Simulcast on Black Gate :
Dark Muse News: Unearthing Black Gate, and the Cave of Wonders – Interviewing John O’Neill
Issue and cover artists: 1 Keith Parkinson (2000), 4 Charles Keegan (2002), 10 Denis Rodier (2007), 12 Bruce Pennington (2008), 15 Donato Giancola (2011)
Learn the lore and allure of Black Gate!
Building on our June 2026 coverage of The
Legend of Top-Shelf Books Open Mic, the near-mythical, yet true, confluence
of many Black Gate contributors and authors, this Dark Muse News
post corners Chief Editor John O'Neill to detail the history of the magazine.
It's over 25 years old!
I learned about Black Gate magazine in 2010 at
the World Fantasy Convention, when Howard Andrew Jones espoused about it on a
panel. I immediately ordered Issue #15, and then the print run ended! Eh gad. I
was late for the party again! (Context in The
Legend of Top-Shelf Books post).
What I adore about Black Gate is its community
of contributors and readers. It attracts people ("Blackgaters") who
love fantasy literature and helping others enjoy it. If you are like me, you
did not join back in 2000, and the magazine, in all its forms, deserves some
explanation.
A condensed history of Black Gate magazine.
- 2000:
Publisher and Editor John O'Neill launched Black Gate's website in August,
ahead of the print release at the World Fantasy Convention in Corpus
Christi in October.
- 2008: Howard
Andrew Jones spearheaded the Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy
Literature blog to create a premier destination for heroic fantasy
on the internet.
- 2011:
The 15th and final print issue was released, and the blog transformed to
post free, original pieces of short fiction every Sunday alongside
non-fiction essays.
- 2016: Black
Gate crossed 2 million page views per month and won both an Alfie
Award from George R.R. Martin and a prestigious World Fantasy Award.
- 2026:
You are here!
Learn the secrets of the grimoire that you are reading
now.
Become part of the lore. Record your Black Gate
memories in the comments!
John O'Neill in
Ottawa in 2022
Thanks for answering our questions, John. Why the name
“Black Gate”?
I love this question, because it delves right into the
nitty-gritty of BG’s history.
Black Gate came out of the dot.com boom of the
mid-nineties. I’d invested in a company called Cyberus – a play on Cerberus,
the 3-headed dog that guarded the gate to the underworld – that grew to become
the largest ISP in Ottawa, Canada. During the heady days of the 90s, we dreamed
of leveraging that success into other ventures, like an online gaming company.
My friend Wayne MacLaurin, CEO of Cyberus, registered blackgate.com as a
possible subsidiary of Cyberus, keeping that underworld motif alive.
Fast-forward a few years, and I’m researching prospective
names for my new fantasy magazine. Every URL I came up with had been nabbed by
that point. But I was surprised that one of my favorites was held by none other
than Wayne MacLaurin. With one quick email, Wayne and I partnered to launch
blackgate.com. Once we had the name, the magazine’s identity came together
quickly.
What were your motivations? The initial editorials (BG
#1 and #2) show a passion for keeping the fantasy magazine form alive.
I thought of Black Gate primarily as an online
business in those days. By the late 90s, I’d been deeply involved in a number
of internet startups, and had helped Dell Magazines and others launch the first
websites for Asimov’s SF, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction, and many others. Demand for online content was exploding.
In 1995 I created an online science fiction hub called SF
Site, using Cyberus equipment and expertise. It grew to over a hundred
thousand monthly readers with virtually zero marketing, and we hosted F&SF
and other magazines for decades. Based on that success, I thought there was a
golden opportunity to launch a print magazine with a cutting-edge digital
presence.
In those days, magazines didn’t even sell subscriptions
online. I was convinced we could quickly establish a sizable online presence,
and show the world how to use the internet to rapidly grow a reader base and
launch a digital brand. I didn’t want us to repeat ourselves with another SF
property, so we chose fantasy.
I picked a genre that the market was clearly clamoring for –
adventure fantasy – and leveraged much of the talent we’d already attracted
with SF Site. We launched the website on August 30, 2000, and our first
issue went to press a few weeks later, just in time for the World Fantasy
Convention in October.
Somehow you got a crew of a dozen people to launch the
magazine. How did you enlist them?
That was easy. At that point SF Site had over 30
regular reviewers and staff, and I invited the most talented among that crew to
contribute – including Rich Horton, Victoria Strauss, Don Bassingthwaite, Marc
Goldstein, David Soyka, Charlene L. Brusso, Lisa DuMond, Paul J. McAuley, and
Todd Ruthman.
The big difference, of course, was that SF Site was a
fan site, whereas Black Gate was a professional publication – meaning we
paid for content. It was not a hardship to get most of the team to join.
Print Issues/Cover Artist: 1 Keith Parkinson, 2 Hung Ving Mac, 3 Hung Vinh Mac, 4 Charles Keegan, 5 Chris Pepper, 6 Todd Lockwood, 7 Terri Lindsey, 8 Kenn Brown, 9 Dan Krall, 10 Denis Rodier, 11 Alessanda Kelley, 12 Bruce Pennington, 13 Malcolm McClinton, 14 Bruce Pennington, 15 Donato Giancola.
Black Gate 1 - November 2000, the print magazine
was born, but the first edition is a different size than the rest. I recall you
had a story about that. What was it?
Glad you asked about that. By 1998 I was part of the
Business Operations team for Motorola, in Schaumburg, Illinois, doing software
acquisitions. In one of the great bits of serendipity of my life, the corporate
lawyer I worked with on those deals was a guy named David Kenzer. I worked with
him every day for two years before discovering that he was the same David
Kenzer who owned one of my favorite game companies, Kenzer & Company,
publishers of Knights of the Dinner Table.
When Dave learned I wanted to publish a magazine, he brought
me to Skokie to introduce me to his printer, A to Z Printing. I knew that I
wanted a magazine that had the same sense of fun and adventure as the pulp
magazines I loved, and for that first meeting I brought a copy of Astounding
Science Fiction from the 1930s with me, to show the printer the size and
feel I was aiming for.
We settled on the oversize format we used for the first
issue, partly because it was the same size as the RPG supplements the printer
was used to. But we quickly discovered that a small reduction would allow us to
use smaller paper, at significant savings. Later issues were all published at
the smaller size.
Alfie Award for Integrity and Boneheadedness - Honored by George RR Martin
This excerpt from John O'Neill comes from an Aug
2016 post. Watch the award acceptance speech on Youtube
Yesterday, while I was walking through the crowded halls of
Worldcon in the Kansas City Convention Center, I was given an invitation to the
Hugo Losers party, courtesy of the party’s distinguished host, George RR
Martin. I was quite flattered, as Black Gate was not
even up for a Hugo (we declined the
nomination, as we did last year, to make room for another nominee on the
ballot), but didn’t think much more about it.
The Hugo Losers party is the hottest ticket of the
convention, as I soon discovered. George personally hands out the Alfie Awards
to those Hugo losers whom he feels (quite rightly, I think) were unjustly
robbed of an award by slate shenanigans. And this year he spared no expense to
do it in style, renting out the Midland Theater, hiring a band, and plying
hundreds of guests with fabulous food and drink. The Awards themselves are
gorgeous, constructed of vintage hood ornaments, in honor of the design inspiration
for the first Hugo Awards.
George funds and hosts the awards, but the Alfie’s are in
truth a fan award… the winners are determined by the results of the Hugo
voting. But after the first few were awarded, George announced that the Alfie
committee had the right to give out special awards. And as the sole member of
the committee, he’d decided to give a special award this year to recognize one
publication “for integrity” in declining a Hugo nomination two years in a
row. Without further ado, George announced the award was to be given to Black
Gate, and I was called to the stage to accept it.
It was a very real honor for me. In a very real way George
exemplifies all that’s best about fandom — its inclusiveness, its quest to
reward excellence, and especially its talent for building a community. I was
very proud to accept the award on behalf of everyone who’s worked so hard to
make Black Gate a success these last few years.
Black Gate wins World Fantasy Award
Oct. 2016, John O'Neill posted
about winning the award; excerpt below.
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?”
Undaunted, Howard put together a top-notch team of writers,
and committed to putting daily content on the Black Gate blog.
It was his vision, and speaking personally, I still think it’s completely
bonkers.
But thanks to Bill Ward, David Soyka, Scott Oden, James
Enge, EE Knight, Judith Berman, Rich Horton, and especially Ryan Harvey for
getting the site off the ground (I still think it’s a crazy idea).
In 2010, C.S.E. Cooney commented that my articles would be
taken more seriously if the majority of the words were spelled correctly. She
became our first website editor, and she did an extraordinary job. She raised
our standards enormously.
Today Black Gate has 58 regular and
semi-regular bloggers — including many of you in the audience. Our mandate is
to cover the best neglected fantasy, past and present.
We’ve received many honors over the last decade, but nothing
like this. This is the highlight of 20 years of love and celebration of
fantasy, and on behalf of the entire Black Gate community, thank
you from the bottom of my heart.
John O'Neill and Howard Andrew Jones at the World Science Fiction Convention, Washington DC, December 19, 2021
Howard Andrew Jones championed expanding the Black
Gate website, transforming it into a mega-blog as it complemented the print
issue.
In January 2025, after Howard Andrew Jones lost his life to
brain cancer, John O'Neill remembered
his dear friend; the excerpt below captures Howard's heroism.
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…
In November 2008 Howard told me he wanted to remake our
website, and post new articles every single day, instead of a few times a
month. I told him he was crazy. How in the world could we produce that much
content, especially without a budget?
Undaunted, Howard put together a top-notch team of writers,
and committed to putting daily content on the Black Gate blog. It
was his vision, and he executed it magnificently, with a little help from Bill
Ward, David Soyka, Scott Oden, James Enge, EE Knight, Ryan Harvey, and others.
Eight years later, the website won a World Fantasy Award — an honor that I
still believe should have been presented to Howard.
Thoughts on the last print issue/stopping print?
Ending the print magazine with issue #15 was a hard decision
to make. I loved the magazine, and I deeply loved publishing fiction --
especially finding new writers, like James Enge, Harry Connolly, Iain Rowan,
Aaron Bradford Starr, Michael Livingston, John C. Hocking, Matthew David
Surridge, Sarah Avery, and many others.
Black Gate started as a business, and that meant
keeping costs manageable. But it was always a side hustle, something I did at
night and on weekends while holding down a full time job. As my career
advanced, those jobs became more and more demanding, and it became more and
more clear that Black Gate was unlikely to ever make enough to allow me
to quit the day job.
As Black Gate became more of a hobby, rather than a
potential off-ramp to my business career, that meant I could treat it as one,
and I no longer had to be quite so rigorous controlling costs. I didn’t mind
spending an extra $300 if it meant getting the cover art I wanted. Or $685 to
add an extra 32 pages. Or $2,300 so we could continue to have top quality
interior art. Gradually it became harder and harder to make the compromises
that were keeping us profitable.
By our tenth year in business we were losing over $12,000 an
issue. No one on the staff was paid, including me. At that point the magazine
was a true labor of love, and we were publishing only one issue a year – a huge
annual production, nearly 400 pages of original fiction, art, and reviews, most
of which I paid for out of my own pocket. As long as I was employed, the cost
really wasn’t a burden.
But in 2012 I left my job as CEO of a small software
business in central Illinois, and the senior position I was expecting at
Motorola didn’t materialize, as the company abruptly announced it was being
acquired by Google. The print version of Black Gate was the first
expense that had to go to stabilize our family finances. I found a job just a
few months later, but by that point it was too late to save the magazine.
I sometimes wonder if there was some way we could have saved
the print version by bridging those months with a crowdfunding campaign or
something similar. But the hard truth is that the print version never sold more
than 1,600 copies per issue. Giving it up allowed us to put all our focus on
the online version of Black Gate, which reached vastly more readers.
By 2015 we finally surpassed SF Site, with over a
hundred thousand monthly readers and 1.6 million page views/month, and in 2016
we won a World Fantasy Award. Our readership has gone up and down in the years
since, but our core readership has proven incredibly loyal, sticking with us
through multiple ups and downs as we’ve weathered the storms of industry change
and provider hiccups.
Are PDFs or back issues still available?
We still have a small number of print copies. Some of our
older issues are sold out, but the rest can still be purchased here.
That's not the case with PDFs. A few years ago, when we
transitioned from the legacy Cyberus servers to our new service provider,
Hostgator, we lost the custom download functionality our architect Rose had
built for us. We also lost the original PDF files. We'd love to rebuild it at
Hostgator, but step one is recreating the high-quality PDFs. Most of our
original production files were lost in a hardware failure in 2006, so this is a
more challenging task than we'd like. But we haven't given up, and hope to recreate
the original PDFs in the next year or so.
Can we talk about unearthing your basement? Are Black
Gate relics in there?
[Click the images for Cave-of-Wonder sizes.]
I don't recommend lining your workspace walls with games like this. Believe me -- it's too easy to get distracted.
There's certainly a fair amount of Black Gate
history!
In the late 90s we finished our basement, and I built an
oversize desk as a work space. That humble office was the global headquarters
for Black Gate's vast publishing empire for the next two decades. I
assembled all the magazines there, and handed all the printing, distribution,
and financial details. When 2,000 copies of Black Gate magazine
arrived from the printer and were dumped in our garage, the whole family would
gather in the kitchen to help me stuff them in envelopes by hand.
Bookcase #31 in The
Black Gate Cave of Wonders
It can be hard to get around in the Cave of Wonders
When we finished the basement we left it as a single room,
to give the kids a place to run around. Over the years I built 56 bookshelves
lining the walls of the basement, and those gradually filled with computers
games, books, pulps, comics, science fiction magazines, and vintage role
playing games. Howard used to call it the Cave of Wonders, because it sort of
looked like a well-stocked gaming store.
The ladder to the
comic nook in the Cave of Wonders
When we finished the basement the contractor asked what we
wanted to do with our two crawlspaces. On a whim we decided to have them
carpeted, and put in some lighting. Our kids called them 'comic nooks,' because
on rainy days they'd crawl inside to read comics or play board games. Over the
next 25 years they gradually filled floor-to-ceiling with comics and old games.
Mostly I stay out of them now, and they're home to a lot of spiders.
These days the back
half of the Cave of Wonders is filled with metal shelving
About a decade ago I started building shelving units to
house my growing paperback collection. Those fill half of the basement now,
making a lot of twisting corridors. Each shelf holds 35 long boxes, or about
3600 paperbacks or old magazines. It's a great way to store a lot of old paper,
but it does make it tough to find what you're looking for. Especially since the
collection isn't organized nearly as well as it should be.
he shelves are inexpensive, and they get everything off the floor, which has helped a lot with navigating around the Cave.[/caption]
I've posted a few pics below to give you a sense of what the
Cave looks like today.
Most of the long boxes on the shelves are filled with vintage paperbacks, although a lot also hold old magazines.
Most of these boxes are not labeled. I spend a lot of my free time labeling and organizing these days.
I'm not completely sure where all these corridors go.
There are many hundreds of hours of enjoyable cataloging and fondling ahead to get all these paperback bagged and organized.
The shelves are positioned in front of bookcases, which can make it tough to find some of the older games. If you want something specific in the Cave of Wonders, you need a lot of patience. And a map.
I don't go into the crawl spaces much anymore. There's not much room to move around.
For the love of God, stay out of the crawlspace
One last photo, and then we'll leave this crawlspace undisturbed for another decade[/caption]
Any reflections about most-fun/memorable/impressive
submissions or interactions with artists/authors/fans?
When I look back at the last 25 years, they're filled with
countless fond memories. It's true what they say. You forget the tough times,
and remember the good.
I don't want to close out without sharing a few of my
favorite memories. First and foremost, there were the writers. Being an editor
is a thankless task, especially if you can't afford to pay yourself. But what
made it all worthwhile was finding those magical stories in the slush pile. The
tales from an unknown -- or relative unknown -- that dragged you to the edge of
you seat, and got your pulse pounding. Finding and publishing the first tale of
Morlock, by the amazing James Enge. Publishing an early story by Cory Doctorow.
Derek Kunsken's third published story. Discovering Harry Connolly. Publishing
early work by Martha Wells, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Richard Parks,
John R. Fultz, Devon Monk, David B. Coe, Constance Cooper, David Wesley Hill, Ellen
Klages, Tina Jens, Peadar Ò Guilin, Iain Rowan, Aaron Bradford Starr, Michael
Livingston, Jonathan L. Howard, Edward Carmien, Matthew David Surridge, David
Evan Harris, Pete Butler, and so many more.
Something I haven't had the chance to talk about much was
the artwork. I was very proud of the fact that we published so much amazing
artwork by some many brilliant artists. Richard Corben, Chris Pepper, Bernie
Mireault, Chuck Lukacs, Charles Keegan, Todd Lockwood, Leif Jones, Jim Pavelec,
Malcolm McClinton, and so many others.
The last thing I want to talk about is how welcoming the
fantasy community was, and is. We received immediate support and incredible
advice from countless corners as we tried to get our humble magazine off the
ground. There was a very fine fantasy magazine that had just gone on hiatus,
and the publisher contacted me -- unsolicited -- and quietly emailed me his
entire subscription database. We had a surprising number of subscriptions
before we even released our first issue. Rich Horton sent me a check for an
8-isusue sub a week after we announced the magazine.
The fantasy community is still centered around conventions,
and they're still the place to be if you want to meet readers, writers, and
artists, and get plugged into what's happening in the field.
There are more fantasy magazines alive today then there were
when we got started in 1999. Most of them are, like Black Gate, very
small, and run by folks with very little experience, but a whole lot of love
for the genre.
It's heartwarming to see that grass-roots drive to create is
still alive in this field. I hope to stay a part of it for a long time.
S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor
at Blackgate.com, regularly reviewing books, interviewing authors
on ‘Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction’, and running Dark Muse News. He
has taken lead roles organizing the Gen Con Writers’ Symposium (2021-2023) and
the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group; he even interned for Tales from the
Magician’s Skull magazine and is an Assistant Editor for Battleborn magazine.
As for crafting stories, he has contributed eight entries across Perseid
Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series,
and has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies. He independently
publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction®; short stories of these
have appeared in Whetstone and Swords & Sorcery online
magazine, Rogues In the House Podcast’s A Book of Blades (Vol. I
and Vol. II), DMR’s Terra Incognita, Tales From
the Magician’s Skull, Savage Realms Magazine, and Michael
Stackpole’s S&S Chain Story 2 Project.
