Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
(1) When I was starting out, I used to ask Gardner a lot of questions about his editorial work at Asimov’s. Gardner did not alter the ending of Howard Waldrop’s “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” He did cut a portion out of Judith Moffett’s “The Hob.” He said it didn’t advance the story.
(2) Gardner delighted in gossip about other editors. He particularly liked telling stories about Roger Elwood, like the Lunacon where Roger held a panel in which he asked trivia questions about movies and whenever anyone got a correct answer, he’d throw a Ring Ding or a Snowball or a Twinkie their way. Gardner said that Roger’s way of assembling an anthology was that he had a long table with stacks of stories on it—one stack was Effinger stories, another stack was Lafferty stories, et cetera. And when the time came to assemble an anthology, he’d simply walk around the table and take one manuscript off each stack.
Gardner had occasion to see this table because the only way to get paid by Roger was to track him down at his house. He said that Roger would sit at that table, write out a check, and then hold it up over his head and let go. “And the check would float slowly to the floor. ‘Didn’t bounce,’ Roger would say,” and then would leave it there for the author to pick up.
(3) I don’t remember what titles Gardner suggested for the story collection of his we published at St. Martin’s, but I didn’t care for any of them. (Maybe they’re still in the book’s file somewhere in the Flatiron building.) He did suggest the Karl Kofoed painting that we used on the hardcover. “Geodesic Dreams” was my idea, and when Gardner asked what it meant, I said that it didn’t work on a literal level. He grumbled about that for years afterward.
(4) John Campbell was well known for concocting story ideas then sending them to half a dozen writers and working with ’em until he had stories he wanted to run.
In contrast, Gardner would cook up outlandish ideas in the convention bar and then reap rewards after writers went home and excitedly wrote up the story. Remember “Fifty Ways to Improve Your Orgasm”?
On a somewhat related note, I heard Gardner complain many times about how he would make story suggestions to a writer and the writer would incorporate the suggestions and sell the story to another market.
(5) Gardner was one of the greatest story doctors of our time with a gift for identifying story problems that I’ve always envied. One reason why Gardner has so many collaborative works in his bibliography is that he would frequently write up something to show a writer how to fix their story, and Gardner’s material was so effective that the writer would give Gardner a coauthor credit. But the physician couldn’t always heal himself. He worked on a novel after Strangers but hit a roadblock in one of the early chapters (I think David Hartwell said it was chapter 6) and never figured out a way around it.
(6) Gardner said that the magazine that made the biggest impression on him in his youth was F&SF, and when he took over Asimov’s he was open to running stories with very slight science-fictional elements. He described them as mainstream stories where a character would ask, near the end, “Off in the distance—is that a dinosaur I see?”, and that ambiguous element would be enough for the story to qualify for Asimov’s. Later, he grew less tolerant of such borderline stories, saying that “If the magazine says ‘science fiction’ on the cover, I think it’s fair if readers complain if that’s not what they get.” I personally consider Gardner’s tenure at Asimov’s as the single best run a magazine editor has had in the last fifty years, and in editing F&SF I always aspired to have a run as good as Gardner’s stretch from 1989 to ’93 or thereabouts.
(7) In The Faces of Science Fiction, Gardner made one of the best comments I’ve ever heard about the field, one I reference routinely: “You have to be a little crazy to try to do good work in sf.”
(8) As you can probably tell, Gardner was very generous in giving me feedback on the art and craft of editing. I was happy to return the favor whenever I could, and when Dolly the cloned sheep made headlines in 1997, I suggested to Gardner that he should assemble an anthology of clone stories. He feigned indifference to the idea over the phone with one of his, “Hmm, maybe,” comments, but considering how soon after our conversation the book Clones! came out, I suspect he was on the phone to Jack Dann three seconds after we rang off. Which was fine by me ... but when the book came out, I didn’t find my name in the acknowledgments. So I showed the book to Gardner the next time I saw him and protested the omission. And now I have a copy of the book inscribed “To Gordon, You gave us the idea and we kept all the money!”
(9) Mocking publishers is something that many of us do, but Gardner was louder and funnier than anyone else on the topic. So it will forever be his fault that when I look at the cover of the AvoNova first edition of Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain, I see the last two letters of the title as an “m” and not as “in.”
(10) In 2015, I was talking with Gardner about the differences in my editorial approach and Charlie Finlay’s, and Gardner said something along the lines of, “I’ve always worked on the notion, however naive it might be, that I’ll buy stories I like, and if I like them, readers will, too.”
It seems to me now that might be the best expression of Gardner’s editorial philosophy, and I’m glad he shared so much of his reading enthusiasm with us all.
Gordon Van Gelder lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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