David G. Hartwell

I got to participate in an SF Signal "Mind Meld" this week, to talk about a science fiction ship I might want to ride upon. My mind often goes in weird directions, and I decided I'd enjoy riding on a nameless ship one might happen upon wandering the world of Severian's New Sun, from the classic Gene Wolf tetralogy The Book of the New Sun.

As I sent my Mind Meld off a couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be nice, when the Meld appeared, to drop David Hartwell a note, and let him know that these books he had edited 30, 35 years ago, still resonated with me. I never had the opportunity. When I woke up on the morning of January 20, I was greeted with two things: the Mind Meld I'd participated in had gone live on SF Signal. And David Hartwell was unexpectedly, critically ill, news that had broken overnight.

Titles from early in David G. Hartwell's editorial career.  One look says it all.

Gene Wolfe was hardly the only great writer that David Hartwell had edited, The Book of the New Sun far from the only book he'd touched that went on to have a long impact in the field. His career spanned 45 years, and touched pretty much anyone who worked in science fiction and fantasy over that time. Besides many a Gene Wolfe book a quick glance at my bookcase reveals Donald Kingsbury's Courtship Rite, Gregory Benford's Timescape and Across the Sea of Suns, Philip K. Dick's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, and Norman Spinrad's The Void Captain's Tale, all from Hartwell's years at Simon & Schuster/Pocket's Timescape imprint in the early 1980s.

By the time Hartwell moved, first as a consulting and then as a full-time editor, to Tor Books in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was a professional in the field with little time to read for pleasure, and my relationship with Hartwell evolved. He wasn't an editor whose acquisitions I had much time to read, and instead, he was the editor I badly wanted to sell to, in large part because I needed only to look at my bookcase to see the influence he'd had on Joshua Bilmes. And as a professional, one of the things I appreciated most about Hartwell in those early years was the professional respect that I received from him. I didn't get that from everyone. Why would I, really. I was in my 20s, I had some accomplishments, and I expected a certain amount of associational respect solely by virtue of working at the Scott Meredith Agency, which was at the time a leading agency in the field. But David G. Hartwell went beyond that. He treated me like a peer. When I told him I had a first novel that seemed just right for him, he told me how he often purchased books that had that effect on people, and he seemed quite sincere in saying so.

The Tor Books cover for Outpost, by Scott Mackay

David Hartwell also gave the impression that he knew what he wanted to do when he woke up in the morning, that he had a vision for what he wanted to buy, an actual point of view. And again, I didn't get that from everyone. There are editors I've known about as long whose point of view eludes me still. Why be in this business if you don't have a strong sense of the mark you'd like to leave on it? When I cracked the Hartwell code and sold him Scott Mackay's OUTPOST in the mid-1990s, I was a very very happy man. I'd like to say that I went on from there to have this incredible agent-editor thing with David Hartwell. I can't. OUTPOST didn't do well, and he wasn't able to buy a second novel from Scott. I can wrack my brain and have a hard time thinking of the next book I sold to him, though my colleague Eddie Schneider recently cracked the code with something that's currently wending through the contracts process.

The publisher I like most will always be the one I've never done any business with recently. It's inevitable when you're in business with people that you'll get to have problems together. David Hartwell could be slow tending to his submission pile, a trait common to many editors in the sf/fantasy genre; and one of the reasons why we didn't do more business together. If we didn't think a project was tailor made for David Hartwell, we'd tend to steer submissions in other directions at Tor. We disagreed on the cover for the Scott Mackay novel. He liked it because it was appropriate to the Canadian market, which he was trying to cultivate. I was dubious; even a well-cultivated Canadian market for a Canadian author was going to be smaller than the US market. I thought if they could have gotten a 9-copy shelf display with OUTPOST by the cash registers at bookstores that people would pick up the book and ask to return it.

But it didn't matter. However much or little the business we did together, the mutual professional respect we had was a constant. We'd schmooze at his table at Boskone; there will be more than an empty spot in the dealer's room this year. I joined his children for dinner one night in Dublin during EuroCon in 2014. We stayed late at the bar in the San Antonio Marriott, and he shared his very clear opinion of the networking style of an aspiring author several tables away. The author wasn't being humble enough, he said, the conversations were too much about the author, the author needed to be listening more and talking less. It was a question of respect.

Respect.

David Hartwell gave it, and he commanded and demanded it. One of his most important contributions to the field of sf and fantasy is exactly that. Many of the books and authors he advocated for, acquired, edited, nurtured, were authors that could command respect outside the community of science fiction and fantasy. The anthologies he edited were often designed to be boats landing on the shore of mainstream literary respectability, the stories they contained part of an attack on the sands of the beach that separated us from them. There always seems to be this neutral zone, the sands that the water touches as it goes from low tide to high tide and back again that separates the sf and fantasy communities from respectable literature, and David Hartwell never doubted that we could cross that strip of sand.

Josepha Sherman

I'm saddened to hear that Josepha Sherman, a long-time writer and editor and one of the first people I met in the sf genre, passed away on Thursday. She was 65.

Those of us who are experienced at reading and evaluating manuscripts, it's sad but true that we can often tell in a matter of sentences whether there's any "there" there in a manuscript. Jo might have the best raw evaluator I'd ever come across, she could tell more in ten pages than anyone I've ever come across, and when I started out doing freelance work for Baen almost 30 years ago, Jo was someone I'd look up to in awe and amazement. She was always willing to put in that little something extra in giving feedback to an author who had earned it.

My respect for Jo was such that she was one of the first people other than myself to do work for JABberwocky. When it was getting to the point that I had a hard time just doing triage on the requested partials out of the query pile, I asked Jo to help out. We'd usually meet up at the Starbucks at 60th St. and 1st Ave., I'd hand off the pile of partials and a week later I'd know which ones could head off, which I needed to spend more time with, which ones needed encouragement, and she knew my tastes and interests about as well as I knew them myself.

She was a writer in her own write, author or co-writer of close to twenty novels. She was a folklorist who compiled many well-regarded anthologies and used her knowledge well in her own fiction.

She was a raconteur. If you found yourself late at night with Jo and a few friends in a con suite, you were likely to be there until early morning, much entertained and much the wiser for the experience.

She moved from New York around ten years ago and kind of fell off the face of the Earth even though she wasn't all that far away. The Jo Sherman that many of us knew left before she herself did this past Thursday.

The Jo Sherman that many of us knew was one of the unsung heroes of the genre, somebody who quietly helped many to achieve their own dreams of writing fantasy and science fiction.

Blake Edwards

And now, Blake Edwards. I would say Edwards had a career somewhat like Scorcese's. Big ups, big downs, all sorts of things in between. I didn't like Breakfast at Tiffany's but it's enduring. Several mid-range masterpieces. Some outright duds, many of them even. I think his legacy isn't in any one or two films the way Scorcese's would rest on Raging Bull and Goodfellas but rather in the way Edwards defined film comedy for a generation or two with the Pink Panther movies, 10, and Victor/Victoria. 

I would say VV is my own favorite because it blends the best elements of Edwards' work. 

Take farce. There is a lot of classic farce in the Pink Panther movies. However, the earlier ones are a little too quiet and debonair for someone of my age and certainly younger who grew up in a louder age. My introduction to Edwards was in the Dyan Cannon Pink Panther movie, and I think if I saw that today I wouldn't like it as much as an adult because it is mostly about the Pink Panther schtick, though I think I would still find some of the funny parts to be genuinely funny. 

But VV...  set in France so it has to be sophisticated and certainly the Julie Andrews character considers herself that. And the songs by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse have a sparkle, wit, sophistication to them.  Even on a first viewing I could appreciate the quality of the filmmaking, the way the camera cuts to the outside of a diner for the final act of a scene instead of keeping us in the thick of it. And in the midst of all of this sophistication it has all the elements of classic farce rendered with impeccable timing. Mistaken identity, banging doors, frenzied mayhem, people sent to hide on the ledge. 

SOB isn't that good, but it has Richard Mulligan. Mulligan was one of the stars of the classic TV comedy Soap and could do amazing things with his body and his timing and his presence, an amazing actor nobody knows much about. SOB may be the only film he was in that was worthy of his presence. 

I wasn't a big fan of The Party, a late in life reteam of Edwards and Peter Sellers, but you can read an appreciation of it by JABberwocky client Bryce Moore. 

I'm not saying all that could be said on Edwards. His best films were done before I was in college, he hasn't been a presence for 15 years and was hardly one for ten years before that. But at his best, he did define film comedy. 

Elaine Koster

Publishers Marketplace reports that long-time NAL publisher Elaine Koster passed away earlier this week at the age of 69. Elaine was kind of the go-to person during the early years of my career when I was selling Simon Green and Rick Shelley to the NAL list, the person editors like John Silbersack and Chris Schelling and later on Laura Anne Gilman would need to go to for the thumbs-up on an acquisition. I'm told by many of these people that she could be hell to work for, but was at the same time one of those people that a lot of good people would all learn a lot from working with. After she left NAL, she became an agent. John and Chris did eventually as well, actually. But we'll forgive her for that. And remember her support of the genre.

Jane Jarvis

The Sunday NY Times carried an obituary for Jane Jarvis. She was the organist at Shea Stadium for fifteen years. Much more to her life than just that, according to the obit, but it's for that which I will remember her. According to the article, she left the Mets in the late '70s, only a few years after I first started going to Mets games (1977, I think, was my first), but in my memory she had to have been pounding her organ keys longer into my Mets attendance than that. It's a tribute to her that I feel as if she must have been part of my life longer than she actually could have been. Thinking of Jane Jarvis brings back memories of what is now a long distant age when you could go to a baseball game without being assaulted by loud non-stop music. Even after Jane left there was a certain civility to the soundtrack at a Mets game, like having Sunday in New York played before every Sunday home game. I must be getting old, to be getting sentimental about the quiet old days at the ballpark, when all the music came from two hands on an organ keyboard.