Pierre-Paul Durastanti: An Interview with Gardner Dozois

[This interview was conducted by e-mail in March and June 2000. It was originally published in translation in the magazine Bifrost but has never appeared in English.—the eds.]

Pierre-Paul Durastanti: Gardner, can you first introduce yourself to our French readers?

Gardner Dozois: I was born in 1947 in Salem, Massachusetts. My paternal grandfather had moved down from Québec, in Canada, to work in the mills in Manchester, New Hampshire. My father was also a factory worker and was always disappointed that I hadn’t followed him into that line of work. But my life was “ruined” by sf instead! <g>

PPD: So your name is French.

GD: Yes, Dozois is a French name, and we’re of mixed French-Scots blood, from the Québec area, although my mother was Irish and Dutch. Dozois is a very rare name in the U.S., but is somewhat more common in Québec. There’s a fairly large French-Canadian population in the part of New England where I grew up, where we used to fill the lowest rung on the social ladder. We didn’t have many actual black people where I grew up, so French-Canadians were sort of the black people of New England: looked down on, referred to as “Frogs,” got to do all the shit jobs nobody else wanted, and so forth.

My paternal grandfather spoke French and spoke English with a very heavy accent, but by the time it reached my father’s generation, most of that was gone. He learned no French, and although he had traces of a French accent in his youth, he worked relentlessly with a tape-recorder to eliminate it because it was a handicap to the Upwardly Mobile in that time and that place, and he had ambitions. Not that he ever reached all that high—but he did get out of the factory and into a more respectable job eventually, being night manager of a hotel. He probably couldn’t have done that if he still had his French accent.

Later on, when I was in the Army, I worked consciously and hard to get rid of my very heavy New England accent in just the same way, probably survival tactics since I ended up in a unit almost completely staffed by people from the Middle West.

PPD: Being recognizable as a New Englander could have been problematic?

GD: Well, anything that makes you stand out as different from everything else is a drawback in the Army. I was different enough from everybody else anyway without having a thick funny accent too! It’s what they call the “Green Monkey” syndrome. Take a monkey and paint it green and put it back in the cage, and the other monkeys will tear it to pieces.

So by the time I left the Army, I had obliterated most traces of my New England accent, although occasionally it will slip back when I’m very tired, or I’ve spent a few days at home.

I guess the upshot of all this is that I grew up as a poor working-class kid in a gritty little factory town in New England, not the most usual background for a science fiction writer—most sf writers I’ve met are at least middle-class or upper middle-class, and many come from moderately rich families. Howard Waldrop and George Martin are among the few others I can name.

So my perspective might be somewhat different from some, because it’s the perspective from the bottom of the heap. I was a working-class kid, grew up relatively poor, and have been relatively poor for most of my adult life, and that gives you a different perspective on life, I think, than if you’re looking at things from the top. Most science fiction writers are at least of comfortable middle-class origin, and many of them are from the upper class, at least the bottom rungs of it. That must produce a difference in perspective.

PPD: Philip K. Dick once told how he first encountered sf thus: “I went into a drug store looking for Popular Science. They were out of it, and I saw something called Stirring Science Fiction. I thought, Well, shit, the title is similar. It’s closer than Nurse Romance Stories. And I took it home and read it.” What’s your story?

GD: Well, for me it was a longer, more extended process. An early favorite book of mine was Kipling’s The Jungle Books, and I moved from there into reading other YA series about animals. At the same time, I was reading the “boy’s adventure” series of the day, although even at the time, I thought those were rather lame (didn’t stop me from reading them, though!). At some point, I gradually moved out of reading these other things into reading science fiction, which seemed to satisfy whatever hunger I was trying to assuage with these other books better than they did.

In retrospect, I think that what I was looking for most was the view from someone else’s eyes (or something else’s eyes), someone who was leading a totally different kind of life from the rather gray and miserable existence I was actually leading myself. To get inside someone else’s skin. The color and exoticism was a big factor here—and in fact, to this day, I still respond well to sf or fantasy that has lots of “local color” and exoticism in it; in some ways, I respond to the same sort of thing in historical fiction that I do in sf, which is probably why it’s always been easy to sell me something that has lots of strong historical details of exotic cultures in it or that takes place in some other time period.

I think the first sf books I read that I can really remember well, ones that made an impression on me deeper than did those I might have run across before that, were the so-called juvenile novels of Andre Norton, which I ran into in the school library. I quickly went from there to reading the Heinlein “juveniles,” though, which made an even stronger impression on me—it was probably the Heinlein juveniles that really set the hook in.

A little bit after that, once I’d been reading the Heinlein juveniles, I discovered science fiction magazines, and that’s when I really got hooked. My first magazine was Fantastic, which at that point was being edited by Cele Goldsmith. She’d just coaxed Fritz Leiber back out of semi-retirement, and the magazine was running all these great Gray Mouser stories by him, and that instantly hooked me. At about the same time, I ran into anthologies such as Unknown by Don Benson and Sword & Sorcery by L. Sprague de Camp, which also had similar stuff in them, including other Gray Mouser stories. So in a way, except for Heinlein, I was actually a fantasy fan before I was an sf fan.

I think that stories by writers like Zelazny started to shift me away from sword & sorcery to sf, along with Heinlein, of course. After that, I started reading everything I could find.

I remember being impressed early on by Alfred Bester, particularly The Stars My Destination, still one of the great sf novels. And by Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber. A little later, I was an early Delany fan, and I read all his novels before anyone else had heard of him or was paying any attention to him. The same thing with Ursula Le Guin.

PPD: What got you into writing? This desire to see through someone else’s eyes?

GD: Yes, probably. I’d always scribbled “stories” down in notebook tablets. At one point in the early ’60s, when Ace began to reissue all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s old novels, including his Martian novels, I became for a while a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs fan and began to write an endless epic in a series of dimestore notebook tablets that was suspiciously like A Princess of Mars. Later on, I began writing a story that was even more suspiciously like one of Fritz Leiber’s Gray Mouser stories.

What concentrated this and made me more serious about it, though, was when I got heavily into reading science fiction magazines. At the bottom of the masthead in those magazines, there’s a notice that says that the magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts—which, if you think about it, implies that it’s okay to send them unsolicited manuscripts. Before this revelation occurred to me, it had never crossed my mind that I could actually send a manuscript to a magazine myself, and there might even be a chance that they would buy it and publish it! (I don’t know where I thought the stories came from—grown on bushes in a fiction farm somewhere, perhaps.) But once I had that revelation, I began to actually try to write stories in some form that I could submit to magazines, which meant that I had to give up on endlessly sprawling notebook tablet epics and concentrate on pulling something together in a concise enough form to be sent into a magazine.

PPD: You debut in 1966, in If. How does one sell his first story?

GD: Well, I submitted several stories to Cele Goldsmith’s magazines but never got anything more than form rejection letters back. This would be, oh, say, sometime around 1963 or 1964, maybe. I think that I started sending stuff in to magazines when I was in high school. Eventually, I started trying other magazines as well, also without success, but perhaps the practice made my pitiful efforts become slightly more sophisticated. Eventually, in 1965, just before leaving home to go into the Army, I sent a story to Fred Pohl at Worlds of If magazine, and I actually got a personal letter back, explaining things I could do to improve the story, and indicating that he’d be willing to take another look at it if I worked on it. Well, needless to say, I was thrilled. I rewrote the story, sent it off, and a bit later, went off to basic training. I actually was in basic training camp in the Army when my mother called to say that she had received an acceptance letter for the story, so I got about two minutes to enjoy the idea that I’d finally made a sale before some drill sergeant was kicking me in the ass and screaming obscenities at me.

PPD: What was your work in the Army? Military journalist, I gather?

GD: Yes, I was a military journalist, although that’s almost an oxymoron, like “military justice.” What I ended up doing was working as a features editor on a division newspaper in Germany—similar to working on a house organ or magazine for a large corporation. Doing puff pieces and PR and “personality” profiles—certainly not real journalism.

PPD: Did this work impact on your fiction when you started writing again after the Army?

GD: I didn’t stop writing fiction while in the Army although it slowed my production way down, perhaps understandably. Still, over the time I was in Germany, I managed to finish several stories and a novel, which wasn’t too bad. I never sold anything to Fred Pohl again, although I kept trying throughout my Army years, and actually made four or five new submissions to him. I later realized that he had painted himself into a corner at Worlds of If magazine, by making it a policy that he would publish one “first sale” story a month. When he couldn’t find anything good, he merely reached into the slush pile and fished out the least awful thing he could find. The slush pile must have been particularly bad that month, because apparently the least awful thing he could find was my story. Anyway, once he didn’t need to buy a “first sale” for that month, he never touched anything of mine again. <g>

PPD: Back from Germany, you publish in the original anthologies of the era, with stories like “A Special Kind of Morning” and “Chains of the Sea”. You ... shunned the magazines?

GD: Well, sometime while I was in Germany, I made a quantum leap in the sophistication of my work. Maybe I was just growing up a bit. But my stuff started to get more “mature,” and I left the interstellar spies with superhuman powers behind. You asked if the military had an effect on my writing. Well, not so much working on the newspaper (although that did give me practice at turning out copy on a deadline), but the fact of being in the Army itself did have an effect on my fiction. At some pinpoint, sometime around 1968, I became a lot more radicalized than I had been, politically, and I began to deeply dislike the Army. In fact, several of my early successful stories, such as “A Dream at Noonday,” were written from a very antiwar slant. So in that respect, being in the Army did have an effect on my work, I guess.

You asked why I shunned the magazines for the anthology series, but that isn’t the way it was at all. In fact, I was unable to sell a story to the magazines all throughout this period. They rejected everything I sent them as too weird, too radical, too far out, too downbeat, too depressing, and so forth. Only the anthology series such as Damon Knight’s Orbit and Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions would touch such stories. So that’s why I sold to the anthologies—because they were the only places that would buy my work! I didn’t begin to be able to sell to the sf magazines until the ’80s, when the magazine market loosened up a bit as to the kind of stuff it would buy, mostly when editors such as Shawna McCarthy and Ellen Datlow came along. Before that, except for an occasional sale to Ted White at Amazing, I had no luck getting into the magazines.

PPD: Having published a good number of short stories and your two novels during the ’70s, you have become a prolific anthologist, and the very successful editor of Asimov’s for about fifteen years now. Was this a career choice?

GD: I gradually got into editing because I couldn’t make enough money from writing to keep myself alive. I never was a highly prolific writer, and it’s hard to make ends meet writing the occasional short story. When I was a starving young writer in New York City, around late 1969 and 1970, some of the contacts I’d made selling stories enabled me to get part-time work reading slushpiles for various publishers, something I did on and off for a number of years to supplement my income. Eventually, that led to my early involvement with Asimov’s and so eventually to the rest of my editing career, I guess. The fact that I was in the right place at the right time, and that knew some of the right people, and that I had a reputation (however fleeting) as a Hot New Writer enabled me to sell my first book, a reprint anthology called A Day in the Life, around 1970—almost unheard of, that an unknown writer should sell an anthology as his first book, but those were radical days in sf, and nobody quite knew what should or shouldn’t be done. That eventually, some years down the road, led to other anthology sales.

PPD: The original anthologies were a land of freedom at that time.

GD: Yes. The anthology markets were much more responsive to “experimental” work than were the magazines. I don’t think that most of my stories of the ’70s would have seen print at all if it wasn’t for anthologies such as Orbit and New Dimensions. The magazine market really was much more conservative and didn’t really begin to loosen up until the early ’80s. I wrote a minor little jape with Michael Swanwick called “Snow Job,” which dealt, lightly, with time-traveling cocaine dealers. Not a terribly serious story or a deeply radical one. But just the fact that it featured cocaine dealers made it untouchable for the magazine market of the day, and everybody rejected it as too “dangerous”—although, of course, it wasn’t really dangerous at all. We ended up selling it, of necessity, to High Times Magazine, where it appeared in an issue with a girlie-magazine-like gatefold of a marijuana plant. Nobody else would buy it. Later, when young editors like Ellen Datlow and Shawna McCarthy came along who weren’t as scared of this “taboo” stuff as earlier editors had been, forget about it. When the magazine market had begun to loosen up a bit, Shawna McCarthy reprinted it in Asimov’s. Then, of course, later on, I myself became a magazine editor, and, as a battle-scarred veteran of the New Wave, loosened things up even more.

PPD: The first of your two published novels was written with a young writer of your “generation,” George Alec Effinger.

GD: Well, the first version of Nightmare Blue, then called Danegeld, was written when I was in the Army in Germany, sometime during 1968. It was a complete draft of a novel but, although it was probably the best I could do at the time (it was a sincere effort, not an attempt to do hackwork), it really wasn’t very good, as I came to realize looking back over it later. Then, a couple of years later, I was living as a starving young writer in New York City, as was George Alec Effinger, and I got to know George. We both knew David Hartwell socially when he was an ambitious young editor trying to put together a book line for Berkley/Putnam. We knew that he was looking for the work of “hot new writers” to feature in this line, and he had more or less let us know individually that he’d be interested in seeing something by us. We were very poor at that point and needed the money, so we wanted to sell him something. I happened to mention to George that I had an already completed novel manuscript but that it wasn’t really good enough to be published. He offered to look it over, decided that he could rewrite it and polish it, and then did a draft of the novel himself. We sent it to Hartwell, and he liked it, although he wanted some fairly substantial revisions, which I did myself during a week that David let me stay in a room at the college dormitory he was then running as a “day job” in New York City. So that was how Nightmare Blue came to be published.

The sf/private eye element existed in the draft from its earliest stages, I put that in there, but all the clever prepostmodern Raymond Chandleresque stuff was put in by George on his polishing draft. Almost all of the alien stuff was mine. The sequences with the dream machine, “Dark Lightning,” were put in by George after the fact. He also made it much more of a Raymond Chandler homage/ironic comment.

PPD: Nightmare Blue is set in Germany—specifically, in a partially alien-occupied Germany. The aliens are there to sell a lethal drug. You said you were in the US Army in Germany at the time of its writing. Are there autobiographical elements in this novel?

GD: Well, I was never much of a drug user. When I use any mind-altering substance at all, booze is my drug of choice, and always has been. But I did know some people over there, mostly civilians and “artists,” who were heroin addicts. So that may be where the drug element comes from. A lot of it was autobiographical just in the sense that many of the locations I’m describing there were locations that were actually around me at the time I was writing the first draft of the novel, and so were locations that I was familiar with. If I’d been living in some other country at the time, then I’d probably have set it there. But I happened to be living in that part of Germany, so that’s what I drew on.

The analogy with the Aensalords and the Army was probably there, in the background, but it wasn’t terrifically conscious. Yeah, I saw it, but it wasn’t really what interested me in the book.

PPD: The human protagonist of Strangers lives in an enclave on another planet and finds himself confronted by an alien culture he doesn’t understand, even though he believes he does....

GD: Yeah, that element was strong and consciously planned in Strangers and is probably a not all-that-subtle use of my own experience in living in an American enclave in a foreign country. Certainly I drew on the experience of living behind gates in an Army base, where it was “America” on this side of the line and a totally foreign world on the other side of the line with little real contact or understanding of the other side on either side of the gate.

By the time I got around to writing Strangers, though, I was a better writer, so I handled the autobiographical elements with a bit more subtlety and ingenuity than I had in Nightmare Blue, where I mostly used my own experience to provide interesting “local color” without really dealing with the content of the experience all that much.

As for Strangers, it started out as a novella that I wrote for Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions IV, and in that form it was a finalist for the Nebula and the Hugo. After I’d finished and sold the novella, I was looking it over, and it occurred to me that it could be turned into a novel just by spending a little more time on some of the things in the plot that I’d skimmed over briefly in the novella version. So it wasn’t so much that I expanded the novella into a novel, as that I’d condensed a novel into a novella in the first place, and it was just a matter of uncompressing those sections that had had to be compressed in the short version, and giving them a bit more room to breathe.

PPD: You still write the occasional short story, but can we hope for a new novel?

GD: I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that I’m probably not a natural novelist. Some people are; my friend Jack Dann, for instance, thinks easily and naturally in terms of novels and large-scale projects; I do not. I’m a natural short-story writer instead, and that works against me at novel length. For one thing, I like to compress everything into a very dense texture—I’m much more likely to compress a four-hundred-page novel down into a 20-page story than I am to expand a 20-page story into a 400-page novel. For another thing, most of the time in fiction I use a very close and closely observed, second-by-second style of description, “He turned on the tap, let it run cold, filled the glass with water. A bug ran across the tap,” and so on ... and that doesn’t work over the length of an entire novel where you need to vary tone and pacing and sometimes skip quickly over long periods of time. For another thing, a lot of the effect of my art depends on misdirection and ellipticalness, and that doesn’t work well at novel length either.

I’m not even sure I really understand the novel form. Several critics blasted me for Strangers because I didn’t have any “subplots” in it. I was bewildered. What’s all this about subplots? I started at the beginning of the story, went to the end of it, and then stopped. I have no idea how I could have worked a “subplot” into it, or why I’d have wanted to!

PPD: You were speaking of Jack Dann, which leads me into mentioning the sheer bulk and quality of your collaborative writing: with him, Michael Swanwick, Jack Haldeman, Susan Casper, and I’m sure I’m forgetting a few names. Do you take a specific pleasure in doing this kind of work?

GD: Well, it’s always seemed to me that the point of collaborations is that you produce a story that neither or you would ever have written, or could have written, if you’d been working on it as a solo story. I think that’s been true of most of my collaborations. Without the collaborator there to lend his or her own particular strength to the mix, you wouldn’t be able to do the story. Ideally, you combine your strengths to produce work that would have been beyond the grasp of either of you alone. (Of course, in the real world, some collaborators combine their weaknesses rather than their strengths, but that’s the way it goes!)

In my own specific case, the collaborations are mostly either stories I started but then would probably have stalled on (or did stall on) because what was needed to take the story on from there was some kind of strength or skill that I didn’t have, or stories that other people had started that they couldn’t finish on their own that needed some skill or strength that I could bring to it.

Sometimes, as with “Snow Job,” it was more a matter of one partner seeing where the story could go while the other partner had overlooked that. I doubt that Michael would ever have come up with the surround frame about the time cops ... but on the other hand, I never would have been able to write such a good scene about a coke-dealing scam, nor would it ever have occurred to me to do so in the first place. So one of us had the nub of the story, and the other one had what was needed to flesh it out and complete it, and it worked out well when the two parts were put together.

PPD: You’ve also written a good number of introductions, articles, essays....

GD: I’ve done some critical work from time to time of that sort, usually when somebody specifically hired me to do so. David Hartwell wanted a critical retrospective of Tiptree’s work for the Gregg Press reissue of Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home and asked me to do it, so I did. Earlier, I’d been asked to do a critical retrospective of Damon Knight and had done that. As a working-class kid, with no particular education or academic background to speak of, I always think that somebody else would be better suited to do these things... but nobody else ever seems to actually do them, so I end up stuck with them. To this day, I believe mine might be the only critical retrospective on Knight’s work ever done, and there have even been only a few on Tiptree. A lot of the basic academic work on science fiction, stuff you say to yourself, “Well, somebody surely must have written about that already,” just hasn’t been done. So I end up doing it myself. For lack of someone better.

These academics should get up off their asses and get to work! Then the field wouldn’t have to settle for my analysis! I mean, do we really need another analysis about Stanislaw Lem when almost nothing of critical depth has been written about James Tiptree, or Damon Knight, or Alfred Bester, or Fritz Leiber?

PPD: You’ve just published several retrospective anthologies, notably on adventure sf. You take a very militant stand in there. Is sf really becoming cut from its past, as you deplore?

GD: I feel that it is, to some extent. Historical memory is a very limited thing in this field at the moment. When I was a young writer, I knew the history of the field, and I was at least passingly familiar with most of the major work of the major authors of the past couple of generations, but that’s rare today. Today, I meet young writers and hopeful wannabe writers, people who consider themselves committed sf readers, sf fans, who have never heard of Cordwainer Smith or Clifford Simak or Fritz Leiber or Alfred Bester, and even many who have never heard of writers who are still on the bookshelves, like Jack Vance and Poul Anderson. And of the past history of the genre itself as a genre, they know nothing at all. Most young readers today have never even heard of the “New Wave Wars” of the late ’60s, or have any idea what the issues were or that there even was such a thing. Many of them have not even heard of the “Cyberpunk revolution,” although that was much more recent a chapter in genre history. Basically, if you haven’t had a substantial presence in mass-market paperback in the big chain bookstores such as Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton’s in the last five or six years, nobody has ever heard of you.

To some extent, I blame the sf courses that are taught in many colleges, now, although the chain bookstores are another big factor. Many of those courses seem to have a de facto list of “Approved Authors,” people that it’s okay to teach about, usually including authors like Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, H.G. Wells, Ursula K. Le Guin, and so forth and cover very few authors outside that list. I talked to one professor who was teaching a science fiction course, and he himself had never heard of Jack Vance or Poul Anderson or Fritz Leiber. Had no idea who they were! There are some who do a good job and know the history of the field, John Kessel, for instance, but many of them don’t really know the subject they’re attempting to teach, I fear. Let’s hope this isn’t equally true in other areas, or you might be nervous the next time you drive across a new bridge!

One of the other reasons why I started doing those retrospective anthologies and perhaps one reason why they’re slanted the way that they are is that I’ve been spending a good deal of time on online chats of various sorts over the last few years, and one comment I hear from young readers over and over again is that there’s no adventure and sense of wonder in science fiction anymore, that you have to turn to media tie-in novels like Star Trek and Star Wars if you want to find that sort of thing, and that science fiction proper is boring and stuffy and actionless and intellectually pretentious. I wanted to show that there is still science fiction out there that can deliver a jolt of adventure and wide-screen sense of wonder, and that you don’t have to turn to Star Trek novels if you want to find science fiction that’s exciting and fun.

PPD: Can you tell us about the situation of the sf magazines in the U.S.? More and more prozines are disappearing, the sales are dropping....

GD: The magazine field is a bit rocky at the moment. It’s often said that this is because novels are now the center of the field and nobody cares much about short fiction anymore or even that people have gotten out of the habit altogether of reading short fiction, and I think that these factors do contribute to the problem. On the other hand, many of the major reasons for the troubles of the magazine field are behind the scenes where it’s not easy for the public to see them. The domestic distribution network in the US, which is responsible for the distribution of almost all magazines, has been thrown into complete chaos in the last several years with bigger distributors swallowing smaller ones, so that where you once had, say, fifty distributors handling magazines, you now have about four or five. This has been bad for all magazines of any type. Fiction magazines, having smaller margins for error in the first place, have perhaps been hit harder by it. It’s much harder to get out on the newsstands now than it was even five years ago let alone ten. And if you don’t get out on the newsstands, you can’t pick up new subscribers, the kind who spot your magazine on the newsstand and say “Hey, that looks interesting!”

Another thing to keep in mind is how nearly invisibly the magazines are being published in some ways. Most sf magazines (even most fiction magazines in general) have no budget for advertising or promotion at all. How many products do you know in the marketplace that sell themselves totally on word of mouth with no promotional work whatsoever? Considering that, it’s amazing that they sell as well as they do!

The hard fact is most people have no idea the magazines even exist, and even fewer have ever seen one offered for sale. That’s true even of many habitual sf readers. Amazingly, even many convention-going sf fans have no idea the magazines exist or have never seen a copy offered for sale. When people ask me what I do, and I mention that I edit Asimov’s, only one in a thousand has ever heard of the magazine, and that one has never actually seen a copy somewhere where he could buy it.

So this is one of the major problems facing the magazines today—how to get around this anonymity and make ourselves more visible to the consumer in spite of the fact that it’s getting tougher to get displayed on newsstands all the time and in spite of the fact that nobody has the money to sink a lot of dough into advertising and promotion. I think that if more people were aware of us in the first place, then a certain percentage of people would give us a try and a good percentage of those would find that they liked us. But getting that knowledge across, when even many sf fans are barely aware that magazines exist, is not easy. One of the few possibilities I can see is using the electronic media, the internet, handheld computers, and so forth, to try to reach new audiences, audiences that might otherwise never be aware that we even exist. It’s too early to say yet if this is actually going to work. But if the magazines have a chance to survive, that’s probably it.

PPD: Back to the situation where the American readers are cut from the genre’s own past—this is difficult to conceive for a French reader who can find almost all of Simak, Vance, Bradbury, Asimov, or Clarke available in the stores.

GD: Well, of course, it’s been a very different set of circumstances over here, especially for the last 20 years. Since the ’80s, almost everything went out of print and stayed out of print. That’s the effect of bottom-line corporate publishing for you plus the rise of the bookstore chains. Used to be, you found a book by an author you liked, and you could go out and buy everything else he ever wrote—if it wasn’t in the bookstores, you could mail-order it from the catalog in the back of a current book. But of course, mail order died too in the ’80s.

So now you go out and you can’t find anything else by the author whose book you liked. This may be changing, though, with the coming of print-on-demand systems and electronic books sold over the Internet. If those systems really become established, nothing may effectively be out of print again. Ideally, if the book is available in the system, you walk into a bookstore, order a copy of a specific book, and it prints one out for you right on the spot, in a few minutes. So you never need to print more than you’re actually selling. Does away with the idea of “print runs” altogether.

There are big changes ahead for the publishing industry, no doubt. I think things will look completely different for better and worse ten years from now than they do today. And, of course, if you combine stories and books available electronically on the internet with POD technology... Eventually, you may be able to download novels from the internet right into your computer at home and have a device make up a hardcover copy right on the spot.

PPD: So this technology could change the book industry just like MP3s and CD burners are changing the record industry....

GD: Exactly. If you want to know what’s going to happen with publishing, look at what’s happening with MP3s today. That’s the future.

PPD: When our reader will read this interview, Nightmare Blue will have been published in France. A few closing comments for them?

GD: Well, I’m pleased that my novels are getting a chance to be brought before a new audience. I’ve been unable to get anybody to reprint them in English for more than 20 years now there’s been a total lack of interest in reissuing them, so it’s good to see them finding new readers somewhere. I hope that people enjoy them.

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Pierre-Paul Durastanti lives in Villefranche-de-Rouergue, Aveyron, France. Gardner Dozois lived in Philadelphia until May 2018.

Happier times with two of the most influential sf short fiction editors: Ellen Datlow & Gardner Dozois.
At the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York, November 2007. Photograph by Scott Edelman.