He died with “The City of Angels” halfway finished.
Gardner had gone into Pennsylvania Hospital with congestive heart failure and was expected to make a complete recovery. But a hospital is a very dangerous place to be. Five times they delayed his release. Then he caught an opportunistic systemic infection. Christopher had retired from the army with the rank of major, and he and Nicole had moved nearby so they could look after his parents. Now he emailed me to say that if I wanted to see Gardner, I should do it quickly because he wasn’t expected to last the weekend. Marianne and I rushed to his bedside. His large, strangely inert body was unconscious, pallid, still. The next day we came to visit again and found his family gathered there. Gardner’s sister, Gail, told me that he had always been her protector. Christopher said that the decision had been made to take Gardner’s body off life support. They were waiting for one last relative to arrive before letting him pass away.
Much as we loved him, Marianne and I knew that his last moments belonged to his family, and not to us. So although Christopher invited us to stay, we did not. Marianne bent down and kissed Gardner’s forehead. I placed my hand over his and, too quietly for anybody else to hear, said, “Goodbye, old friend.” Then I turned away, with that same hand clutched over my eyes to hide the tears that I could not manage to stanch. Tears identical to those that are running down my face even now, as I write these words.
I drove us home. Sometime not long after, Gardner left the planet.
In the wake of Gardner’s death, I knew that the third novella, “The City of Man,” would never be written. I could do a reasonable imitation of his rich, wonderful style, but without his input, his passion, his inspiration, the novella would just be… mine. I had no desire to see all that we’d put into the text diminished like that.
Nevertheless, I wanted the world to experience the ending that Gardner had planned and obsessed over for decades. I wanted everyone to know that the man who had a reputation as a very gloomy writer indeed had come up with a happy—no! joyous!—ending. And I wanted to give him one last novel.
So I took the half-written “City of Angels,” dropped the title and much of the intended plot, and moved it in a direction that would bring it to Gardner’s intended conclusion. When it was finished, I appended it to “The City of God,” and then broke the combined text into chapters, so that it would read continuously as one story, the novel it was always meant to be, instead of appearing as two novellas. Finally, I went over the whole thing, giving it the final polish draft Gardner would have and striving to make it sound as much like him as possible. In this, I think I succeeded. But that’s a judgment for the reader to make, not me.
Lee Harris at Tor.com liked the novel and bought it. He did, however, gently observe that “The City of God,” while a fine title for a novella, was perhaps not the right one for the book. It took several weeks of agony and bafflement—this is normal for book titles, by the way; they can be the most difficult part of writing—to come up with something that worked. Never had I missed Gardner more. It would have been great fun to brainstorm the title with him, throwing out possibilities and hooting scornfully at the lamer attempts. But at last, in a dream, I saw the words “City Under the Stars” on the front page of the typescript, and they felt right to me.
This is not the novel that Gardner and I started to write a quarter century ago, much less the one he set out to create more than twenty years before that. But I am proud of it. Also, I know that Gardner would be tickled to have one last novel on his bibliography. Let this stand as a memorial to him.
Gardner Dozois was the kindest man I ever met. He was also one of the most modest. Many a time I wished he were less so. “Nobody wants to meet an old fat man!” he would say when Marianne and I nagged him into attending some social event where, of course, he was the belle of the ball and charmed the pants off of everybody. In his last years, whenever anyone talked about his legacy, he would scoff, “I’ll be forgotten five minutes after I’m dead. Nobody is going to give a damn about an old fat man!”
In this, he was wrong. Gardner left behind many, many friends, and they all took his passing hard. I, for one, miss him terribly.
So would you, if you had met him.
About the Authors
MICHAEL SWANWICK published his first story in 1980, making him one of a generation of new writers that included Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Connie Willis, and Kim Stanley Robinson. In the third of a century since, he has been honored with the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards and received a Hugo Award for fiction in an unprecedented five out of six years. He also has the pleasant distinction of having lost more major awards than any other science fiction writer.
Roughly one hundred fifty stories have appeared in Amazing, Analog, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, High Times, New Dimensions, Eclipse, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, The Infinite Matrix, Omni, Penthouse, Postscripts, Realms of Fantasy, Tor.com, Triquarterly, Universe, and elsewhere. Many have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies, and translated into Japanese, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Czech, and French. Several hundred works of flash fiction have been published as well.
A prolific writer of nonfiction, Swanwick has published book-length studies of Hope Mirrlees and James Branch Cabell as well as a book-length interview with Gardner Dozois. He has taught at Clarion, Clarion West, and Clarion South. He was guest of honor at MidAmeriCon II, the 2016 World Science Fiction Convention.
Swanwick is the author of ten novels, including In the Drift (an Ace Special), Vacuum Flowers, Stations of the Tide, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, The Dragons of Babel, Dancing with Bears, and Chasing the Phoenix. His short fiction has been collected in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Imaginary Lands, Moon Dogs, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar Box Faust and Other Miniatures, The Dog Said Bow Wow, The Best of Michael Swanwick, and Not So Much, Said the Cat. His most recent novel, The Iron Dragon’s Mother, completes a fantasy trilogy begun almost twenty-five years ago.
He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.
GARDNER DOZOIS is widely regarded as one of the most important editors in the history of science fiction. His editorial work earned more than forty Hugo Awards, forty Nebula Awards, and thirty Locus Awards, and he was awarded the Hugo for Best Professional Editor fifteen times between 1988 and his retirement from Asimov’s in 2004, having edited the magazine for almost twenty years! He also served as the editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies and coeditor of the Warrior anthologies, Songs of the Dying Earth, and many others. As a writer, Dozois twice won the Nebula Award for best short story. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011 and received the Skylark Award for Lifetime Achievement. Gardner was actively writing and editing when he died in the spring of 2018. Recent publications include two nonfiction collections, Sense of Wonder and On the Road with Gardner Dozois (with an introduction by Michael Swanwick), three anthologies, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 35th Annual Collection, The Book of Magic, and The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, several short stories in Asimov’s and F&SF, and a podcast of “A Special Kind of Morning” on LeVar Burton Reads.