Gardner Dozois - On the Road with Gardner Dozois

2019 by Gardner Dozois

Traveling Incognito 2019 by Michael Swanwick

Memories of Gardner:

2019 by Agberg, Ltd.

2019 by Sheila Williams

2019 by Walter Jon Williams

2019 by Eileen Gunn

2019 by James Patrick Kelly

2019 by Erin Underwood

Photo of Gardner Dozois 1992 by Beth Gwinn
Photo of Jim Burns 2018 by Jim Burns
Cover Design 2018 by Matt Smaldone
Cover Image 2018 by Jim Burns
Interior Illustrations 2018 by Jim Burns

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic, magical or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

FIRST EDITION, February 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61037-336-4 (paper)
ISBN: 978-1-61037-337-1 (epub)
ISBN: 978-1-61037-016-5 (mobi)

NESFA Press is an imprint of the
New England Science Fiction Association, Inc.

NESFA is a registered trademark of the
New England Science Fiction Association, Inc.

by Michael Swanwick

H eres the way this introduction originally began:

Gardner Dozois didnt drive. Or, rather, not since his Army days when a sergeant gave him all the driving instruction he would ever receive by barking, Dozois! Drive that jeep to Erlangen! The fact that his late wife, Susan Casper, is commonly at the wheel in all the adventures chronicled here contributes to the dreamlike sense of his being carried along, of passing lightly over the world, commenting on its virtues and absurdities, without the obligation to make any lasting impression on it.

Not that he hadnt had his effect on the world, as attested to by the many awards he casually accepts in the course of his travels. Before he gave most of them away, Gardners collection of Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editorfifteen, I believewas unsurpassed in its vulgarity. The collective trophies looked like a display in a sex shop. But the hard work of earning those awards happened elsewhere, at home and in the office. Here, he is on vacation. So you dont see him encouraging new writers and promoting their work, suggesting the changes that will make an unpublishable story award-worthy, luring writers out of retirement, drawing attention to brilliant but neglected work, and so on and on. However, his friends being drawn largely from within the field, there are occasional glimpses of people you may know: yours truly singing a Brecht/Weill song with Gardner and Susan or George R. R. Martin driving a rental car ten times around a roundabout just for the hell of it.

These essays are part diary entries and part con reports. (Earlier essays focused more on the con report part, I suspect. We will never know, however, because they were posted on the GEnie or Delphi bulletin boards in the early days of the Web and when the platforms disappeared, the essays went with them. Gardner being anything but an archivist, he hadnt kept printed copies. Let young writers take this lesson to heart when dealing with future media!) At the time, there was no intention that they would ever be reprinted. He was simply sharing with friends the pleasures and discoveries of his travels. Unlike his fiction, which was painstakingly crafted, these reports were written in a gently colloquial manner and without serious literary intent. They flow as a river flows, easily and unhurriedly.

Gardner was, as you will discover, a genial travel companion, both good humored and perceptive. But that doesnt mean youre under any obligation to accept him at face value. The Gardner Dozois people commonly saw at science fiction conventions and similar public events, the one Isaac Asimov habitually referred to as Chestertonian, the amiable trickster and josher at pretension, was every bit as much a construction as was the rather similar public persona of G. K. Chesterton himself. Like Chesterton, he was a serious man with depths he seldom let outsiders see. But if you look sharply herein, you will get glimpses of the man behind the mask. Men, rather, for like everyone else Gardner was a Swiss Army knife of personalities. There is the pessimist for whom every trip to Pittsburgh must necessarily be his last. The cat-lover, always ready to interpret a local toms casual glare into English. The class-conscious man of blue-collar origins. The former child, standing awestruck before the grandeur of existence. The melancholic who could read the extinction of humanity into a hill of ants. The social creature who had a particular gift for friendship. The sensitive soul capable of describing John Brunners newly widowed wifeBrunner was the first science fiction writer to die at a Worldconclutching his hand, weeping, but not his feelings when she did so.

Best of all, perhaps, every now and then Dozois the Literary Artist erupts onto the page with an extraordinary image or passage or turn of phrase. Does God really speak in sparrows? To find out, youll have to get into the car with him and let Susan drive you both to places youve never been before...

And there, after a jaunty Enjoy the ride! is where this introduction originally ended. Alas, Gardner died, suddenly and unexpectedly, before this book could be published. I have spent the day revising this introductionchanging verbs to the past tense and adding a new beginning and end but mostly finding ways of putting off this sad chorejust two weeks after he passed away.

Gardner was a modest man and would have been astonished at the outpouring of grief from his many friends, not all of whom had actually met him in the flesh. But after he got over that, hed be the first to tell you that a writer is never completely dead so long as someone is reading his or her words. So let me recommend to you his wonderful novel Strangers and his brilliant short fiction. Also, this book. Preserved herein is Gardners voice, exactly as he spoke, and his vision just as his friends understood it. Take a journey with Gardner Dozois and watch him come vividly back to life, laughing and wisecracking, making wry observations, mourning the follies of the world. Those who have traveled with him will attest that, yes, he was exactly this way. Those who have not will get some sense of what they missed.

Enjoy the ride.

by Gardner Dozois

T hese trip reports were written between 1995 and 2000. I wrote several more of them (I can remember whole paragraphs from a trip report about our trip through France on our way to the Worldcon in Holland), but they were serialized on either my or Susan Caspers threads on Genie and Delphi, and when those websites died, the trip reports were lost and could not be retrieved. The only ones that survived were those for which I had print copies in my filesperhaps a useful lesson for society at large.

After 2000, I got busier with work, and my wife Susan Casper began her long slow slide into her final years, requiring an increasing amount of care, and so I didnt have the time for trip reports any more. Several more accounts of our travels together, told from Susans viewpoint, can be found in her posthumous collection, Up the Rainbow: The Complete Short Fiction of Susan Casper.

This book, of course, is dedicated to Susan Casper, my travel companion on many trips all over the world for forty-seven years. Now that she is gone and my travels are over, I at least have the memories of those journeys togethermemories that Ive shared with you here, in the hope that you enjoy them, as we enjoyed the trips that made them possible.

by Robert Silverberg