Gardner Dozois passed away this weekend, and the modern science fiction community has lost a giant.
He was the editor of Asimov’s magazine for 20 years, a position with which he earned 15 Hugo Awards. But it was as the editor of his annual Year's Best Science Fiction collections that I came to really know him. These massive tomes topped out at hundreds of pages and 100,000s of words. The stories he selected were always cream of the crop, but it was for his in-depth introductions that I always bought these books. In the age before the internet, his summation of the previous year’s activities in all aspects of SF/F was required reading. It still is. Often, I would not get through an entire anthology but I always read Dozois's introductions.
The SF/F community will definitely miss Dozois’s vision, but if we’ve learned anything from science fiction literature, it’s that we always look to the future, a future Gardner Dozois helped shape.
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