Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction The Strange and Fabulous Journey of Gardner Dozois

  Travel Diary Author’s Preface to Introduction to Travel Diary

  Introduction to Travel Diary

  Another Introduction to Travel Diary

  Travel Diary

  The Gods of Mars Introduction to The Gods of Mars

  The Gods of Mars

  Solace Introduction to Solace

  Solace

  Golden Apples of the Sun Introduction to Golden Apples of the Sun

  Golden Apples of the Sun

  The Mayan Variation Introduction to The Mayan Variation

  The Mayan Variation

  The Clowns Introduction to The Clowns

  The Clowns

  Touring Introduction to Touring

  Touring

  Dinner Party Introduction to Dinner Party

  Dinner Party

  Snow Job Introduction to Snow Job

  Snow Job

  Flash Point Introduction to Flash Point

  Flash Point

  Send No Money Introduction to Send No Money

  Send No Money

  A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows Introduction to A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

  A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

  The Storm Introduction to The Storm

  The Storm

  The Last Day of July Introduction to The Last Day of July

  The Last Day of July

  Afternoon at Schrafft’s Introduction to Afternoon at Schrafft’s

  Afternoon at Schrafft’s

  Playing the Game Introduction to Playing the Game

  Another Introduction to Playing the Game

  Playing the Game

  Down Among the Dead Men Introduction to Down Among the Dead Men

  Down Among the Dead Men

  Passage Introduction to Passage

  Passage

  Community Introduction to Community

  Community

  The Visible Man Introduction to The Visible Man

  The Visible Man

  A Cat Horror Story Introduction to A Cat Horror Story

  A Cat Horror Story

  Executive Clemency Introduction to Executive Clemency

  Executive Clemency

  Strangers Introduction to Strangers

  Strangers

  Editors’ Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Strange Days

  Fabulous Journeys with

  Gardner Dozois

  Edited by Tim Szczesuil & Ann Broomhead

  NESFA Press

  PO Box 809

  Framingham, MA 01701

  www.nesfapress.com

  2001

  Copyright 2001 by Gardner Dozois

  Introduction Copyright 2001 by Michael Swanwick

  “Send No Money” Copyright by Gardner Dozois & Susan Casper

  “Snow Job” Copyright by Gardner Dozois &Michael Swanwick

  “Executive Clemency” Copyright by Gardner Dozois & Jack C. Haldeman II

  “Playing the Game,” “Down Among the Dead Men” Copyright by Gardner Dozois &Jack Dann

  “The Clowns” Copyright by Gardner Dozois, Susan Casper & Jack Dann

  “Touring,” “The Gods of Mars,” “Golden Apples of the Sun,” “Afternoon at Schrafft’s” Copyright by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann & Michael Swanwick

  A Travel Diary Introduction Copyright 2001 by George R.R. Martin

  Another Travel Diary Introduction Copyright 2001 by Mike Resnick

  The Gods of Mars Introduction Copyright 2001 by James Patrick Kelly

  Solace Introduction Copyright 2001 by Nancy Kress

  Golden Apples of the Sun Introduction Copyright 2001 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The Mayan Variation Introduction Copyright 2001 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The Clowns Introduction Copyright 2001 by Andy Duncan

  Touring Introduction Copyright 2001 by Paul McAuley

  Dinner Party Introduction Copyright 2001 by John Kessel

  Snow Job Introduction Copyright 2001 by Michael Swanwick

  Flash Point Introduction Copyright 2001 by Pat Cadigan

  Send No Money Introduction Copyright 2001 by Susan Casper

  A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows Introduction. Copyright 2001 by Walter Jon Williams

  The Storm Introduction Copyright 2001 by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The Last Day of July Introduction Copyright 2001 by Michael Bishop

  Afternoon at Schrafft’s Introduction Copyright 2001 by Eliot Fintushel

  Playing the Game Introduction Copyright 2001 by Joe Haldeman

  Another Playing the Game Introduction Copyright 2001 by Andy Duncan

  Down Among the Dead Men Introduction Copyright 2001 by Ian MacLeod

  Passage Introduction Copyright 2001 by Jane Yolen

  Community Introduction Copyright 2001 by Connie Willis

  The Visible Man Introduction Copyright 2001 by Stephen Baxter

  A Cat Horror Story Introduction Copyright 2001 by Jack Dann

  Executive Clemency Introduction Copyright 2001 by Michael Swanwick

  Strangers Introduction Copyright 2001 by Robert Silverberg

  Dust Jacket Illustration “Murasaki” Copyright by Stephen Youll

  “Nebula Award” is a registered trademark of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.

  “Hugo Award” and “Worldcon” are registered service marks of the World Science Fiction Society

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC, MAGICAL, OR MECHANICAL MEANS INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER, WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.

  FIRST EDITION, August 2001

  International Standard Book Number:

  1-886778-26-4

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-924-1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  Acknowledgements

  “Introduction: The Strange and Fabulous Journey of Gardner Dozois” by Michael Swanwick appears here for the first time.

  “Travel Diary” by Gardner Dozois appears here for the first time.

  “The Gods of Mars” by Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick, and Jack Dann appeared first in The 1986 Annual World’s Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha.

  “Solace” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Omni, Feb. 1989.

  “Golden Apples of the Sun” by Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick, and Jack Dann appeared first in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 11, edited by Arthur W. Saha, 1985.

  “The Mayan Variation” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Sep. 1984.

  “The Clowns” by Gardner Dozois, Susan Casper, and Jack Dann appeared first in Playboy, August 1985.

  “Touring” by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick appeared first in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series X, edited by Karl Edward Wagner, 1982.

  “Dinner Party” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Light Years and Dark, edited by Michael Bishop, 1984.

  “Snow Job” by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick appeared first in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Oct. 1985.

  “Flash Point” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Orbit 13, edited by Damon Knight, 1974.

  “Send No Money” by Gardner Dozois and Susan Casper appeared first in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, MidDec. 1985.

  “A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Asimov’s Science Fic
tion, Oct./Nov. 1999.

  “The Storm” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Future Corruption, edited by Roger Elwood, 1975.

  “The Last Day of July” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in New Dimensions III, edited by Robert Silverberg, 1973.

  “Afternoon at Schrafft’s” by Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick, and Jack Dann appeared first in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Mar. 1984.

  “Playing the Game” by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann appeared first in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, Feb. 1982.

  “Down Among the Dead Men” by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann appeared first in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jun. 1983.

  “Passage” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Xanadu, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Jane Yolen, 1993.

  “Community” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sep. 1996.

  “The Visible Man” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in Analog Science Fiction—Science Fact, Dec. 1975.

  “A Cat Horror Story” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Oct./Nov. 1994.

  “Executive Clemency” by Gardner Dozois and Jack C. Haldeman II appeared first in Omni, Nov. 1981.

  “Strangers” by Gardner Dozois appeared first in New Dimensions IV, edited by Robert Silverberg, 1974.

  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 fi
ction, 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!