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.
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, Penthous
e, 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.
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Also by Gardner Dozois
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Nightmare Blue (with George Alec Effinger)
Strangers (as Gardner R. Dozois)
Hunter’s Run (with Daniel Abraham and George R. R. Martin)
COLLECTIONS
The Visible Man
Slow Dancing Through Time
Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois
Morning Child and Other Stories
When the Great Days Come
AS EDITOR
Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (volumes 6–10)
Under African Skies
Under South American Skies
The Good Old Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition
The Good New Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition
The Good Stuff
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction (magazine) (1986–2004)
Old Mars (with George R. R. Martin)
Old Venus (with George R. R. Martin)
The Exclamatory Series (with Jack Dann)
The Year’s Best Science Fiction (volumes 1–35)
Warriors (with George R. R. Martin) (volumes 1–3)
plus many more anthologies, far too numerous to list
NONFICTION
The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr.
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (with Tina Lee, Stanley Schmidt, Ian Randal Strock, and Sheila Williams)
Sense of Wonder: Short Fiction Reviews (2009–2017)
Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys with Gardner Dozois
Also by Michael Swanwick
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
THE IRON DRAGONS SERIES
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
The Dragons of Babel
The Iron Dragon’s Mother
In the Drift
Vacuum Flowers
Stations of the Tide
Jack Faust
Bones of the Earth
Dancing with Bears
Chasing the Phoenix
COLLECTIONS
Gravity’s Angels
A Geography of Unknown Lands
Tales of Old Earth
Moon Dogs
The Dog Said Bow-Wow
The Best of Michael Swanwick
Not So Much, Said the Cat
The Postmodern Adventures of Darger and Surplus
Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary
Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures
Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna
The Periodic Table of Science Fiction
NONFICTION
The Postutopian Archipelago
What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage?: James Branch Cabell in the Twenty-First Century
Hope-in-the-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees
Being Gardner Dozois (an interview)
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Two Pilgrims on the Road to the City of God
About the Authors
Also by Gardner Dozois
Also by Michael Swanwick
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CITY UNDER THE STARS
The City of God copyright © 1995 by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick
This expanded edition copyright © 2020 by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Raphael Lacoste
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Ellen Datlow and Lee Harris
The first part of this book was first published in OMNI 1995 as The City of God.
A Tordotcom Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-75657-2 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-75658-9 (trade paperback)
First Edition: August 2020
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, ext. 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
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