Gardner Dozois Nearly Killed Anthologies for Me Too

A comment seen over at Vox Populi post taking a look at the Balkanization of SF:

“Both of these publications were edited by the same person. At the time, I wasn’t sure if he had abominable taste, or if the “good old stuff” wasn’t being written any more because the Zeitgeist had changed.”

That would be Gardner Dozois, editor of ASIMOV’S SF magazine from 1984 to 2004, who is hugely responsible for the bastardization of science fiction. I remember buying a copy of ASFM in 2000 after losing interest in the genre in my late teens, about twenty years. Good God! I had to repeatedly look at the cover to re-confirm I was reading a science fiction magazine! Gardner is famous for saying his single criteria for buying stories was “If I like it, that’s all!” I translate that to “Screw the readers!” Had a fondness for stories without science, artsy-fartsy literary experiments, depressing dystopias and teenagers masturbating and having sex with robots. I once challenged him to cite one story he published that contained at least two of the following five elements:

1. Presented science and technology as positive.
2. Had a heterosexual white male as the hero.
3. Had a plot based on the impact of science or technology.
4. Presented human beings as something special.
5. Did not ridicule religion or faith.

He couldn’t, of course. But hey, he won the Hugo as Best Editor 15 times over 17 years, so he must have been doing something right!

The post itself goes into both Jeffro’s analasys of where the history event horizon stops the current SF-SJW crowd from seeing the past clearly , and our cuddly SF teddy bear with a flamethrower, Brad Torgersen, pointing out how “tolerance” works in SF these days.

Well worth reading Vox Day’s analysis, as well as the original articles referenced.