Black Gate

We lost Gardner Dozois last month. It was a terrible blow to the field. I’ve seen plenty of somber discussion among fans about whether or not Gardner was the finest editor science fiction has ever seen, and there’s no doubt in my mind he’s in the running.

Gardner devoted his entire career to science fiction, and his accomplishments were extraordinary. He won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times during his 19-year tenure at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Nineteen years is an amazing run, but it’s barely half the 35 years he spent as editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, the de facto SF yearbook. I read the sixth volume in 1989 and I’ve looked forward to every one ever since.

The last volume will be published in less than two week, and its publication is bittersweet. It’s not the final book we’ll have from Gardner. His huge fantasy anthology The Book of Magic — with brand new stories by George R.R. Martin, John Crowley, Tim Powers, Scott Lynch, Eleanor Arnason, Garth Nix, Ysabeau Wilce, Liz Williams, Kate Elliott, and many others — is coming in October, and The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction is scheduled to be published in February. But the arrival of the final Dozois Year’s Best is very definitely the end of an era.

There will never be another editor like him. Cherish this book while you can.

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Neil Clarke is the editor of the acclaimed Clarkesworld magazine, as well as the Best Science Fiction of the Year series from Night Shade Books, now in its third year. He also dabbles in themed anthologies, and they have been excellent. They include Galactic Empires and a splendid collection of robot stories, More Human Than Human.

His anthologies pretty rigorously exclude any classic SF, and in fact tend to focus almost exclusively on stories published after 2002 (which I assume is when he began reading the magazines regularly). This laser focus on modern writers makes him almost unique among modern genre anthologists and — for me at least — means that his books have been an invaluable tool for discovering great new writers. If, like me, your exposure to science fiction skews pretty heavily towards the 20th Century, Neil’s fine books may be just the antidote you need to bring you up to date on where SF is headed today.

So I was very excited to see Night Shade announce a brand new reprint anthology from Neil. The Final Frontier arrives in three weeks and includes tales from Nancy Kress, Ken Liu, James Patrick Kelly, Carrie Vaughn, Peter Watts, Greg Egan, Vandana Singh, Michael Swanwick, Tobias S. Buckell, and many others. Here’s the description.

The vast and mysterious universe is explored in this reprint anthology from award-winning editor and anthologist Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld magazine, The Best Science Fiction of the Year).

The urge to explore and discover is a natural and universal one, and the edge of the unknown is expanded with each passing year as scientific advancements inch us closer and closer to the outer reaches of our solar system and the galaxies beyond them.

Generations of writers have explored these new frontiers and the endless possibilities they present in great detail. With galaxy-spanning adventures of discovery and adventure, from generations ships to warp drives, exploring new worlds to first contacts, science fiction writers have given readers increasingly new and alien ways to look out into our broad and sprawling universe.

The Final Frontier delivers stories from across this literary spectrum, a reminder that the universe is far large and brimming with possibilities than we could ever imagine, as hard as we may try.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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