Sean’s heels was Ryan Harvey with two Pellucidar posts, his review of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Savage Pellucidar (#6) and the Series Wrap-Up (#10). The most popular article last month was our survey of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress anthology…
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As we head into fall, the list of upcoming novels, stories and features from Black Gate‘s authors and bloggers continues to expand — and grow more and more impressive. Here’s a partial list of the current and upcoming releases from some of your favorite BG writers. The Harbors of the Sun by Martha Wells, the last in the Books of the Raksura series, came out in July from Night Shade Books After the End of the World by Jonathan L. Howard, Volume…
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Greetings academic editors, writers and publishers! I am an educated lay reader of academic history books. I hear academic publishing is… differently profitable at the moment, so perhaps you want to have a think about how to engage more people like me. Really there must be a lot of us — people who want to get at the detail, the evidence, the debate, and so find ourselves buying weighty academic tomes. We’re military history buffs who want to get into not…
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By Janet Morris and Chris Morris This is a complete work of fiction presented by Black Gate magazine. It appears with the permission of Janet Morris and Chris Morris, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part. All rights reserved. Copyright 2017 by Janet Morris and Chris Morris. My ancient incantations are too weak, And hell too strong for me to buckle with: — Shakespeare and Marlowe, Henry VI, Part 2 “Come ye, Fates of untamed mind, Purpose…
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10th July 1460, near Northampton, England. Battle of Northampton. It’s the Wars of the Roses. King Henry VI — well His Grace’s advisers, anyway — the Lancastrians, if you must — versus the Yorkists led in this case by the Earl of Warwick . The King’s forces have fortified themselves into a bend in the river. They’ve got a ditch, wooden stakes, perhaps carts, certainly cannon. They’re gearing up for a rerun of the Battle of Castillon (an English defeat so…
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One warm French afternoon in AD 1176, William the Marshal and the Young King found themselves without their comrades on the main street of the little village of Anet. At the other end stood a local knight, intent on capturing them, plus infantry archers and spearmen. “What shall we do?” asked the Young King (Henry, heir to the throne of England, who I always imagined played by Rick Mayall at his brattiest). “Charge them by God!” said the Marshal (I…
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Imagine if the Trojan War happened pretty much as Homer described it? How would modern archaeology, scholarship, and our understanding of war help us understand the events of the Illiad? Yes, on the face of it, Barry Strauss’s The Trojan War – A New History is an odd book. It’s a bit like John Morriss’s Age of Arthur, which took Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth more or less at their word, much to the derision of other Dark Age historians. However, this isn’t a Dark Osprey flight…
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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…
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My local produce seller, a farmer from one of the villages in the Rif When the writing gets tough, the tough writers go to Tangier… One of the advantages of living in Europe is that you have North Africa right at your doorstep. Sadly that region, with all its diverse cultures and beautiful landscape and ancient sites, has largely become a no-go area. Algeria and Libya are war zones and Tunisia and Egypt are highly unstable as well. That…
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Did you know that men used to wear falsies? Not for their chests, but for their calves. Back in the 18th-century, men wore stockings and knee-britches, and if you didn’t have well-turned calf muscles, then you were a “spindle shank.” So some men with skinny legs wore little cushions. Which leads us to the young soldier Jean-Roche Coignet, seduced by an older woman, thus beset by the excruciating problem of how to hide his “wretched false calves and… three pairs of stockings.” He managed…
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