THE EDITOR'S WORD by Mike Resnick

Greetings, and welcome to the thirty-fourth issue of Galaxy’s Edge. We think we’ve got a pretty nice line-up for you, with new and newer writers such as Brenda Kalt, Grayson Bray Morris, Shawn Proctor, Alex Shvartsman, George Nikolopoulos, A. Merc Rustad, Doug Dandridge, Sharon Diane King, and Larry Hodges. They’re joined by established stars Robert Silverberg, Jane Yolen, Jack McDevitt, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Also aboard are our regular features: Recommended Books by Jody Lynn Nye and Bill Fawcett, science by Gregory Benford, literary matters by Robert J, Sawyer, and the Joy Ward Interview featuring superstar Larry Niven. Finally, we’re beginning a new serialization this issue: Hugo winner Charles Sheffield’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

We’re very pleased with this issue. We hope you are, too.

***

I lost a dear friend at the end of May. I’d known Gardner Dozois for close to half a century. I’d sold to him, brought from him, co-edited with him, gone to Europe with him, partied with him, and remain in awe of his editorial talent. In a period of twenty years as the editor of Asimov’s, he won fourteen Hugos as Best Editor, a record that has never been matched or even approached and almost certainly never will be.

I tell a story about his tenure at Asimov’s. I sent him a lot of stories, and I sold him a lot of stories. In fact, during those twenty years he rejected only one story of mine. I licked my wounds for a couple of days, then promptly sold it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—and sure enough, it made the Hugo ballot for Best Short Story.

You can’t imagine how much fun (and how much mileage) I got bragging all over the Internet that I had made the ballot with an Asimov’s reject. Gardner never said a harsh word. Then came Labor Day weekend, and the Worldcon, and the Hugos, and of course I lost to an Asimov’s story—and Gardner got as much mileage bragging about how a story he’d bought had beaten one he’d turned down. Neither of us ever said a harsh word, and in truth we both had a wonderful time with it.

The field of science fiction has had well over one hundred editors since Hugo Gernsback created Amazing Stories and “scientifiction” back in 1926. You can argue that at most there were five truly great ones: Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, Anthony Boucher of F&SF, Horace Gold of Galaxy, John Campbell of Astounding and Unknown, and Gardner.

And of the five, the only two that I think would be unanimous choices are Campbell and Dozois.

We lost one of our true giants this spring. And as much as I’m going to miss my friend, science fiction’s going to miss him even more.