More years passed.
They were punctuated periodically by visits from Jack Dann, who breezed down from Binghamton, New York, brimming with confidence and ambition. Jack was Gardner’s closest and dearest friend back then and often came to Philadelphia to get his advice on whatever it was that Jack was then writing. Gardner or Susan would call me and we’d all go out to dinner together. Then we three writers (Susan later became a writer herself, and a good one, but at that time she looked upon us with tolerant amusement) would talk and argue and laugh deep into the night. Gardner and Jack would critique whatever I was working on, plan their own collaborations, plot the overthrow of all that was trite and boring about science fiction, and (inevitably) come up with a theme anthology to pitch to a New York publisher and then co-edit. Jack would give investment advice which neither Gardner nor I was in any position to benefit from. Ideas would fly from our brains like sparks, shooting up into a night sky more thronged with stars than anything ever painted by Van Gogh. We drank a lot of Gardner’s cheap cream sherry.
After five years of dread that I’d impose my undeniably terrible fiction on him, curiosity got the better of Gardner and he asked to see something I’d written. That was the first, though far from the last, time I was invited to sit with Jack at Gardner’s kitchen table. The two of them—who were, no exaggeration, the best story doctors in the business—took apart my manuscript and showed me how to turn it into a real story. And I got it! I really did. I reeled back to my apartment that evening at two A.M., up Spruce Street, past young men driving slowly by or sitting on stoops looking soulful or sauntering along the sidewalk, all checking one another out but not yet ready to commit, drunk on the realization that I was now an honest-to-goodness writer. Gardner and Jack had showed me how to do it. From that moment on, I knew that whatever I wrote would eventually be finished and that, while there might be rejections and even multiple rejections, it would all ultimately sell.
On another visit, we three started writing collaborative stories together. In the course of conversation, we’d toss out ideas, one would catch fire, and then, waving our arms excitedly and interrupting each other (“No, no, no, not the Big Bopper—Buddy Holly!”), we’d plot it out from start to finish, in a process much like the folktale about making stone soup. Add salt! Paprika! A wizard! Invisible cats! I would take detailed notes and, later, write the first draft and mail it to Jack, who would improve upon it and throw it to Gardner for the final polish. Tinker to Evers to Chance. We called ourselves the Fiction Factory. We wrote some wonderful stuff and sold it all, often to the slicks. One story sold to Penthouse. Another, which I had a very small part in writing and credit for which I turned down, appeared in Playboy. I learned a great deal on those nights. Including, yes, never to turn down credit in a story that will later sell to the best-paying fiction market in the country.
Years passed. They were filled with incident. For a while, I volunteered at the Wilma Project, sometime between its inception as a feminist theater collective and the massive success that Blanka and Jiri Zizka later made of it, during which I was one-half of the entire permanent staff—the one who put out the chairs and sold apples and hot cider at intermission. One sweltering Philadelphia summer, Gardner wrote his novel Strangers in crabbed longhand on yellow legal pads on an extremely short deadline—five weeks? nine?—sitting on a park bench in Washington Square in the shadow of Independence Hall. When I came to visit, Susan and I would pick him up at the park and go to dinner at the Midtown Diner, where we’d chat for an hour or two before releasing him into the darkness to stumble off, looking for a coffeehouse or unused set of steps where he could write. (David Hartwell, who had set the deadline, later told me there was no real need for it, but that he had doubted the book would be finished without the added pressure. I never shared that information with Gardner.) Philadelphia was a rougher place back then, with strip joints in the shadow of City Hall and streetwalkers in what is now the Gayborhood. Once, on South Street, Gardner saw a man stabbed to death with a fork. Another time, he was filmed crossing the street in front of the old Terminal Hotel for a shot in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out that was later left on the cutting-room floor. Yet again, I saw a driver, for no discernible reason, swerve onto the sidewalk and attempt to run down Gardner and Susan.
Meanwhile, Marianne Porter and I had fallen in love. We were married in Tabernacle Church in West Philadelphia, whose congregation she belonged to and where I had the job of church secretary, with Gardner and Susan among those in attendance. My first two stories placed on the Nebula ballot, both in the novelette category. Back then, sagely, SFWA gave writers in that situation the option of withdrawing one story from the ballot. “You’re not going to win,” Gardner advised me, “so you might as well keep both on. It’ll bring you more attention.” Three years later, Marianne and I had a son, Sean. He and Gardner, who was always good with children, got along like a house afire. As an adult, Sean would work for a time as Gardner’s office manager.
It was now the eighties. Gardner asked Jack and me to help him come up with a plot for the Digger Novel. He had brought Hanson all the way to the City of God and could go no further. He assumed that the people (there was never any doubt that they were people like any other, only obscenely wealthy) on the other side of the Wall were evil, aristocratic, and decadent. But Gardner, who knew so well what it was like to be a member of the underclass, had no idea what form that decadence would take.
Somewhere along the line, perhaps in preparation for this evening, perhaps earlier, I’d finally been allowed to read what had been written of the Digger Novel all the way through and was blown away by it. So I was thrilled at the possibility of being a footnote to literary history, the man who made its completion possible.
Jack and I spent the evening throwing out ideas by the handful, like so much spaghetti, hoping that something would stick to the wall. We came armed with multiple scenarios, each enthusiastically building upon the other’s visions and spontaneously inventing new possibilities as the old ones were shot down. “Oh yeah!” Jack would say. “And then you could—” And I would gleefully add, “Absolutely! After which—” Gardner listened carefully to each idea, and then, like some great, shaggy beast, swung his head slowly from side to side. So we threw out more and more and more ideas. All to the same response.
It was clear that Gardner’s subconscious, though it would not share this information with him, knew exactly what it wanted the story to be and none of our suggestions came anywhere near to hitting the mark. Back went the novel into the closet.
More years passed.
I came to accept that the Digger Novel would never be written.
With the unexpectedness of a lightning bolt (though later, in retrospect, it would seem inevitable) Gardner was named the new editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. The magazine’s demands on his time were enormous. I stopped bringing my stories to him to critique. As did Jack. Gardner went on to become the most influential science fiction editor of his era, second in the common esteem only to John W. Campbell. During his nineteen-year tenure, he earned fifteen Hugo Awards for Best Editor. He also continued to edit The Year’s Best Science Fiction, an enormous “bug crusher” (as Bruce Sterling characterized it) of a book whose compilation required that he read literally every SF story written each year. In part this was because he was convinced the Asimov’s gig wouldn’t last long. But also he wanted a good excuse to read every SF story written each year. The original publisher, Jim Frenkel, had to be talked out of publicizing it with the slogan, “We Have the Fattest Best of the Year—and the Fattest Editor Too!”