ardner Dozois has won the Best Editor Hugo Award 12 times out of the 15 he's been nominated, including the 2000 Hugo, recently awarded at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. As the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, which could well be considered the SF field's flagship publication, and as an anthologist, Dozois' influence is immeasurable. He is also a talented writer (although not prolific) and has won multiple Nebula Awards for his fiction.
Recently Dozois met with Science Fiction Weekly to discuss his work and the state of science fiction in both print and other media.
This year's edition of The Year's Best Science Fiction is packed with good stories. Which are your favorites and why?
Dozois: That's one of those questions that a "best of the year" editor probably shouldn't answer. It's like asking a parent who his favorite children are. If you single one out as your favorite, the others are going to be upset; you're supposed to love all your children equally, right? So I'll duck it, and limit myself to pointing out that the anthology contains some excellent work by new or nearly-new writers such as David Marusek, Richard Wadholm, Kage Baker, Chris Lawson, Alastair Reynolds and several others, and I'll justify mentioning them by putting them forth as a counter to the still often-heard assertion that there aren't any good new writers coming along anymore. In fact, there are quite a few good new authors coming along, as this book demonstrates.
The book also features work by old pros such as Hal Clement, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg and Ben Bova, who have been writing for decades, since long before many of the newer writers were even born, in some cases. It's a special characteristic of the field that 50- or 60-year careers are not uncommon, and that writers who've been around that long are still producing work good enough to get them into a "best of the year" volume, right alongside the Young Turks. The demographic spread of writers producing worthwhile work in the genre is amazing.
Now that they're over, what do you think the biggest trends of the 1990s were in written science fiction?
Dozois: It seems fairly clear, using 20/20 hindsight, that the biggest trends of the '90s were parallel booms in the hard-science story, updated and reinvented to better suit the tastes of the time, and in modern space opera, also updated and reinvented to better suit the tastes of the time. We're talking now about the work of people like Greg Egan, Gregory Benford, Paul J. McAuley, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, Michael Swanwick, Gwyneth Jones, Brian Stableford, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Iain Banks, Peter Hamilton and a number of others; some of the newer writers I just mentioned, such as David Marusek and Alastair Reynolds, would clearly fit comfortably in here as well. Many of the same players have produced work in both these areas, but they don't quite overlap exactly; Greg Egan, for instance, is perhaps the foremost new practitioner of the modern hard-science story, but he doesn't write space opera, nor does Brian Stableford (although, interestingly enough, he used to); where people like Iain Banks or Peter Hamilton don't write hard-science stories. You do have people like Paul J. McAuley and Stephen Baxter, though, who seem equally fluent in both areas, and move freely from one to the other as they choose.
It's interesting to note how many of these writers are British (a number of Australians could be counted in as well). Is this because they swung to writing hard-science and space opera as a reaction to the British New Wave of the '60s and '70s, which tended to eschew both? Who knows? If so, though, and if the pendulum-swing theory is true, then their literary children may end up writing nonscientifically oriented avant-garde New Wave fiction again, in reaction to them!
Pundits of science fiction have long proclaimed the imminent demise of the genre. In summing up 1999, you pointed to several signs that the genre is once again not at death's door. Why do you think folks keep wishing the genre dead?
Dozois: I have no idea. Perhaps it's because it would be easier for the genre to be safely dead than to have to keep up with it. It's tough staying current with a genre as big, complex, contradictory and multifaceted as this one, where huge amounts of work are published every year (even ignoring the media-oriented stuff). One thing I have noticed is that most of the people who say that SF is dead or dying, or that the work that's coming out now just isn't anywhere near as good as it Used To Be, usually turn out to be people who don't actually read much, if any, contemporary science fiction anymore, and haven't for years. The people who do read lots of contemporary science fiction know better, though; almost to a person, we agree that science fiction is more vital, complex and challenging than ever.
It's easier to say SF is dead, though, and take a gloomy pleasure out of that, than to keep up; it's easier to say that there's nobody worthwhile anymore now that writers such as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein are dead than it is to search out other good writers amongst a welter of unfamiliar names. Asimov and Heinlein would have been the first to decry this attitude, by the way; having come up themselves as new young writers that many people didn't want to bother with because they knew they couldn't be as good as the older writers they were replacing, they were well aware of the constant evolution and turnover of the field, constant erosion and replacement, and that the field depends on new writers to survive and grow. Asimov in particular would have been insulted by the idea that the field had died with him; his often-expressed hope was that new writers would continue to build on the foundation stones he'd put down for generations to come--just as he had built in his time on the foundations laid down by others.
What do you see happening with science fiction magazines in 2000 and beyond? What would you like to see magazines doing online?
Dozois: For a variety of technical reasons ... most of them having to do with upheavals in the domestic distribution system for magazines in the last few years, it's gotten harder and harder for small-circulation magazines of any type, especially fiction magazines (the mystery magazines have been hit just as hard as the science fiction magazines, for instance) to get displayed on many newsstands. It is likely to get harder still in days to come, as the ever-shrinking number of distributors becomes ever more selective, pushing to handle only high-circulation magazines to maximize their profits.
Since most of the traditional SF magazines have always been subscription-driven anyway, this is not necessarily an immediate disaster. But if the SF magazines are frozen out of the newsstands, that makes it hard to attract new subscribers, people who may never have seen the magazine before who pick it up on impulse because something about the cover or the blurbs or the author lineup looks appealing to them, and who like what they see enough to end up subscribing. Without a constant influx of new subscribers, natural attrition amongst the old subscribers will eventually reduce the circulation to zero.
It may be possible to use the Internet as a promotional tool, to get around the newsstand bottleneck and reach new subscribers directly. To do this, I'd like to see the print magazines greatly increase their presence and visibility online. One way to do this would be to expand their present Web sites; offer features, including original fiction and nonfiction, that are available only online; and then seduce the Internet surfers this brings in into taking a chance on subscribing to the print edition as well. It's difficult to find the money, time or manpower to do this, though, and continue bringing out a monthly print magazine at the same time, although we're doing the best we can, and hope to at least redouble our efforts in the not-too-distant future.
The Internet has fostered the appearance of dozens, if not hundreds, of semi-pro and amateur Webzines that publish science fiction, horror and fantasy short fiction. Other publications have abandoned print entirely in favor of the Web. Do you think these Webzines have begun to influence the speculative fiction market?
Dozois: Cynics would say that the track record of publications that "have abandoned print entirely in favor of the Web" has not been very good. Both Tomorrow and Omni abandoned their print formats in favor of all-electronic formats, and both subsequently died, as did the Omni successor site, Event Horizon. I tend to think at the moment that Web sites are best used in support of physical products, products that can be advertised and sold via the Web ... but it's early days yet. This is an industry in its infancy, and the truth is, nobody is really sure as yet what's going to work and what isn't going to work.
The problem with online-only fiction sites to date has been, How do you make any money off them? Omni tried to attract enough Web advertising to pay for the site's expenses, and Tomorrow tried to sell a large-enough number of online "subscriptions" to survive, and neither of these things worked. Several other sites, like Fictionwise and Mind's Eye Fiction, are trying to get readers to pay directly online, on a piecemeal basis, for the fiction they consume, story by story. The jury's still out on most of these experiments. Once somebody figures out a reliable way to make money from selling fiction online, then the floodgates will open, and the online market will become a big part of the overall speculative fiction market. To date, though, the promise of all this remains largely unfulfilled--although this may be about to change.
Do you think the prospects for top-notch fiction on the Web will improve in 2000 and beyond?
Dozois: I think that we're at the start of a period where we'll see a dramatically increased amount of top-notch fiction on the Web (at least for a while), with several large and impressive sites now offering original fiction as part of their editorial mix, and several more such sites rumored to be in the works. I'm moderately optimistic about sites such as SCIFI.COM offering original online-only fiction, because it's only part of the editorial mix, only part of what the site has to offer, and so the fiction page doesn't have to carry the burden of making a profit all by itself, something that has been a problem for many sites. After all, this is the same kind of mix you see in successful print magazines like Playboy (and which you used to see in the print version of Omni), which feature fiction as part of a large and diverse editorial mix; making an online all-fiction venue self-supporting is probably a harder task, although there are a couple of rumored sites coming that are going to attempt it.
If some of the high-end, quality sites that are going to be "publishing" original fiction online are successful and self-sustaining, then we could be in for some very exciting times in the online end of the market. Even in the worst-case scenario, though, there'll probably be more good original fiction on the Web for the next couple of years than there was in 1999, when fiction of real quality on the Internet was rather thin on the ground.
Some folks rail against the "dark edge" they say dominates today's science fiction stories. They theorize that the genre's fascination with anti-heroes, dark futures and dehumanizing machinery turns off young readers, and say that there needs to be more positive, "old-fashioned" science fiction. What do you think?
Dozois: I think that there may be something to this, although not as much as the more extreme pundits would claim. While I wouldn't like to see science fiction abandon hard-hitting and disquieting sociological speculation, or give up on cautionary tales that warn us about dystopian futures we should strive to avoid, I don't think there's any harm in also publishing a healthy percentage of fiction that's "just" flat-out entertainment, adventure fiction, something that awakens the much-maligned Sense of Wonder, something you read for the fun of it, because you enjoy reading it.
I think that the pendulum may have swung a little too much in one direction in recent years ... which is why I've been putting together retrospective anthologies of "Adventure SF" such as The Good Old Stuff and The Good New Stuff. But a good magazine, whether print or electronic, should have balance. All of one thing or the other quickly becomes dull, no matter which extreme you choose to favor. You need both types. All types.
Star Trek's fortunes seemed to have improved since you wrote your 1999 summation in The Year's Best Science Fiction; a new series is being planned, and a script for a movie has allegedly been penned. Where would you like to see Star Trek go--or would you rather see it go away?
Dozois: I have no objection to Star Trek, either in the movie theater or in the bookstores, and have enjoyed many episodes myself, and even a media-novel or two. Although this is a hot-button topic with some portions of the print audience, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that people who enjoy a television show would want to read books featuring further adventures of the same characters, and ought to be able to find such books for sale in the bookstores. What's annoying is the tendency on the part of some publishers, in search of the elusive "sure sale," to want to push everything else off the shelf in favor of publishing nothing but media-novels such as the Star Trek books. While I have no objection to media fans getting to read novels made from their favorite media shows, I'd like to be able to find non-media stuff in the bookstores, too! But this is the fault of tunnel vision and short-sightedness on the part of the publishing companies, and can't really be blamed on Star Trek itself.
As far as where the television show should go, I'd think that a return to its roots would probably be in order. If I'd been in charge, I would have taken Voyager back to the core Star Trek universe years ago, back to Federation space. What's needed is probably what amounts to "Star Trek: The Next Next Generation." Get a new ship, put the most popular cast members you can sign from TNG, Deep Space Nine, and perhaps Voyager (by far my least favorite of the four Trek series, and one that even most ... Trek fans seem to be only lukewarm about) on board, along with some interesting new characters, and get back to basics. Above all, improve the quality of the writing, which has really slipped badly on Voyager. But the Star Trek folk certainly don't want any advice from me.
Star Trek and Star Wars have both disappointed fans in the last two years. What do you think the effects would be if these franchises continue to falter or crumble altogether?
Dozois: I don't think there would be much real effect. If both the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises vanished tomorrow (which is not going to happen), other shows would come along to replace them in the public's fancy in short order. Babylon 5 stole much of Trek's thunder during its glory days, anyway, and now Farscape seems poised to become a similar cult favorite. There's always going to be a Hot New Show coming along ... and another one behind that.
In terms of science fiction stories, what would you like to see more of in 2000?
Dozois: Most of what you find in the slush pile is fantasy and horror of one sort or another. Of the percentage of what's left that is science fiction, the vast majority of it (with the exception of a certain residue of third- and fourth-generation cyberpunk, mostly inspired by various movies and TV shows) is near-future, soft-science dystopian stuff. Now I like that kind of thing too, and will certainly continue to buy superior examples of it, but it would be nice to see some other kinds of material for a change, something with some color and sweep and action in it, something to appeal to that Sense of Wonder I mentioned earlier, something that takes place on strange alien worlds or in the far future instead of in the slums of New York City five years from now. We do get stuff with that kind of color and exoticism too, of course, especially from the writers I mentioned in the answer to the second question, and I buy as much of it as I can find, but I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more of it. (Of course, the kicker is that it also has to be a good story, and a well-written one to boot--easier said than done!)
Congratulations on winning the Best Editor Hugo at this year's World Science Fiction Convention. After winning the award 12 times, does it still hold any meaning for you?
Dozois: Sure, it still means a great deal to me. It's a validation by your peers that you're still doing good work, and a confirmation by the
reading audience that you're still supplying them with work that they
enjoy and want to read. It's a definite gesture of respect, a clear
indication that what you do is being appreciated (one of the few such
indications you ever get in this business). You don't get tired of
that, no matter how many times you've won before.
