Hooray For Graying Science Fiction Fans (and authors, artists and editors…)

Gardner Dozois has now been elevated to HERO status over here in crotchety land. There will be a parade.

Gardner gets interviewed over at Locus and has some absolutely WONDERFUL things to say:

?I try to hold the line in the distinction between science fiction and everything else when I edit The Year’s Best Science Fiction series. That distinction doesn’t mean a whole lot to some people anymore, but I have this naive feeling that if it says ‘The Year’s Best Science Fiction’ on the cover it should (mostly at least) have science fiction in it. It is old-fashioned. Although SF is leaking into mainstream fiction and mainstream is leaking back, you can still tell whether or not something is core science fiction, if you care to make that distinction in the first place.”

and

?I will probably get pilloried for saying this, but it’s actually harder to write science fiction, because you have to know more. I’ve never been a hard science fiction writer, but even writing a non-hard science fiction story you have to know a lot more about science and the world and how things work than you do to write a fantasy. I have never had a strict theoretical definition of what science fiction is. You can usually tell it when you see it: stories on one side of the line are fantasy; stories on the other side are science fiction. Where it gets tricky is when they begin to blur at the line where the two genres press together.?

and

?In fact, although this is somewhat traitorous of me as a former magazine editor, I’m not all that worried about print magazines dying. I think there will be plenty of web magazines to replace them if they do. Part of the problem is how you make any money publishing online, but that’s going to get worked out. I am worried because there’s not a lot of core science fiction being published on the Internet. You can find oceans of fantasy and slipstream and horror, but it’s rare to find a science fiction story and rarer to find a hard science fiction story. That is a ‘flavor’ that seems largely relegated to the print SF magazines at the moment. Jim Baen’s Universe will do science fiction, and even hard science fiction, but very few other e-magazines do.?

(All emphasis mine)

I met Gardner years and years ago (when neither of us was gray) when visiting the new offices of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I think it was at George Scither’s house…

The main thing I remember about him was how utterly HUGE he was. And how quiet. He kind of shuffled around and loomed over everything. George was the talkative, kinetic one, Gardner stood off to the side, like an enforcer. BAD things would happen to story writers who’s submissions were not up to snuff.

He’s obviously made a career and name for himself over those intervening years and it’s very gratifying to see that he’s still on watch on the ramparts of SF. It IS an identifiable genre, it IS something special, it WON’T be going away and you all need to write more such stuff so Gardner can pick it up for his annual anthology.