Introduction
The Strange and Fabulous Journey of
Gardner Dozois
Imagine you’re at a party in Gardner’s apartment. It’s not large, but he’s invited swarms of people, so it’s very crowded. Gardner keeps his awards on a little table not far from the door. People who have never been there before, young editors and the like, will eventually drift over to admire the thicket of Hugos for his work as an editor, and while there notice two Nebulas gleaming in their midst. Inevitably, someone will say, “I didn’t know Gardner was a writer.”
“Oh, yes,” one of us Old Hands will reply (we linger near the trophy table for this very purpose), “Gardner’s a much better writer than he is an editor!”
Just to watch their faces, you see.
But it’s true. I bow to no man in my estimation of Gardner as an editor. He does a brilliant job of it, and we’re all better off for his being at the helm of Asimov’s. Still, his special gift is as a writer, and his gift finds its truest expression at short length. Gardner is a consummate writer of short fiction.
Gardner Dozois sold his first story when he was seventeen. “The Empty Man” appeared in the September 1966 issue of Fred Pohl’s Worlds of If; he learned of its acceptance while he was in boot camp. That story isn’t reprinted here, and it’s doubtful he’ll ever allow it to be reprinted anywhere. But immediately after his years in the Army, he made a name for himself with wonderfully original and literate stories like “A Special Kind of Morning,” “Machines of Loving Grace,” and “Chains of the Sea.” Between 1970 and 1975, he produced nineteen stories, including much of his best work, as well as a novel written with George Alec Effinger, Nightmare Blue, which was intended as a potboiler but ended up being something rather better.
Unfortunately, the above-mentioned stories could not be included in this collection because they are currently available online, and NESFA Press required exclusivity. However, this book does include five works from Early Period Dozois. “The Visible Man,” written, in part at least, in order to sell a story to Analog, shows the transformative power Gardner brings to a traditional SF dilemma-story. “The Storm” and “Flash Point” are both horror stories in the original sense of the term, narratives that evoke horror and awaken the reader to terror and pity. The spooky-beautiful “The Last Day in July” begins as a horror story, but opens out into something richer and more optimistic. As a special treat, Gardner’s stunning novella “Strangers,” which he later expanded into a novel of the same name, is collected here for the first time.
There is a long gap in Gardner’s bibliography between 1975 and 1981. He was, though it became evident only in retrospect, suffering from writer’s block. It wasn’t perfectly obvious at the time, though, because he was still writing constantly. The stories never did come easily, and the fact that he couldn’t finish any particular one at a given time was nothing unusual. Moreover, Gardner was living in extreme poverty and as a result he was constantly assembling theme anthologies, working on his best-of-the-year volumes, and engaged in the various writerly and editorial scut-work a working writer must undertake to keep from actually starving to death. And he spent one long summer writing Strangers, that beautiful, heartbreaking and neglected novel whose virtues you can sample here in shorter form.
Nevertheless, there is a six-year period in which he published no new short fiction.
Part of the problem was medical. I unhappily remember walking to lunch with him and Susan one day and realizing that something was dreadfully wrong. It took Gardner an enormous effort to make his way down the sidewalk. He was walking slowly, oh so slowly, and talking very matter-of-factly about how the darkness was closing in around him. “You see that mailbox on the corner? I can’t read the words on its side. I know it says U.S. Mail, because that’s what mailboxes say. But I can’t make out the letters.”
This story has a happy ending. The next day, Susan managed to bully him into seeing a doctor, who immediately slammed him into the hospital. He was diagnosed as a diabetic and kept there for some time. I vividly remember how on New Year’s Eve a tipsy orderly giggled, “Whoopsie!” and switched syringes after Gardner delicately pointed out that he’d picked up the wrong one.
The close brush with the Angel of Death invigorated Gardner. He put out a sudden burst of energy and became prolific again. He published six stories in 1981 alone! Sure, four of them were collaborations (more on this soon), but the others were strong stories and “Executive Clemency” is, I hold, a tour de force, one of Gardner’s core works, and a story that people will be reading with admiration a hundred years from now.
Another stand-alone story from Second Period Dozois included here is the truly horrifying “Dinner Party.” As a literary fiendish device, as a constant turning of the screw that raises the ante with every word right to the very last line, there’s just no beating it.
Of the twenty-one stories published between 1981 and 1985, thirteen were collaborations, most with Jack Dann, some with me, a few with his wife and fellow-writer Susan Casper, in various combinations of bylines. So a word has to be said about those wonderful starry nights when Jack Dann breezed into town with a cigar stuck in the corner of his expansive grin, and Susan called to ask if I wanted to come over, and we all stayed up late, talking about everything, and spinning out ideas for stories and plotting them out on the spot.
Those were good times and they only get better with the passing years. Nostalgia will do that. I was one of the writers for “Touring” and “Snow Job,” for “The Gods of Mars” and “Afternoon at Schrafft’s” and “Golden Apples of the Sun.” It was more than a privilege for me to work so closely with Gardner and Jack, particularly since I was just starting out on my career. It was more than a thrill to see how the Big Boys did it, to observe their craftsmanship on a line-by-line basis as the stories were being written. It was my post-graduate education.
In this same period, Gardner also wrote, among other stories, “Down Among the Dead Men” and “Playing the Game” with Jack Dann, “Send No Money” with Susan Casper, and “The Clowns” in collaboration with both of them. This constant back-and-forthing of manuscripts and consultations helped enable his solo fiction by creating a buzz of energy and a recurrent feeling of accomplishment. It didn’t hurt that during this period, Gardner was selling steadily to the “slicks”—to high-paying markets like Playboy and Penthouse, and the less reputable Oui and High Times, as well as to the late and sorely missed Omni.
The upshot of all this prolific and market-savvy output was that Gardner remained as poor as a church mouse.
Because writing is hard work, and a harder business. If all you write is short fiction, it doesn’t matter how upscale the markets you sell to are, you can’t make a living at it. Of necessity, over the years, Gardner had kept himself alive by doing various editorial chores, taking the occasional assistant editor job, learning the business from the bottom up. He got a quiet but pervasive reputation as being one hell of a story doctor.
So it was startling but strangely logical when in 1985 Gardner was given the editorship of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as it was then called. He threw himself into the job, and the trophy table covered with Hugos tells the rest.
But that wasn’t the end of his writing. Every year or two, Gardner manages to squeeze enough time from his schedule to craft a new work of fiction. Third Period Dozois, which covers 1987 through the present, contains nine stories so far, five of which are collected here. “Solace” can be read as his response to the Cyberpunk-Humanist wars, going down into the trenches to battle the young Turks on their own territory. “Passage” is an evocative mood piece inspired by a dream. “Community” is the kind of dark social extrapolation Gardner did so often in his early work. “A Cat Horror Story” is ... well, exactly that. Gardner hates it when I point this out, but how good can it be? It’s a cat story!
Those capable of appreciating cat stories will love it, I’m sure.
“A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows,” Gardner’s most recent work (which, incidentally, just lost a Nebula Award one week ago as of this writing), pays for everything, even the inherent sweetness of writing a cat story. It’s a chimerical hybrid of literary DNA from Early Period Dozois and the hot new generation of hard SF writers currently tearing up the place. It shows off. It dances right on the edge of a Vingean singularity. It embraces the future.
Short fiction writing is, for the most part, a young person’s game. It takes enormous energy and it pays not at all well. Newer writers enter the field with newer ideas, and you have to scramble just to keep up. It takes ambition. It takes zest. That’s why there are so few who have been writing the stuff for thirty years. That’s why it’s so remarkable that Gardner is now entering his fifth decade as a writer.
A collection like this, coming as it does in year one of the new Millennium, is inevitably a summing-up, a look back on a lifetime’s writing. But it’s also an opportunity to anticipate what is yet to come. Look at the old stuff, then look at the new. You’ll see growth and evolution, but no failing of powers or ambition. I can only repeat what I’ve heard Gardner say so many a time, upon encountering a promising story by a writer nobody’s heard of yet:
Keep your eye on this guy. I think he’s got more good work in him.
Michael Swanwick