Gardner Dozois

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Gardner Dozois
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21 Quotations from Gardner Dozois

AI n. 1973 G. Dozois Chains of the Sea in R. Silverberg Chains of the Sea 83 While the humans scurried in confusion, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) created by MIT/Bell Labs linked itself into the network of high-speed, twentieth generation computers placed at its disposal.
alternate universe n. 1990 G. Dozois Playing the Game in Slow Dancing Through Time Afterword 159 This started off as a story by Jack called ‘The Alpha Tree’, about a boy who could see into alternate universes… I skewed Jack’s idea somewhat, building the story instead around a concept that had long fascinated me—an intuition of how easy it would be to become lost among the billions of probability-worlds that are born and die around us every second of every day.
artificial intelligence n. 1973 G. Dozois Chains of the Sea in R. Silverberg Chains of the Sea 83 While the humans scurried in confusion, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) created by MIT/Bell Labs linked itself into the network of high-speed, twentieth generation computers placed at its disposal.
Campbellian adj. 2001 G. Dozois in M. Swanwick Being Gardner Dozois 76 There was a sort of vague polemical point in the back of my mind here, to show that a significant impact can be made upon a society by someone even if they are not particularly competent and Heinleinian and Campbellian. A non-super-man. I suppose you could contrast this with my first story, ‘The Empty Man,’ where the character is a Campbellian superhero.
counterfactual n. 2006 G. Dozois Counterfactual in Year’s Best SF 12 (2007) 92 Counterfactuals had become increasingly popular in recent years—perhaps because the public had been denied the opportunity to play soldier during the Great War—until they were now almost respectable as pulp stories went, and you could make decent money selling them. But in writing Counterfactuals, you had to provide some kind of tipping-point, some event that would have changed everything that came after—and it had to be at least superficially plausible, or the fans, armchair historians all, would tear you to pieces.
cyberpunk n. 1 1984 G. Dozois Science Fiction in the Eighties in Washington Post Book World 30 Dec. 9/3 Surely the wild and woolly ‘outlaw fantasy’ Waldrop began producing in the '70s played some part in shaping the esthetics and literary style of the ‘cyberpunk’ movement.
cyberpunk n. 2 1984 G. Dozois Science Fiction in the Eighties in Washington Post Book World 30 Dec. 9/1 About the closest thing here to a self-willed esthetic ‘school’ would be the purveyors of bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff, who have on occasion been referred to as ‘cyberpunks’—Sterling, Gibson, Shiner, Cadigan, Bear.
genre n. 2001 G. Dozois Being Gardner Dozois 236 Yes, it’s quite true that the expectations of genre weight it a bit in one way, toward one interpretation, but my steadfast refusal to admit that they're actually real—even at the end, when he’s ready to make this momentous decision, he’s still not sure whether there actually are time travellers there, or he’s just making the whole thing up—makes it as ambiguous as possible, given the fact that it was going to have to appear in a genre magazine if it appeared anywhere at all.
genre fantasy n. 2000 G. Dozois Michael Swanwick: Chameleon Eludes Net in Moon Dogs 14 Although his last few novels seemed to be taking him away from science fiction (and perhaps even away from conventional genre fantasy) toward that vaguely defined territory that might be described as ‘American Magical Realism,’ or perhaps ‘Postmodernism,’ I doubt that he will ever entirely abandon the field—at least some of his short fiction remains solidly centered here, and, in fact, falls under the heading of rigorous and ingeniously worked-out ‘hard science’…and his new novel, currently underway, features time-travelers and some very hungry dinosaurs, core SF themes…although no doubt, in Swanwick’s hands, they are due to have some unexpected changes rung on them!
Heinleinian adj. 2001 G. Dozois in M. Swanwick Being Gardner Dozois 76 There was a sort of vague polemical point in the back of my mind here, to show that a significant impact can be made upon a society by someone even if they are not particularly competent and Heinleinian and Campbellian. A non-super-man. I suppose you could contrast this with my first story, ‘The Empty Man,’ where the character is a Campbellian superhero.
post-apocalyptic adj. 2001 G. Dozois Interview in G. Dozois & M. Swanwick Being Gardner Dozois 236 Czudak reflects back on the thermonuclear war, which I think reflects a break with seventies science fiction which would have thrown the story into a post-apocalyptic setting.
postholocaust adj. 2001 G. Dozois Interview in G. Dozois & M. Swanwick Being Gardner Dozois 144 Obviously the world had been ruined in some sort of catastrophe, and, in fact, the original idea was that this was going to be an After-The-Bomb story, showing how the man and his son survived in a Post-Holocaust world.
probability world n. 1990 G. Dozois Playing the Game in Slow Dancing Through Time (Afterword) 159 This started off as a story by Jack called ‘The Alpha Tree’™, about a boy who could see into alternate universes…. I skewed Jack’s idea somewhat, building the story instead around a concept that had long fascinated me—an intuition of how easy it would be to become lost among the billions of probability-worlds that are born and die around us every second of every day.
proto-cyberpunk adj. 2001 G. Dozois Interview in G. Dozois & M. Swanwick Being Gardner Dozois 23 So I worked in clones and people with no digestive tracts whose nourishment was beamed to them by broadcast matter, and various other things like that. Just to get a sense of far-future alienness, of how different these people were from us… I think what I was doing here…was groping towards a sort of proto-cyberpunk aesthetic.
sharecropper n. 1987 G. Dozois in Year’s Best Science Fiction Fifth Annual Collection Introd. p. xiv In the case of the ‘sharecroppers’, I also feel, perhaps naively, that young writers ought to be busy developing their own worlds and working out their own ideas and fresh material, rather than reworking ground already broken by older and more successful writers.
sharecropper n. 1987 G. Dozois in Year’s Best Science Fiction Fifth Annual Collection Introd. p. xiv The recent influx of ‘sharecropper’ novels joins a flood of similar items—choose-your-own-adventure books, ‘Robotech’ books, Star Trek novels, and so on. It is possible to argue that none of these items are pernicious in themselves, perhaps not even the ‘sharecropper’ books.
sharecropping n. 1987 G. Dozois in Year's Best Science Fiction Fifth Ann. Coll. Introd. p. xiii Perhaps the most ominous of these was the dramatic upsurge of novels by newer writers set in fictional worlds created by famous SF writers, or novels using thematic material created by established writers. This practice of hiring lesser-known authors to create new adventures set ‘in the world of’ some famous SF novel (for instance, a novel set in the world of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, or in the world of Robert Silverberg’s Lord Valentine’s Castle ) has been referred to as ‘share-cropping’ and strikes me as a very dangerous trend.
spaceboat n. 2001 G. Dozois Preface in Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming x And although the dream of life on Mars has hung on even to the present day, in an increasingly more pallid and less hopeful form (now we’d be overjoyed to find lichens... or even fossil microbe evidence that there once had been life there, millions of years ago), it was obvious by the middle of the century that Dejah Thoris wasn’t going to be there to greet the boys when they stepped off the spaceboat.
subgenre n. 2001 G. R. Dozois in M. Swanwick & G. R. Dozois Being Gardner Dozois 214 It may look a little better when compared to the overall sub-genre of science fiction cat stories.
subgenre n. 2001 G. R. Dozois in M. Swanwick & G. R. Dozois Being Gardner Dozois 140 I came up with the idea, although of course it’s just a variant on the long sub-genre of time-viewer stories.
time viewer n. 2001 G. Dozois in M. Swanwick Being Gardner Dozois 140 I came up with the ida, although of course it’s just a variant on the long sub-genre of time-viewer stories.