Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

GARDNER DOZOIS - ANOTHER FRIEND I NEVER MET

I thought the internet was supposed to tell me everything I need to know instantly, as soon as I log on, but I only just discovered that Gardner Dozois died this year, on the 27th of May. He was 70.
On three shelves of a bookcase right behind me are 26 volumes of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, the giant annual anthology, stretching from number three in 1986 (you can’t get the first two) to number 28 in 2011 – at that point I decided I really ought to get round to actually reading all this stuff before I got any more. It’s a slow but ongoing project.

But these weren’t just great one-stop anthologies, no. They were where Gardner laid down his version of The Truth. Usually the Truth about Science Fiction, but other stuff would creep in too.

Every one of these books has a SUMMATION at the beginning. It followed a strict pattern – he never deviated in all those years. Gardner would tell you which publishers and which magazines went down the drain that year, and which hopeless idealists had started up new ventures. He mapped the uncomfortable attempted transition from print to online fiction. He also charted the often horrible story of How Science Fiction Ate Planet Earth, that is, how it moved from the tiny despised ghetto it was in the 1950s to become the almost boringly mainstream entertainment it is now.

Then he would survey the original and best-of short fiction anthologies – typical comment from the one I’m looking at now : “There seemed to be fewer slipstream/fabulist/New Weird/whatever anthologies this year”. After that came the novels – Gardner always apologised for not having read many of these, but he was busy reading every single short science fiction story so he never did have the time for that many novels. Then came consideration of original short story collections and SF & fantasy reference books, and then – movies!

The War of the Worlds was fast-paced and suspenseful… that being said, I regretted the fact that Spielberg somehow managed to skew the movie into being yet another Spielberg “small child in jeopardy (Dakota Fanning sure does scream a lot in this film)/self-centred-immature-father-in-a-dysfunctional-family-learns-to-value-his-children-over-himself” movie rather than really focusing on the disaster that’s overcoming humanity at large… in some ways it’s more faithful to HG Wells’ novel than the previous Hollywood version was – and yet at the same time gave me the feeling that in spite of all that faithfulness to the text, Spielberg had somehow ended up missing the point of the novel altogether.

After movies he checks out TV shows, writes about the SF conventions and the annual awards, Hugos, Locus, Nebula, etc and after all that we get the Obituaries which in 2005/6 started with Robert Sheckley and ended with Tammy Vance, described as the daughter-in-law of Jack Vance. So the word for obituaries was : comprehensive. If you were an extra on a Doctor Who episode from 1975, or a beloved writer’s daughter-in-law, you got mentioned.

And then Gardner would equally garrulously introduce each story, usually as if it was a pearl beyond price. In the 23rd annual collection in front of me he introduces stories like this :

In the skin crawlingly tense adventure that follows...

In the bittersweet story that follows...

In the powerful novella that follows...

In the ingenious and suspenseful story that follows…

In the dazzling, crammed, high-bit-rate story that follows...

Gardner was the superfan I never could have been, he had a strong opinion about absolutely everything, and I loved his energy and his seeming ability to be able to encompass the whole of science fiction, which each year, like a galaxy, seemed to expand enormously.

Now I’m going to get all the Year’s Bests I’m missing. I hope they're not too expensive. It’ll take years to get round to reading them, but I’ll immediately check out each yearly SUMMATION, just to hear his voice again.