Gardner Dozois - Sense of Wonder: Short Fiction Reviews (2009-2017)

On August 10th, 2008, toward the end of the Denver Worldcon, Denvention 2, Charles L. Brown, the founder and editor of Locus Magazine, took me and my wife, Susan Casper, out to dinner, along with Jonathan Strahan and Liza Trombli. Turned out, once we'd gotten through the obligatory gossip part of the meal, that Charles wanted to invite me to write a monthly column for Locus, reviewing short fiction.

I was dubious, and said so. I was no critic, and Locus already had fine critics like Gary Wolfe and Russell Letson writing for it, so what did they need me for? Charles explained that he didn't want a critic for this column, he wanted a reviewer, someone who would look over all the short fiction being published that month and make recommendations to the Locus readership as to which stories were worth reading and which were not, and perhaps explain a little about what qualities made one story better or worse than another. I admitted that I might be able to do thatit wasn't that dissimilar to what I did as the editor of an annual Best of the Year anthology, except on a different time-scale: sort through the year's output of short science fiction and decide which stories I wanted to choose to put before the public in my anthology...except for the part where I explained why I liked one story better than another, which sounded like it could be a lot more work.

I remained reluctant to accept the assignment, but Charles kept nagging away at me throughout dinner, and by the time dessert arrived, I had agreed, somewhat hesitantly, that I would try writing a couple of columns and we'd see how they worked out.

By the time we left the restaurant, I was still more than half-convinced that it wouldn't work outeither Charles would find that the columns weren't really what he was looking for after all, or I'd write a few of them and then burn out, considering all the other work I already had on my plate in the first place.

Nine years have gone by since that August night in Denver in 2008, and the number of columns I've produced (every month except for a few missed columns while I was in a prolonged hospital stay) is creeping up on 110 as I write these words in December of 2017, adding up to about 189,000 words worth of columns. People have been asking me when I was going to collect all those columns as a bookso here it is. Be warned: this is a collection of reviews, not, for the most part, in-depth critical analysis or astute generalizations about the SF/fantasy fields. If you want that, you'll have to seek out books by Gary Wolfe or Russell Leston or Ursula K. Le Guin or John Clute or any of a half-dozen other learned critics of the field.

Charles came up with the title Gardnerspace for the review column. I never liked it, and don't like it now, but Charles usually got what he wanted, and that's the title the column's run under all these years. I took the opportunity to change the title of this book, though, to something I liked better, although it's still composed of the same reviews that ran in Locus.

Gardner Dozois