So Gardner went into the hospital for treatment of mild congestive heart failure, caught massive antibiotic-resistant infections while in the hospital, and has now shuffled off this mortal coil.
One of my greatest regrets in life is that I never managed to sell anything to Gardner. Because once you did, you knew you’d made it as a science fiction writer. I state that he was the best editor of short science fiction ever because during his 20 years as editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, stories that he purchased and edited for the magazine won Nebula awards 40 times and Hugo awards over 40 times, as well as he himself winning Editor of the Year 18 times. His editorship of the magazine resulted in a magazine whose quality still astounds. I can pick up, say, a 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and it’s still mind-blowing. You can’t say that about a 30+ year old issue of any other science fiction magazine.
Now, then there’s people who will bring up John W. Campbell. Yes, Campbell basically defined the modern science fiction genre. But: he was relevant for far less time than Gardner was. By the mid 50’s Campbell was basically irrelevant to the field. The leading edge had leaped over to Galaxy under the editorship of Horace Gold and, later, Fred Pohl, and most of the leading writers of the field had deserted him. Even during his glory years in the late 40’s / early 50’s the stories were laughably crude by today’s standards. You won’t enjoy many of them today. You’ll laugh at how ridiculous they are, perhaps, but you won’t enjoy them. Meanwhile, pick up any issue of Asimov’s edited by Gardner and prepare to have your mind blown. They were that good, usually 2/3rds of the nominees for the Hugo and Nebula for short fiction during his editorship of Asimov’s were first printed in Asimov’s.
The science fiction short story arguably hit its peak during Gardner’s editorship of Asimov’s. He published stories that were both literary and scientific, hard science fiction and things you could barely recognized as science fiction or fantasy. And they were *good*, tight and beautiful and full of impact and meaning. Not by accident, either. Joe Haldeman once noted that Gardner had gutted and filleted one of his shorter novels into being a novella to run it in Asimov’s, completely ruining it in Joe’s opinion at the time. The end result, “The Hemingway Hoax”, won both the Hugo and Nebula Award for Novella in 1991. Needless to say, Joe changed his opinion :).
That’s what Gardner was as an editor: Someone who could take one of the best works by one of the best writers in science fiction, and make it better. Sadly, as the Internet era took its toll on print magazines, it became harder to maintain that quality and eventually he retired as editor and returned to writing. He was a good writer too. But not as good a writer as he was an editor. (And I say this despite the fact that he won both a Nebula and a Hugo for his writing).
His work as an anthologist was also praise-worthy. Starting in 1984, he compiled the annual “Year’s Best Science Fiction”, a huge doorstopper of a book that collected the best short science fiction published in the English language, along with commentary about the works and the state of the industry. His taste at selecting stories for this anthology was as refined as his taste for selecting stories for his magazine. His work as an anthologist became perhaps even more important as the Internet gutted the traditional science fiction print magazines and the publishing of short fiction spread across the Internet to all manner of small sites, making it difficult for someone with a busy life like mine to find it. I mean, I subscribe to two of the traditional print magazines today (albeit delivered via Kindle now as vs paper, I just don’t have room for paper), but they aren’t anywhere near the quality that they were back in the last final gasp of the print magazines, during Gardner’s editorship of Asimov’s and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s editorship of F&SF. The rest of what’s published in short science fiction is scattered all over the Internet or in small ‘zines with a circulation of sometimes and never. Gardner Dozois’s work at ferreting out the gems from around the Internet was tremendously valuable to the field, bringing together a fragmented market into something visible to science fiction fans.
So that was Gardner Dozois. He was 70 years old. We probably lost ten more years of his work. So it goes.
– Badtux the Sad Penguin
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Badtux the Snarky Penguin 