{"id":4798,"date":"2018-06-17T09:00:01","date_gmt":"2018-06-17T09:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/?p=4798"},"modified":"2018-06-12T19:54:07","modified_gmt":"2018-06-12T19:54:07","slug":"editing-with-gardner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/2018\/06\/17\/editing-with-gardner\/","title":{"rendered":"Editing with Gardner"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been a few weeks since Gardner Dozois died.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m still having a hard time coming to grips with it.\u00a0\u00a0 He was such a huge presence in the field, such a gigantic personality, it still seems inconceivable that he’s gone.\u00a0 I posted about our friendship below,\u00a0 about the laughter he brought with him wherever he went… but I wanted to write about his legacy as an editor as well.<\/p>\n

It’s been harder than I anticipated.\u00a0\u00a0 Every time I start this post, it hits me all over again, and I realize that I will never see him again.<\/p>\n

I need to say something, though.\u00a0\u00a0 Not for Gardner — there are dozens of memorials all over the net, speaking of his talents\u00a0 — but for myself.<\/p>\n

There’s really not much that I can say that has not already been said.\u00a0\u00a0 As an editor, I think, Gardner had few peers.\u00a0\u00a0 Over the decades our genre has been fortunate in having a succession of amazing editors: H.L. Gold, Anthony Boucher, Terry Carr, Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Donald A. Wollheim, Cele Goldsmith Lalli, Ellen Datlow, Ben Bova, Ted White, Fred Pohl, and Groff Conklin all come to mind, and many more. \u00a0 But two figures tower above them all: John W. Campbell, the editorial genius who gave SF its Golden Age, for whom not one but two<\/em> memorial awards are named… and Gardner Dozois.\u00a0\u00a0 His stint as editor of Asimov’s<\/em> can rightly be compared only with Campbell’s decades at Astounding<\/em> and Analog<\/em>, and was similarly influential.\u00a0 He discovered and nurtured more new talents than I could possibly remember or recount… among them, myself.\u00a0\u00a0 Not at Asimov’s<\/em>, no.\u00a0\u00a0 I was already well established before Gardner got that gig.\u00a0 No, he found me long before, in his first editorial job… reading the slush pile at Galaxy.\u00a0 <\/em>It was in that pile, in the summer of 1970, that he came across my short story “The Hero,” and passed it along to editor Ejler Jakobsson with a recommendation to buy.\u00a0\u00a0 That was my first professional sale, and came during the summer between my senior and graduate years at Northwestern, when I starting to seriously contemplate what I wanted to do with my life.\u00a0\u00a0 That sale, and the publication that followed, went a long way toward making that decision for me.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s no exaggeration to say that I might not be where I am today if Gardner had not fished me out of the slush pile in 1970.<\/p>\n

Many decades later, I had the honor and privilege of working beside Gardner on a series of anthologies that I am still very proud of.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We were both huge Jack Vance fans, so the idea of a doing a Dying Earth anthology was a natural for us… and when Jack gave us permission, we were thrilled.\u00a0\u00a0 SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH was a tribute anthology as well, and the best kind: one that Jack Vance was actually able to read and appreciate while he was still with us.\u00a0 I hope he liked reading that book (the tributes at least) as much as Gardner and I liked doing it.<\/p>\n

I’ve never met anyone who was as well read in SF and fantasy as Gardner Dozois, but like me, that was never all<\/em> he read.\u00a0\u00a0 He loved mysteries and thrillers and historicals as well; so long as the tales were gripping and well told, he never cared what the imprint was on the spine.\u00a0\u00a0 So the next thing we tackled after the Vance books were the crossgenre anthologies: massive books with very broad themes, featuring work from outstanding writers from a dozen different genres.\u00a0\u00a0 WARRIORS was the first.\u00a0\u00a0 It did so well that we soon followed it with DANGEROUS WOMEN and ROGUES.\u00a0\u00a0 Those did even better.\u00a0\u00a0 They won awards, got great reviews, and even more importantly, introduced thousands of readers to some great new writers they might never have encountered, if we hadn’t put them between covers with their familiar favorites.\u00a0\u00a0 Gardner and I did a couple of fun genre mash-ups as well.\u00a0\u00a0 There was DOWN THESE STRANGE STREETS, crossing private eye stories with fantasy and SF, and SONGS OF LOVE AND DEATH, an SF\/ fantasy\/ romance hybrid.<\/p>\n

Last, but definitely not least, were our two “retro SF’ collections, OLD MARS and OLD VENUS.\u00a0\u00a0 Damn, those were fun to do.\u00a0 Gardner and I shared a deep deep affection for the lost solar system of our youth, the Mars of the canals and dead cities and vanished races, the Venus of endless swamps and dinosaurs and web-footed Venusians.\u00a0 And we discovered, to our delight, that a lot of writers shared that love, and had been waiting all their lives for a chance to set a story on the Mars and Venus of yore.\u00a0\u00a0 Those books were easy to edit; we had to beat off writers with a stick.\u00a0\u00a0 Both books won awards.<\/p>\n

The sad part is, it ended there.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t want it to.\u00a0\u00a0 Neither did Gardner.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I loved working with him, and we had more anthologies we wanted to do.\u00a0 We wanted to follow OLD MARS and OLD VENUS with OLD LUNA, and maybe down the line OLD MERCURY, or a book set in the asteroids.\u00a0\u00a0 Done retro, like the first two.\u00a0 We talked about doing more crossgenre books.\u00a0 A second WARRIORS, a second ROGUES, a second DANGEROUS WOMEN, maybe one called VILLAINS or HEROES or (this would have been fun) SIDEKICKS.\u00a0\u00a0 The publishers were interested.\u00a0 The earlier books had sold very well.\u00a0\u00a0 Gardner was interested.\u00a0\u00a0 I was the one who demurred.\u00a0\u00a0 As proud as I was of those books, as much as I enjoyed working with Gardner, I did not have the time.\u00a0\u00a0 WINDS OF WINTER was late and getting later, and the editing had taken more of my time and energy than I thought it would.\u00a0\u00a0 “I can’t take on anything more right now,” I told him.\u00a0 “We’ll do them later, once I’ve delivered WINDS.”\u00a0\u00a0 So Gardner went on to edit THE BOOK OF SWORDS and THE BOOK OF MAGIC by himself (he could have edited all these books by himself, he never actually needed<\/em> me, we just enjoyed working together).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I contributed stories to both books (a reprint to MAGIC, since I did not have the time).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There would be plenty of time to do ROGUES 2 and OLD LUNA and SIDEKICKS and all the rest, after all.\u00a0\u00a0 All the time we needed.\u00a0\u00a0 Just as soon as I got King Kong off my back… we even kicked around the notion of a reprint anthology we wanted to call THE HUGO LOSERS.\u00a0\u00a0 After all, we were the guys who founded the Hugo Losers Party… just yesterday, in 1976….<\/p>\n

We’d do all these books tomorrow.\u00a0 Next month.\u00a0\u00a0 Next year.\u00a0\u00a0 Real soon now.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…<\/p>\n

He’s gone now, and I fear he has taken all those books with him.\u00a0\u00a0 I may edit other anthologies in the future (in addition to the Wild Cards series, which I imagine I’ll be editing till I join Gargy at the Great Worldcon in the Sky), but I could never bring myself to edit those particular books, the ones we had talked about doing together.\u00a0\u00a0 It just wouldn’t feel right.<\/p>\n

Gardner Dozois won fifteen Hugo Awards as Best Editor, a record that will never be broken, I expect.\u00a0\u00a0 He and I won some Locus Awards and a World Fantasy Award as well, and I will always cherish those.\u00a0\u00a0 It was an honor to know him, and to work with him.\u00a0\u00a0 I miss him so much.<\/p>\n

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It has been a few weeks since Gardner Dozois died.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m still having a hard time coming to grips with it.\u00a0\u00a0 He was such a huge presence in the field, such a gigantic personality, it still seems inconceivable that he’s gone.\u00a0 I posted about our friendship below,\u00a0 about the laughter he brought with him wherever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[47,48,58],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4798"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4806,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798\/revisions\/4806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}