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. (more…)