FOREWORD:
WRITE LIKE DOZOIS? I CANT EVEN SAY HIS NAME
MICHAEL BISHOP
Over the twenty years that Gardner and I have known each other, we’ve met in person less than half a dozen times—at a convention in Philadelphia, at a Nebula Awards banquet in New York City, at a booksellers convention in New Orleans, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta. Four meetings? I believe that’s all, but memory is always suspect, and I sometimes fear that I wouldn’t be able to pick mine out of a “Dragnef”-style lineup even if the other memories up there beside it belonged to, say, Jack Dann, Jay Haldeman, Michael Swanwick, and Susan Casper.
This is what I do remember: around the late 1960s/early 1970s, I read every number of three original SF anthology series: Orbit edited by Damon Knight, New Dimensions edited by Robert Silverberg, and Universe edited by Terry Carr. I was trying to write and sell stories of my own, and the stories in these volumes, especially by such writers as R.A. Lafferty, Kate Wilhelm, Gene Wolfe, Joanna Russ, Edgar Pangborn, and Silverberg himself, struck me as the best of that period’s cutting-edge work—stuff I hoped to emulate and, as unlikely as it obviously was, even to surpass. My excuse for thinking that I had a shot at competing with these fine writers—in these prestigious, hard-to-crack anthologies—was that I was young yet, twenty-five, twenty-six, a virtual babe at my brand-new IBM Selectric. Just wait until I got cranked up. I’d overtake the leprechaunish Lafferty, the elegant Ms. Wilhelm, the subtle Wolfe, the sneakily profound Russ, the lyrical Pangborn, and even that prolific but literate Silverberg fellow in, hey, a year or two, tops. And then the SF world would know that a new Zelazny, a new Delany, a new whoever-was-hot-this-week had ridden into town to gun down yesterday’s tomorrows.
Problem was, some upstart with a hard-to-say last name and an image-packed, rhythmic prose style had beat me to the draw and was filling up major portions of Orbit, New Dimensions, and Universe—not to mention other magazines and anthologies—with ambitious, gripping, imaginative, successful stories that I could read only with jealous awe. His stories had enigmatic, creep-under-your-skin titles—“Where No Sun Shines”, “A Dream at Noonday”, “The Last Day of July”, “A Special Kind of Morning”—and, damn it all to Philadelphia and back, they actually conjured the kinds of stunning SF-grounded effects I hoped my unwritten stories would one day pull off. But this guy—a long-haired hippie-ish ex-soldier, to paint a rough portrait from some of what Silverberg said about him in his various introductions—was already doing what I still only hoped to do. Worse, it seemed that this infuriating Doh-ZOYS was—damn it all to Alpha Centauri and back—younger than I was, maybe by as much as two years.
AARRRGGH!!!
How did I first make contact with this DUZ-wheeze person? If I remember correctly (and I may not), it was Gardner (thank God his first name wasn’t Aloysius or Heneage or Vyvyan) who contacted me. In the late 1960s/early 1970s, he was working, or had worked, as a slush-pile reader for Ejler Jakobsson at Galaxy and If magazines, and my first sale of a science fiction story was to Galaxy with a Bradburyesque little piece titled “Piñon Fall.” At the time, I thought that Mr. Jakobsson had discovered my story in his morning’s mail, read it with both alacrity and appreciation, and set it aside for six months to allow his admiration to cool. (No, no, no—I figured that the post office had lost my manuscript in the mail.) Actually—or, a bit closer to “actually”—Gardner, according to a letter written in 1970 or 1971, had found “Piñon Fall” in Galaxy’s slush pile, had liked it well enough to tell Mr. Jakobsson, and had urged him to buy it. The sale took place, and my story appeared in Galaxy’s October-November 1978 issue, along with the third part of Robert A. Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil and a Silverberg novella called “The World Outside.”
So, in a very real way, I owe my first legitimate SF sale to this Duh-ZOID person. With that sale as a credit, I was able to persuade other editors—Edward L. Ferman, David Gerrold, Damon Knight, and, eventually, even Robert Silverberg—to pay me real money (two to five cents a word) for the stories rattling out of my Selectric. In fact, it was Gardner, telling me that he had found “Piñon Fall” among Galaxy’s unsolicited submissions, who urged me to try to enhance my earnings, my visibility, and my reputation as an up-and-comer by submitting material to the hardcover anthologies then enjoying both a gratifying popularity and a degree of prestige unknown at the digest-sized magazines. “If,” wrote Gardner, “you have something available, you ought to send it to New Dimensions.” He listed reasons, all of which struck me as convincingly astute, and I wrote back to thank him but also to point out that I had only a story or two to my credit and didn’t have anything else “lying around” for New Dimensions or Orbit or Quark. I was in awe of this Dō-ZWAH fellow (roughly, the correct pronunciation), but I would have never told him so, for my immature competitiveness kept me from viewing anyone younger than myself as a mentor, that person’s demonstrable talents be damned. I just couldn’t imagine having new stories always at hand, the way this guy apparently did.
Later, I learned that Gardner wasn’t as prolific as I had first thought him to be. He worked hard over each of his stories, with the patience and precision of a lapidary, and the style in which he couched his gnomic musings about fate, man’s inhumanity to man, and the alien strangeness of life in this universe often verged on the achingly beautiful. It still does, but, briefly at least, he was the object of a couple of bad raps, namely, that his work was pessimistic and/or defeatist, that he was a writer more interested in fine writing than in substance, and that the most likely result of reading his stuff—for those who care mostly for story, with little attention to or concern for style—was the cultivation of an ulcerous depression.
Balderdash, every charge. Gardner always puts his style at the service of content. Early stories like “Chains of the Sea”, “The Visible Man”, and “A Special Kind of Morning”, as well as such fine later stories as “Dinner Party”, “The Peacemaker”, “Morning Child” (the latter two are Nebula Award winners), and “Solace” disclose a writer with an insightful sense of what our humanity often demands of or takes from us. Further, Gardner has compassion big enough to redeem his put-upon and/or wrung-out characters from the snares that they have fallen into or laid for themselves—even when that redemption is philosophical rather than physical. Maybe, in fact, especially then.
But Slow Dancing is a collection of collaborations, not of solo stories, so let me add here that the Gardner Dozois who shows up in these collaborations has an antic streak that isn’t always visible in his solo work. That’s not to say that you won’t recognize the “serious” Dozois (familiar to us from The Visible Man and the four other noncollaborative stories just listed) from “Touring,” “Down Among the Dead Men”, “Executive Clemency”, and the psychological horror tales “Playing the Game” and “The Clowns”, but that at least a bit of the madcap Gardner Dozois, known for years to convention-goers, crops up conspicuously, and hilariously, in the stories “A Change in the Weather”, “Afternoon at Schrafft’s”, “Golden Apples of the Sun”, “The Stray”, “Send No Money”, and (maybe idiosyncratically, my favorite of the collection) the at-once funny and touching “Slow Dancing with Jesus”.
(By the way, about this last story, Gardner writes, “I alone am responsible for the appalling joke at the story’s end.” I may be a little weird, but I don’t see the story’s final line—at least on one level—as either appalling or laughable. It is, I suppose, but it also isn’t. As a result, “Slow Dancing with Jesus” harbors resonances that hoist it out of the territory of clever commercial writing into the heady vicinity of—hush, now—art. And it may even be why this volume uses the title of my favorite of Gardner’s collaborative efforts as its title piece, sort of.)
Okay, so you get Gardner being madcap, antic, cut-uppish, and downright laugh-out-loud funny in some of these stories (along with his fine collaborators, of course). What else do you get? To my mind, maybe the most obvious thing you get—and why not, given the diverse hands that brought these stories into existence?—is variety. You get horror (“Down Among the Dead Men”, “Touring”, “The Clowns”, etc.), science fiction (“Executive Clemency”, “The Gods of Mars”, “Time Bride”, “Snow Job”, etc.), and fantasy (“Slow Dancing with Jesus”, “Afternoon at Schrafft’s”, “A Change in the Weather”, “Golden Apples of the Sun”, “The Stray”, etc.). And it’s interesting to note, too, that many of the stories I’ve arbitrarily plunked into one category—horror, science fiction, or fantasy—actually cross genres, sometimes repeatedly. Far more important to Gardner and his collaborators than into which bin to place one of their productions were the lovable mongrel demands of an individual tale’s own internal logic. Thus, “Playing the Game” is both horror and SF, “Time Bride” both humor and smoothly didactic SF, “Touring” both wish-fulfillment fantasy and an unsettling kind of existential horror. And so on.
Suffice it to say that this is a wide-ranging, entertaining, colorful, and unpredictable collection of stories, well worth both your time and your money.
I’m sorry—truly sorry—that there’s no story here with a byline citing Michael Bishop as a collaborator of Gardner’s. Once upon a time, I made a half-hearted attempt at a collaboration when Gardner sent me the opening of a long SF story and gently suggested that I ponder the material to see if I could add to and maybe even resolve the conflicts already set forth—but I stuck, and never got unstuck, and finally Gardner opted to pass the material along to George R.R. Martin. That was a wise decision, even if he and George haven’t yet finished the story either, but I remain jealous of all the good souls—Jack, Jay, Michael, and Susan—who have collaborated successfully with Gardner.
I hope that one day, if only for a wisecracking short-short, I can join their company and experience myself the exhilaration of working with Gardner, of bouncing ideas off his bizarrely flexible brain, and of hitting again and again those high-paying slick markets that so often featured his and his collaborators’ cunningly hewn stories—tales of mystery, imagination, and joie de vivre.
I’m not sure I know how to pronounce joie de vivre, but I know it when I encounter it, and Gardner’s undoubtedly got it. Over the past few years, incidentally, I have learned how to pronounce his lovely last name.
(To reiterate: Dō-ZWAH, Dō-ZWAH, Dō-ZWAH.)
And I keep hoping that some small relaxation of his editorial duties—he does a bang-up job at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, assembles a respected annual best-of-the-year anthology, and edits a series of entertaining theme anthologies with Jack Dann—will give him more writing time of his own. In the meantime, we have this handsome collection, and I’m damned grateful to the folks at Ursus Imprints that we do.
February 26-27, 1990
Pine Mountain, Georgia