Editorial: Sent out of the Garden

Gardner Dozois died last week. He was for at least decades the most visible and most influential short fiction editor in science fiction. Had he simply edited Asimov’s for 20 years, he’d be widely remembered. Alongside that, though, he also edited around 100 volumes of short fiction, a mixture of thematic reprints and original collections, independently or with friends such as Jack Dann and George R.R. Martin. His doorstop-sized The Year’s Best Science Fiction series ran for 35 volumes, following 6 years of the more modest Best Science Fiction of the Year series that he took over from Lester Del Rey in 1977. Several instructors I know have adopted this series for their science fiction classes as snapshots of the current sf scene; though no one perspective could possibly show everything, Gardner saw and shared as much as one could ever hope.

Gardner was personally a delight, one of the great fannish comedians. He (and his aforementioned fannish friend GRRM) founded the Hugo Losers’ Party at MidAmericaCon I in 1976, and even if the tradition mutated over the years, it retained its essential fannish silliness to the present. He was a delight on panels, able to shift from substantial discussion of the craft of editing to hilarious vamping in milliseconds and never even for an instant dull. On his blog Not a Blog, Martin posted a link to an excellent panel he and Gardner and Howard “H’ard” Waldrop presented at the 2013 Capclave that shows all of them in full raconteur mode, reliving fannish glories in, to my ear, the best tone--“Here’s the fun we had and we want you to have along with us.” You can find it at <bit.ly/GRRM-Gardner-HW-Capclave>.

Finally, Gardner was a long-time friend of the magazine; as he describes in the interview elsewhere in the issue, he and David Hartwell found each other early in their respective careers. Gardner gave us a review decades ago that we still quote on our advertising: “... some of them overintellectualized to the point of opaqueness; there is a welcome leavening of humor, and some fascinating but unclassifiable stuff....”—he gets us!

Well, got. We have lost a giant, but we have his works, his spirit, his laugh. We can return to his hundred books and be, to a degree, in his company again.

On that note, I end with a cat picture. (Gardner left two black cats behind. I think he would approve.).

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors

“No one would have believed ... that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” Photograph of Jack by human companion Ellen Datlow.

Comments

[Ellen Datlow]

Thank you for making Jack (my monster) famous!