Book Review: Being Gardner Dozois: An Interview with Michael Swanwick

Not long ago I read and reviewed a recently published book called Being Michael Swanwick by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. It consists of a series of interviews of author Swanwick that delve into the creative process of how he came to write his published short fiction. This book was inspired by an earlier book, Being Gardner Dozois, in which Swanwick interviews Dozois about his short fiction. The late Gardner Dozois was a powerful presence in the science fiction field, not only as a writer but even more as an editor, and so I was eager to read the earlier volume as well.

I received Being Gardner Dozois as a Christmas present and set about reading it almost at once. Something mystified me, though, about the publication date. The ReAnimus Press edition marks the copyright and publication dates as 2018, but the last story that Dozois and Swanwick discuss was published in 1999. Could it be that Swanwick was unable to find a publisher for it for two decades? That didn’t seem likely. A modicum of research, mainly on Wikipedia but also on publisher websites, revealed that the book was first published in 2001 by Old Earth Books. At that time it was a finalist for the Hugo Award and won the Locus Award for non-fiction. The Old Earth Books website has not been updated since 2012, so we can presume it is defunct. According to its website, one of the aims of ReAnimus Press is to help authors to “get their out-of-print books and short works back into readers’ hands.” To accomplish this, it uses ebooks and Amazon’s print on demand services.

Being Gardner Dozois covers all of Dozois’s published stories beginning with those he wrote as a teenager through, as I mentioned, 1999. Besides being a writer, from 1986 to 2004 Dozois was also editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and he won the Hugo award fifteen times as an editor. I would have liked Swanwick’s interviews to delve into Dozois’s editorial process, but he focuses only on Dozois as a writer. And Dozois was an excellent writer. Two of his short stories won Nebula Awards, and many more were nominated. Dozois had a singular style that might be described as literary, and not many of his stories appeared in the genre digest magazines. Instead, he sold his stories to top-class cutting-edge anthologies such as Damon Knight’s Orbit series and Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions series. Later he also sold numerous stories to slick magazines such as Omni, Playboy, and Penthouse.

Since I have read both Being Michael Swanwick and Being Gardner Dozois fairly recently, it is interesting to compare the interview styles and the voices of the authors. Being Michael Swanwick is a bit more formally presented, whereas Being Gardner Dozois is presented more as a lark, as a fun project involving two close friends. Near the end, Dozois jokingly mentions: “You realize that you have just pulled off one of those completely useless but impressive accomplishments, like making a replica of the Titanic out of marzipan, or building the Eiffel Tower life-sized out of old used Q-tips. I figure there’s about five people in the world who are going to want to read this book. Maybe that’s overestimating it.” Dozois turned out to be wrong in this instance, as evidenced by the awards the book received, and I’m sure he knew he was wrong when he said it or he wouldn’t have spent so much time with Swanwick compiling the book. It’s true that a book like this could become tedious if the interview subject was a mediocre writer, but that’s certainly not true of Dozois or of his interviewer Swanwick. They are both among the finest writers the science fiction and fantasy field has ever produced, and this book is of great value to both aspiring and veteran writers – and, for that matter, anyone interested in how superlative literature comes into existence.