Gardner Dozois
Based on Wikipedia: Gardner Dozois
The Man Who Decided What Science Fiction Was
For nearly two decades, one person held more power over the science fiction genre than perhaps anyone since the legendary John W. Campbell. His name was Gardner Dozois, and if you read science fiction between 1984 and 2018, his fingerprints were all over it—whether you knew it or not.
Here's a remarkable statistic: stories that Dozois selected for his annual best-of-the-year anthologies went on to win forty-four Hugo Awards, forty-one Nebula Awards, thirty-two Locus Awards, ten World Fantasy Awards, and eighteen Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards. That's not a typo. That's one editor's taste shaping the entire award landscape of a genre for over three decades.
George R. R. Martin—yes, the Game of Thrones author—called Dozois the most important and influential editor in science fiction since John W. Campbell. For those unfamiliar with Campbell, he essentially invented modern science fiction as editor of Astounding Science Fiction from 1937 to 1971, discovering Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and a dozen other foundational writers. To be compared to Campbell is the highest praise possible in the field.
From Salem to the Stars
Gardner Raymond Dozois was born on July 23, 1947, in Salem, Massachusetts—the very town famous for its witch trials. He later admitted that he turned to reading fiction partly as an escape from the provincialism of his hometown. Small-town life in mid-century America could feel suffocating for a young person with an imagination that stretched toward distant galaxies.
After graduating from Salem High School in 1965, Dozois joined the Army and served as a military journalist from 1966 to 1969. It was during this time that he broke into professional publishing. Frederik Pohl—himself one of science fiction's towering figures—published Dozois's first story in the September 1966 issue of If magazine. Dozois was just nineteen years old.
After his military service, Dozois made the pilgrimage that so many aspiring writers and editors have made: he moved to New York City to work in the science fiction field. His next four stories appeared in 1970, three of them in Damon Knight's respected anthology series Orbit. Knight was another editorial giant of the era, and getting three stories into Orbit in a single year signaled that this young writer from Salem had serious talent.
The Writer Who Became an Editor
Unlike many editors who stumble into the role after failed writing careers, Dozois was genuinely accomplished as a fiction writer before he became famous for editing. He won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice—first for "The Peacemaker" in 1983, then again for "Morning Child" in 1984. Winning back-to-back Nebulas is extraordinarily rare.
His fiction tended toward shorter forms. He published only one solo novel, Strangers, in 1978, and a handful of collaborative novels including Nightmare Blue with George Alec Effinger in 1975 and Hunter's Run with George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham in 2008.
His short fiction collections tell the story of a writer's career: The Visible Man in 1977, Geodesic Dreams in 1992, Strange Days in 2001, and When the Great Days Come in 2011. The titles alone suggest the range of his imagination.
But here's the fascinating thing: once Dozois became editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in 1986, his own fiction output dwindled to almost nothing. He had found his true calling, and it consumed him.
The Asimov's Years
Asimov's Science Fiction is one of the most prestigious science fiction magazines in the world. It was founded in 1977 and named after Isaac Asimov, who served as its editorial director until his death in 1992. Dozois had actually been the magazine's first associate editor back in 1976, before it even launched. A decade later, he took the helm as editor-in-chief.
What followed was an unprecedented run of excellence. Dozois won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor fifteen times in seventeen years, from 1988 until his retirement from the magazine in 2004. Fifteen times. The Hugo Awards are voted on by science fiction fans at the annual World Science Fiction Convention, so this wasn't a small group of industry insiders handing him awards—it was the entire science fiction community recognizing his work year after year.
During the 1970s, before his Asimov's tenure, Dozois had also worked with other science fiction magazines: Galaxy Science Fiction, If, Worlds of Fantasy, and Worlds of Tomorrow. These publications were the lifeblood of the genre, where writers developed their craft and readers discovered new voices.
What Made Him Great
Dozois had a particular taste that shaped the field. He consistently expressed interest in what he called "center-core SF"—adventure science fiction and space opera. Space opera, despite its operatic name, refers to sweeping interstellar adventure stories in the tradition of Star Wars or the Foundation series. It's big, exciting, idea-driven storytelling.
But Dozois's taste was broader than that label suggests. Under his editorship, Asimov's published everything from hard science fiction grounded in real physics to experimental literary stories that pushed the boundaries of the genre. He had an uncanny ability to recognize quality across the entire spectrum.
The Year's Best
When Dozois retired from Asimov's in 2004, he didn't slow down. He remained editor of what may be his most enduring legacy: The Year's Best Science Fiction anthology series.
He had founded this series in 1984 and continued editing it until his death in 2018—thirty-four annual volumes documenting the evolution of the genre. The series became the definitive record of what was happening in science fiction each year. In three decades, Locus magazine readers voted it the year's best anthology almost twenty times, with the runner-up spot almost ten additional times. When it wasn't winning, it was coming in second.
The anthology served multiple functions. For readers, it was a way to sample the best short fiction without subscribing to a dozen magazines. For writers, inclusion was a career milestone—a signal that you had arrived. For historians and scholars, it became an essential primary source for understanding the genre's development.
Collaborations and Themed Anthologies
Dozois was also a prolific anthologist beyond his year's-best work. With Jack Dann, another respected editor and writer, he produced a long series of themed anthologies with delightfully self-explanatory titles: Cats, Dinosaurs, Seaserpents, Hackers. Each gathered stories around a single evocative concept.
With George R. R. Martin, his close friend, Dozois edited several major cross-genre anthologies that brought together science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream literature. Warriors collected stories about soldiers and combat from writers across genres. Dangerous Women featured women characters who were powerful, complex, and often lethal. Rogues celebrated lovable scoundrels. These anthologies introduced science fiction and fantasy writers to mainstream audiences and vice versa.
Some of the Martin collaborations had a wonderfully nostalgic bent. Old Mars and Old Venus asked contemporary writers to imagine those planets as science fiction had portrayed them before space probes revealed the disappointing reality—Mars teeming with ancient civilizations, Venus as a steaming jungle world. It was retro science fiction written with modern craft.
The Importance of Anthologies
It's worth pausing to explain why anthology editing matters so much in science fiction. Unlike mainstream literary fiction, where the novel reigns supreme, science fiction has always valued short stories. Some of the genre's most famous works—Asimov's "Nightfall," Clarke's "The Star," Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream"—are short fiction.
But short stories need homes. They need magazines to publish them originally and anthologies to keep them alive afterward. The editor who selects stories for an anthology shapes what gets remembered. A story that appears in The Year's Best Science Fiction stays in print, gets read by thousands more readers, and enters the conversation about what science fiction is and can be.
Dozois understood this power and wielded it thoughtfully. He championed writers he believed in, brought attention to overlooked voices, and created a coherent vision of the genre through his selections.
Michael Swanwick and the Art of Conversation
Michael Swanwick, a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author, was one of Dozois's frequent collaborators and close friends. Swanwick conducted a remarkable project: a comprehensive interview with Dozois covering every single piece of fiction Dozois had ever published.
The result, 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. It's an extraordinary document—part literary criticism, part oral history, part portrait of a creative mind.
Swanwick and Dozois also wrote fiction together, including the story "The City of God" in 1995 and the posthumous novel City Under the Stars, published in 2020, two years after Dozois's death.
Health and Resilience
Dozois faced serious health challenges in his later years. In 2004, he was badly injured in a taxi accident while returning from a Philadelphia Phillies baseball game. The injury was severe enough to cause him to miss that year's World Science Fiction Convention—his first absence from Worldcon in many years. The convention had been central to his professional life, a place to meet writers, make deals, and connect with the community he served.
He made a full recovery from the accident, but in 2007, more serious trouble emerged. On July 6, he underwent planned quintuple bypass surgery—a major procedure where surgeons create five new pathways for blood to flow around blocked coronary arteries. A week later, complications required additional surgery to implant a defibrillator, a device that monitors heart rhythm and delivers electrical shocks if the heart starts beating dangerously.
Despite these challenges, Dozois continued working. He kept editing The Year's Best Science Fiction. He kept writing fiction, albeit slowly. He kept appearing at conventions when he could.
The Final Chapter
Gardner Dozois died on May 27, 2018, at a hospital in Philadelphia. He was seventy years old. The cause was a systemic infection—a reminder that even the strongest bodies eventually fail.
The science fiction community mourned deeply. Tributes poured in from writers whose careers he had shaped, readers whose imaginations he had fed, and editors who had learned from his example. George R. R. Martin, who had known him for decades, wrote movingly about their friendship and collaboration.
In 2011, Dozois had been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame—appropriate recognition for someone who had done more than almost anyone to define what science fiction was during his era.
The Dozois Legacy
What do we make of a career like Gardner Dozois's? He wasn't the most famous science fiction author—he published only a handful of novels and rarely appeared on bestseller lists. He wasn't a celebrity. Most readers outside the science fiction community have never heard his name.
But influence isn't the same as fame. Dozois shaped the careers of hundreds of writers. His selections for Asimov's and The Year's Best determined which stories got remembered and which slipped into obscurity. His preferences—for adventure, for big ideas, for quality prose—influenced what writers aimed for and what publishers sought.
Consider this: if you've read any science fiction published between 1984 and 2018, you've almost certainly encountered his influence. The writers who won awards, the stories that entered the conversation, the very definition of what counted as important science fiction—all of this flowed through Gardner Dozois.
His annual recommended reading list, which he maintained for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, was designed to direct younger readers to older classics. He saw himself as a steward of tradition, someone who connected the field's past to its future. He had absorbed the work of the masters—Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury—and spent his career ensuring that their legacy continued through new writers.
The thirty-four volumes of The Year's Best Science Fiction stand as a monument to sustained editorial vision. Open any volume, and you'll find the best of what science fiction had to offer that year, selected by someone who understood the genre deeply and loved it fiercely.
Why This Matters
In any creative field, there are the artists everyone sees and the gatekeepers few notice. The gatekeepers—editors, curators, critics—determine what reaches audiences and how it's framed. Their taste becomes, in a sense, everyone's taste.
Gardner Dozois was one of the great gatekeepers. His story reminds us that culture isn't just created by individuals working in isolation. It's shaped by the people who select, organize, and present creative work to audiences. The editor who chooses which stories go into an anthology, the curator who decides which paintings hang in a museum, the critic who champions certain books over others—these figures may lack the glamour of the artists themselves, but their influence is profound.
Dozois worked in a genre that has often been dismissed as escapist entertainment. But he knew—and spent his career demonstrating—that science fiction at its best grapples with the most important questions: What does it mean to be human? Where is technology taking us? How do we build just societies? What awaits us in the vast darkness between stars?
For more than forty years, Gardner Dozois helped answer those questions by finding the writers who asked them best and bringing their work to readers who needed to hear it. That's a legacy worth celebrating.