NYRSF 349 Editorial: Gardner, Seen from Afar

This issue began when Michael Swanwick e-mailed me “From A to Z with Gardner Dozios” with the comment “I presume you’ll also be putting together a Gardner-themed issue sometime soon ...”, and in that moment I knew we were. Michael was an enormous help with brainstorming and contacting contributors and this issue owes him an immeasurable debt.

I did not know Gardner nearly as well as I would have liked. I met him at conventions, mostly Worldcons, mostly in passing because he was generally being pulled in a dozen different directions at once. Even under those circumstances, his unmistakable intelligence, charm, and humor came through.

At the 2001 Worldcon (The Millennium Philcon), I spent an hour working the Dragon Press table in the Dealer’s Room while David Hartwell took a break. The great upside was that the Asimov’s table was immediately adjacent and Gardner was in full-on carnival-barker mode, serving up a nonstop and never-repeating series of hilarious pitches for the magazine to any passers-by.

At the 2012 Chicago Worldcon, Gardner was the co-anchor of a hilarious “Secret History of Science Fiction” panel that was mostly a series of “what we did when we was drunk” anecdotes that distilled a certain era in sf fandom and brought it, at least for a few minutes, to life.

At Anticipation, the 2009 Montreal Worldcon, I participated in a panel on the question of whether magazines per se deserve to receive Hugo Awards; panelists included Stephen H Segal, Sheila Williams, Mike Resnick, Chris M. Barkley, and of course Gardner. Gardner took a “con” stance, arguing that the best fiction magazine in the field by definition was the magazine that had the best fiction, by whatever measure you wanted to apply. I argued that every magazine has a specific flavor, that (for instance) Stan Schmidt’s Analog or Asimov’s during his own tenure had a character distinct from just the stories. I don’t know whether I convinced him, but he took the point (and the many points of the other panelists) seriously, assessing them as part of a real discussion rather than just a rehearsal of previously established positions.

Just a few encounters, but he looms large in my memory.

In closing, I’ll mention one small portion of his work that no one else mentioned. Back in 2010–2011, Jo Walton wrote the “Revisiting the Hugos” series on Tor.com <www.tor.com/features/series/revisiting-the-hugos/>. In these, she gives her assessments of the Hugo nominees list for the Best Novel award for each year from 1953 to 2000 and of other works that would have been credible alternate selections. Shortly after the series began, Gardner started leaving lengthy comments to the posts discussing the short-fiction field for each year, apparently off the top of his head. His knowledge of sf’s short fiction was unrivaled (a fact which made the summary essays and Honorable Mentions in his Year’s Best volumes so vital). His commentary was so much a part of “Revisiting” that Jo incorporated it into her recent compilation of the columns, An Informal History of the Hugos (Tor Books, 2018).

Gardner was such a great mixture of professional knowledge and fannish joy. We will miss him so.

Mining the Vortex: A Portrait of Gardner Dozois. Copyright by Sally Wiener Grotta. All rights reserved. <SallyWienerGrotta.com>