November 25-December 1, 2004

art

Future Shock

The tome machine: Fairmount resident Gardner Dozois, who just edited his last issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, leads a panel discussion with local sci-fi scribes this Wednesday. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Local sci-fi guy Gardner Dozois on Asimov, special f/x and good storytelling.

by Andrew Parks

"I call myself a sewer pipe of the arts. I strain out all the shit and leave you with nutritious stuff to enjoy. At least that's how it's supposed to work."

It's actually worked quite well for the past 18 years: Gardner Dozois' tenure as editor/shit-sifter of the monthly short-story magazine Asimov's Science Fiction (December is his last issue). During that nearly two-decade run, he's won an unprecedented 16 Hugos for Best Professional Editor (the Oscar of the sci-fi industry). In 2001, Philadelphia magazine went so far as to name the Fairmount resident in its "Revolutionary Minds" issue, calling him "the most influential editor in the field [of science fiction]."

More important than a trophy is the trust fans have placed in Dozois' taste. It's made him the returning editor of the Year's Best Science Fiction annual and kept die-hard readers interested in his magazine, even as other titles folded and Asimov's own page count and circulation "steadily declined" (in 1990, issues were 320 pages; they're now 144). Dozois says the magazine's struggle to stay afloat is simply symptomatic of the print industry.

"To say people don't want to read it [science fiction] anymore is a dangerous assumption to make," he explains. "The circulation of most magazines have gone down over the last four or five years, even the monster ones like TV Guide and Playboy. The types of media are changing, like if you want to see naked pictures of women, you can just go to the Internet and not buy a $6 magazine."

Dozois admits he's a minority in the sci-fi community: an actual reader who prefers the power of an idea over the stylized violence of light sabers and ray guns. Most final-frontier fans prefer the flashier mediums of films, video games and comic books.

To wit: The gaming-and-film draw of Dragon*Con reels in tens of thousands of people a year, while local, primarily print-focused sci-fi gatherings (like Philcon, coming up Dec. 10-12 at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown), attract only a fraction of that. As for stores, the sci-fi section of Barnes & Noble keeps shrinking, with the books tucked away on a few shelves and a fiction magazine section relatively nonexistent. Yet, sci-fi, shoot-'em-up video games rack up ridiculous numbers. (Halo 2 just topped $125 million in its first 24 hours.)

Kids must suddenly hate reading, right?

"I'm not sure there was ever a huge percentage of people who like to read for pleasure," Dozois says. "Science-fiction readers and people who like to read in general have always been in the minority and perceived as geeks and weirdos."

Geeks and weirdos, perhaps, but the quality of the writing blows most of the more popular arts out of the water. Take Dozois' own award-winning short story, 1983's "The Peacemaker." Its environmental disaster storyline of polar-cap paranoia predated the big-budget film The Day After Tomorrow by two decades.

"A lot of films don't affect me because they don't make any sense and the writing is just bad," Dozois says. "I don't mind the splashy special effects. I'd just like it in service of a good story."

And that's why Dozois still reaches for the broken-in spine of an Isaac Asimov novel, rather than, say, the CGI-enhanced adaptation of I, Robot featuring Will Smith.

"That's not what Isaac would have wanted," Dozois says. "He was a pacifist and said, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.' He was more concerned with ideas, using rationality to figure out your problems and the problems of the world."

Dozois has passed the Asimov's torch to editor Sheila Williams, who will work out of the magazine's main office in New York. "I don't want editing the magazine to spoil my enjoyment of science fiction, something I could foresee happening sometime soon," says Dozois of his decision. "You can only read thousands of manuscripts every month for so long." He'll concentrate on editing more anthologies, including a survey of the best science-fiction stories of the last 25 years, which will be released early next year.

On Wednesday, Dozois and local sci-fi authors Tom Purdom and Michael Swanwick plan to explore impending moral and scientific problems of the world at the Central Branch of the Philadelphia Free Library. Purdom and Swanwick both contributed to Dozois' anthology of short stories Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (St. Martin's), which envisions a society where stem-cell research and cloning are just the beginning.

Explains Dozois, "Some of the younger ones in the audience may live to see this, a post-human future where we could control our bodies, eliminate disease, extend our life span, control our emotions—a whole cornucopia of possibilities, some frightening, some promising and some that are both."

"We embrace the possibilities 20 or 30 years before everyone else," Dozois says. "If you read science fiction, at least you can see the blow coming."

Gardner Dozois, with authors Tom Purdom and Michael Swanwick, discussing Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future, Wed., Dec. 1, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, www.library.phila.gov.