Tag: John Joseph Adams

Virtual Memories Show 232:
Gordon Van Gelder

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“For years, my basic rejection letter would use ‘alas,’ and the SF community picked up on that and started calling them ‘alas-o-grams.'”

Editor/publisher Gordon Van Gelder joins the show to talk about his career in the science fiction and fantasy fields. We get into publishing F&SF Magazine, coping with burnout, balancing the demands of art and business, exploring the differences between editing for magazines vs. anthologies, trying to avoid disruption, handling diversity issues without implementing a quota, figuring out the dystopian theme of his current run of anthologies, dealing with the cultural, um, norms of stories of past decades, avoiding the perils of chasing “name” authors and rejecting a story by Ray Bradbury, making the shift from print to online, watching new writers develop a strong voice, working with the necessary egotism of writers, explaining how the internet has wrecked SF/F criticism, and more! Give it a listen! And go buy his new anthology, Go Forth And Multiply: Twelve Tales of Repopulation (Ramble House)!

“The best stories transcend race and gender. . . . On the page, everyone is black and white.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

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About our Guest

Gordon Van Gelder published his first story in 100 Great Fantasy Short, Short Stories in 1984 but the majority of his career has been spent as an editor. After a brief internship at Bluejay Books in 1986, he began working at St. Martin’s Press in July 1988. He worked there for 12 years, during which time he worked with such authors as J. G. Ballard, Jack Cady, Bradley Denton, George Pelecanos, and Kate Wilhelm. In 1997, he succeeded Kristine Kathryn Rusch as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He spent 18 years as the magazine’s editor before handing the reins to C. C. Finlay at the start of 2015. He lives in New Jersey with his family and continues to publish F&SF.

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Boston Marriott Quincy during Readercon weekend on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of GVG in a tie, by Leslie Howle, and photo of GVG in a blue Yankees t-shirt, by Al Bogdan, so they’re not on my instagram.