I’ve been attending science fiction conventions for a relatively long time—my first Lunacon was in 1972, my first Worldcon in 1974—and I can’t remember David Hartwell ever not being there. That he will no longer be there seems wrong.

But though I won’t see him at conventions, he will live on in our memories, and in the many books he either edited or inspired.

Strangely, though it’s science fiction which has kept us bound together all these years, it was poetry that caused me to first reach out to him. I was a newbie teen back in those early days of con-going, so we moved in different circles, but I was also writing a great deal of poetry then, and David was the editor of the literary journal The Little Magazine, which published the likes of Thomas Disch, Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

I began submitting poetry to him in 1974, the same year (but before) I started working at Marvel Comics, the same year (but before) I met my wife. Which means our contact has lasted nearly 42 years now. Though my cover letters were always addressed to him, it wasn’t until 1978 that I received a rejection ship bearing his signature.

I’ve tried several times during the intervening decades to win him over with something I’d written—including a novel he had the good sense not to publish and which I’ve had the good sense to abandon—and I always hoped that someday I would win him over. But now I’ve run out of time to gain his approval.

Though, come to think of it, I did get his approval—though not for my writing—when I shared his banquet table in Saratoga Springs during the awards ceremony of most recent World Fantasy Convention. While we waited for the proceedings to begin, he told me how much he liked the flashy jackets I’d taken to wearing in recent years, jackets so flashy, in fact, that every time I wore one of them a few people would ask, “Did you steal that from David Hartwell?”

Coming from a man who once posted his theories of fashion (which also included the only photograph I’m aware of in which we are together), those comments pleased me.

I will miss him, and mourn as well the lost possibility of earning his approval of my prose. So I will do my best to honor him in the only way I know how—by forging ahead, by becoming a better writer, by attempting to someday create something which would have gotten his approval had he but been here to give it.