City Under the Stars

Two Pilgrims on the Road to the City of God

Long, long ago, when the world was young and dinosaurs still fell from the sky, I met Gardner Dozois. That was in 1974. I was long-haired, beardless, countercultural, and years away from publishing my first story. He was ex-army, bohemian, and the most celebrated writer known only to the cognoscenti in all of science fiction. I instantly became friends with his wife-to-be—after what she later and with characteristic wit called a “whirlwind seventeen-year courtship”—Susan Casper. Gardner was a little suspicious of me, afraid I would try to get him to read my undoubtedly terrible fiction.

There was little chance of that happening because, although I wrote persistently, madly, every day, I never managed to finish a story. I had no idea how to do that. But Susan and I palled around a lot, smoked dope, played pinball, argued the finer points of rock musicians, electronica, and Mummers clubs. On Thursday nights I hosted hearts games at my apartment on Twenty-Third Street for a louche circle of acquaintances. Susan and I were both sharkish competitors, while Gardner and a young woman named Marianne Porter—remember that name—sat in the shadows talking.

Less than a year into our friendship, Susan entered the hospital for what she reassured everyone was “a silly little operation.” The operation, of course, was neither silly nor little, and when she was wheeled off to the OR, she later said, she looked back at Gardner and saw from his face that he never expected to see her again. But shortly before, at one of the first science fiction conventions I ever attended, I had noted which people she talked to as friends and secretly got dozens of them to sign an outsized get-well card for her. So when, against all his fears, Susan emerged from surgery alive, Gardner decided that I was okay. Though he still worried I would inflict my admittedly terrible fiction upon him.

Back then, Gardner could be spotted from blocks away. He had long, straight blond hair that fell halfway down his back and a jaunty little beard and dressed in blue jeans, a black Stetson, and a black T-shirt with white block letters reading PROPHET OF DOOM. He and Susan were poor as church mice and had a child to provide for. Gardner’s wonderful stories came slowly and with great effort and didn’t bring in much money. So Susan held down a low-paying buzzkill of a job in Welfare while Gardner supplemented their income by assembling anthologies and landing the occasional editorial gig. Once, his jeans split down the back, which was a major crisis because he didn’t have a second pair or the cash on hand to buy one. He was a natural short fiction writer, but because novels paid better than short fiction, he made several abortive attempts at the form.

Among the projects begun and never finished was something called “the Digger Novel.” Those in Gardner’s literary cohort who had read that fragment spoke of it with awe. It began, they said, with a long, slow, mesmerizing description of a man shoveling coal into a hole, during which the reader got to see his life and soul destroyed—and then things got worse. It was, by repute, the best stick of prose Gardner had ever written. But he had snagged on a key plot point and the novel went unwritten, waiting for a burst of inspiration that, so far, had not come. Gardner was a private soul. I knew better than to ask if I could read it.

I also knew that I could never aspire to the first rank of Gardner’s friends, people like Joe Haldeman and George R. R. Martin and Ed Bryant and George Alec Effinger and Jack Dann, writers who had begun their careers at roughly the same time, fought in the metaphoric trenches together, and written their best work hoping for each other’s approval. This did not bother me. There are no chums like those of our youth. Also, they were like gods to me. Gardner was one of the pantheon of writers I revered and much older than me when we met. He had been published for years. He had the gravitas of age.

I was twenty-three years old and he was twenty-six.

Years passed. One day I was visiting Gardner and Susan in their tiny, cat-infested, three - rooms - and - a - bath apartment on Quince Street in Center City, Philadelphia. It was raining. Susan’s son Christopher, who was angelically beautiful and engagingly mischievous, was running around underfoot. Susan had smoked the last of her Salem Light menthols and sent Gardner to the corner to buy another pack. (Sending each other on minor errands, like arguing frequently, was one way they expressed their love.) He shambled into the hallway, rooted around in the closet, and emerged with a raincoat and a cardboard box. Dumping the box in my lap, he said, “Here, Michael. This is the Digger Novel. You can read it while I’m out.”

I was stunned. I had, without realizing it, passed some sort of threshold in our relationship and was now deemed worthy of the legendary text. I opened the box, lifted out the typescript, and began to read.

A few minutes later, Gardner came back with the cigarettes and returned the box to the closet. I forget how many pages I’d finished. Four, maybe, or five. It wasn’t many.

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!”

Gardner all but stopped writing.

But not quite. Above all else, Gardner valued being a writer. His two Nebula Awards for short fiction meant much more to him than the Hugos ever did. An editor could not channel the Promethean fire; he could only search for it in the slush pile and buy it when it appeared. Writers were the real thing. Somehow, though his stories would be rare as unicorns, they still appeared.

More years passed.

At the end of a visit to his new Society Hill apartment—a far cry from the Quince Street digs, with a fireplace and a Jacuzzi tub—Gardner saw me to the front stoop and then said, “Wait a second.” He went inside and returned with a familiar cardboard box.

“I’m never going to write the Digger Novel,” he said. “So you might as well take it and see if you can turn it into a novella.”

I took the box from him. “I know exactly how to do this,” I lied. “I’m not going to tell you now because I want it to be a surprise!” (Remember, I’d long ago given up on Gardner ever finishing it on his own.) I clutched the box to my chest and began to edge away, afraid that Gardner would come to his senses and snatch it back.

“It’s clear to me this isn’t going anywhere,” he said unhappily. “So you might as well make something of it.”

I was down to the sidewalk. “Wait until you see what I have in mind! You’ll love it!”

Gardner wasn’t listening. In his heart of hearts, he was mourning the necessity to hand over the child of his imagination to me. “But I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Make the conclusion open-ended. Just in case we decide to make a novel of it.”

“You must be reading my mind!” I chirped.

Miraculously, in that instant, even as I was saying those words, the solution entered my mind: Hanson would enter the City of God and find it abandoned. The people are gone, following the consequences of their decadence into unknown realms. But their toys remain.

And those toys are dangerous.

I made the City as menacing and hallucinatory as I could. Gardner and I swapped the manuscript back and forth, improving it with every pass, and when the story was done to both our satisfactions, he made the polish draft. Because Gardner was a master stylist, he always did the final draft on all the collaborations, whether with me or with others. We all agreed he was the best.

After a great deal of to-and-froing, we agreed to name the story “The City of God.” It appeared in Omni Online, edited by Ellen Datlow, and, months later, in Asimov’s Science Fiction. (Gardner recused himself and Sheila Williams made the decision to buy it.) We couldn’t have been happier with how it had turned out.

Still. Gardner had put the idea of a novel into our heads. We often talked over the possibility of writing two more novellas, “The City of Angels” and “The City of Man,” which could be combined with the first, continuing Hanson’s saga. Each novella would be published independently and then we would merge all three into one continuous narrative and sell it as a novel. It was a solid plan. But we kept putting it off.

Years passed.

Both Gardner and I had things to do. Pressing matters of magazines to put out and anthologies to compile and stories and novels and essays to write. Gardner and Susan got married and bought a house. Their son, Christopher, and his wife, Nicole, had two children, Tyler and Isabella, whom the newly minted grandparents loved without reservation. A taxi accident put Gardner in the hospital, and since neither the cab company nor his insurance wanted to pay for it, he had to deal with lawyers for what seemed forever and was literally years. Some time after that, Susan’s health, never good to begin with, took a severe turn for the worse. She was in and out of physical rehab for years.

Because Susan could no longer handle the stairs, they rented out their house and moved into an apartment. Gardner sold his enormous collection of books, about which Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda once exclaimed, “These are the most delightfully read books I’ve ever seen!”, to a fan. His papers went to the University of California, Riverside, and Gardner threw in several of the uglier of his many Hugos as a lagniappe. When he was moving from the one location to the other, somebody asked what he wanted done with a box of the remaining Hugos. “You want one? Take it!” he said. “Take as many as you like.”

He meant it.

Through all of this, Gardner and I continued, off and on, to talk about the City of God Novel (its name changed with the first novella) and where it might go. “It’s hard to talk about a novel that hasn’t been written yet, that may never be,” Gardner said when we were in the early stages of working out the final plot. “But I dimly see Hanson as ultimately being left with some sort of gatekeeper or overseer responsibility for the rest of humanity that he didn’t really want and didn’t really think he was doing a good job at.” Then he came to what, to him, was the heart of the novel: “The only thing that keeps him from becoming as corrupt as everybody else is the knowledge of how bad it looks from the lower depths when you allow yourself to be transformed into a boss, and sort of a determination not to have that happen to him.” It was important to Gardner that Hanson remain, now and forever, a blue-collar guy, a worker, a decent man of simple tastes who had no desire whatsoever to make others suffer.

Gardner made a start on “The City of Angels,” chronicling Hanson’s imprisonment. I thought it was brilliant and extended the plot, returning Hanson to the City of God. Susan Casper’s health, meanwhile, worsened precipitously. Marianne and I visited her at their apartment one day, bringing with us Samuel Delany, who was an old friend and whose visit cheered her enormously. Chip (as Delany is known to his friends) took a picture of the three of us that was to be her last. That night, in her sleep, she passed peacefully away. Gardner kept the box with her ashes on the windowsill of their apartment. “It’s silly,” he said, “because I know that she’s not there or anywhere else and can’t hear me, but sometimes I’ll still talk to her as if she were.”

He said that at the Pen and Pencil, America’s oldest journalists’ club, on Latimer Street, where he was a member. The widowed women among our cronies told Gardner how he was going to feel now and in the future and he listened to them with attentive respect, prepping himself for life alone. His old friend Pat Cadigan flew in from London to do her bit to comfort him. Her original intent had been to visit Susan, but mortality descended before the flight could be arranged. I’ll carry with me forever the memory of Pat and Gardner sitting on his couch together, holding hands and smiling through their sadness, saying nothing because there was nothing that needed to be said.

It was in the lead-up to this difficult time, while Susan was still alive, that Gardner and I finally got serious about the City of God Novel, talked out the plot, and started working steadily on the second novella.

There is a sentimental notion, among many of Gardner’s friends, that without Susan he had lost the will to live. This makes Marianne mad enough to spit. He had not. Our son, Sean, who was working for him at the time, reported that Gardner was constantly busy assembling anthologies, coaxing new stories out of writers, and, of course, actively at work on the novel he and I had intended for decades. He had plans for the future and things he wanted to do. He had begun and abandoned a sequel to Strangers, and I am convinced that, given time, he could have been coaxed into finishing it. Alas, he was not given time.

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.