Gardner Dozois

Gardner Raymond Dozois ( doh-ZWAH; July 23, 1947 – May 27, 2018) was an American science fiction author and editor. He was the founding editor of The Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies (1984–2018) and was editor of Asimov's Science Fiction (1986–2004), garnering multiple Hugo and Locus Awards for those works almost every year. He also won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice. He was inducted to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on June 25, 2011.

Biography

Dozois was born July 23, 1947, in Salem, Massachusetts. He graduated from Salem High School with the Class of 1965. From 1966 to 1969 he served in the Army as a journalist, after which he moved to New York City to work as an editor in the science fiction field. One of his stories had been published by Frederik Pohl in the September 1966 issue of If but his next four appeared in 1970, three in Damon Knight's anthology series Orbit.

Dozois said that he turned to reading fiction partially as an escape from the provincialism of his home town.

He was badly injured in a taxi accident after returning from a Philadelphia Phillies game in 2004 (causing him to miss Worldcon for the first time in many years) but made a full recovery. On July 6, 2007, Dozois had surgery for a planned quintuple bypass operation. A week later, he experienced complications which prompted additional surgery to implant a defibrillator.

Dozois died on May 27, 2018, of a systemic infection at a hospital in Philadelphia at the age of 70.

Fiction

As a writer, Dozois mainly worked in shorter forms. He won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice: once for "The Peacemaker" in 1983, and again for "Morning Child" in 1984. His short fiction has been collected in The Visible Man (1977), Geodesic Dreams (a best-of collection), Slow Dancing through Time (1990, collaborations), Strange Days (2001, another best-of collection), Morning Child and Other Stories (2004) and When the Great Days Come (2011). As a novelist, Dozois's oeuvre is significantly smaller. He was the author of one solo novel, Strangers (1978), as well as a collaboration with George Alec Effinger, Nightmare Blue (1977), and a collaboration with George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham for Hunter's Run (2008). After he became editor of Asimov's, Dozois's fiction output dwindled. His 2006 novelette "Counterfactual" won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Dozois also wrote short fiction reviews for Locus.

Michael Swanwick, one of his co-authors, completed a long interview with Dozois covering every published piece of his fiction. Being Gardner Dozois: An Interview by Michael Swanwick was published by Old Earth Books in 2001. It won the Locus Award for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

Editorial work

Dozois was known primarily as an editor, winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times in 17 years from 1988 to his retirement from Asimov's in 2004. George R. R. Martin described him as the most important and influential editor in science fiction since John W. Campbell. In addition to his work with Asimov's (of which he was the first associate editor in 1976), he also worked in the 1970s with magazines such as Galaxy Science Fiction, If, Worlds of Fantasy, and Worlds of Tomorrow.

Dozois was also a prolific short fiction anthologist. After resigning from his Asimov's position, he remained the editor of the anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction, published annually since 1984. In three decades Locus readers have voted it the year's best anthology almost 20 times and the runner-up almost 10 times. And, with Jack Dann, he edited a long series of themed anthologies, each with a self-explanatory title such as Cats, Dinosaurs, Seaserpents, or Hackers.

Stories selected by Gardner Dozois for the annual best-of-year volumes have won, as of December 2015, 44 Hugos, 41 Nebulas, 32 Locus, 10 World Fantasy and 18 Sturgeon Awards. That also includes the Dutton series (Dozois volumes only).

Dozois consistently expressed a particular interest in adventure SF and space opera, which he collectively referred to as "center-core SF".

Works

Novels

Nightmare Blue (with George Alec Effinger) (1975, ISBN 978-0-425-02819-3)

Strangers (1978, ISBN 978-0-399-12095-4)

Hunter's Run (2008, ISBN 978-0-06-137329-9) (with George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham)

City Under the Stars (2020, ISBN 978-1250756589) (with Michael Swanwick)

Collections

The Visible Man (1977, ISBN 978-0-425-03595-5)

Slow Dancing Through Time (1990, ISBN 978-0942681031)

Geodesic Dreams (1992, ISBN 978-0-312-08197-3)

Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois (2001, ISBN 978-1-886778-26-9)

Morning Child and Other Stories (2004, ISBN 978-0-7434-9318-5)

When the Great Days Come (2011, ISBN 978-1-60701-278-8)

Short stories

The Empty Man (1966)

The Sound of Muzak (1970)

A Special Kind of Morning (1971)

Wires (1971)

Conditioned Reflex (1972)

King Harvest (1972)

Flying (1973)

In A Crooked Year (1973)

The Sacrifice (1982)

Virgin Territory (1984)

The City of God (1995) (with Michael Swanwick)

Sunk Beneath the Waves (2013)

The Place of Bones (2016)

A Dog's Story (2017)

Unstoppable (2018)

Homecoming (2019)

Anthologies

Edited by Gardner Dozois co-edited by Dozois and Susan Casper

Ripper (1988, ISBN 978-0-8125-1700-2) (co-edited with Susan Casper)

co-edited by Dozois and Mike Resnick

Future Earths: Under African Skies (1993, ISBN 978-0-88677-544-5) (co-edited with Mike Resnick)

Future Earths: Under South American Skies (1993, ISBN 978-0-88677-581-0) (co-edited with Mike Resnick)

co-edited by Dozois and Stanley Schmidt

Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History (1998, ISBN 978-0-345-42194-4) (co-edited with Stanley Schmidt)

co-edited by Dozois and Jonathan Strahan

The New Space Opera (2007, ISBN 978-0-06-084675-6) (co-edited with Jonathan Strahan)

The New Space Opera 2 (2009, ISBN 978-0-06-156235-8) (co-edited with Jonathan Strahan)

co-edited by Dozois and Greg Bear

Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (2014) (co-edited with Greg Bear)

Cross-genre anthologies co-edited by Dozois and George R. R. Martin