People say "You've won so many Hugos, don't you get bored with it?" And the answer is no, you don't get bored with it, because it is an indication of respect from people from whom it's most important to get that respect -- fellow professionals and the audience you're all writing for. So no, I don't get bored with it.

I should probably correct the impression that I always win the Best Editor Hugo, because it isn't true. Kris Rusch beat me at the Winnipeg Worldcon, and what's often overlooked now is that when I started out at the magazine, I lost two or three Hugos right there at the beginning to Terry Carr and to Judy-Lynn del Rey. So I haven't always won.

One of the problems with being the kind of active John W. Campbell editor, where you're indicating what ideas you want explored, is it tends to "harden your arteries" towards being receptive to new directions that come along that are generated by the writer. I think it's a mistake to create an aesthetic or didactic template of what you want and then reject everything that doesn't fit into that. You're sort of pre-rejecting stories because they don't fit within your ideology, and I think that's a good way to become fossilized. I think an editor like Campbell did become fossilized toward the end of his career, where a more eclectic editor like Boucher never really did.

You can sort of think of me as a conduit between the audience and the great mass of unpublished material out there. I see my job as spotting material I know the audience is going to like and funnelling it along to them. So you can see me as a great sewer pipe of the arts, but hopefully I also filter out a lot of the really obnoxious solids that could otherwise get through to the audience.

I must say that this is probably lost on most readers, and probably is indeed a waste of time, since what every reader wants to read in the magazine, it seems, is only those kinds of stories that he himself likes, and doesn't want to see in the magazine anything else other than that. I'm not sure the readers really appreciate the wide range of material in the magazine, but that's the way I like to do it, and that's the way I'll continue to do it.

With the best of the year, I also try to maintain an aesthetic balance. I don't want it to be all one kind of story, or one mood of story. But at the same time you're constrained by the fact that it says "The best stories of the year" on the title, so if the book really needs a hard science story for balance, but the only example you can find of a hard science story is one that is kind of mediocre -- just acceptable but not exceptional -- I'd be more leery of putting such a story in the book. You do have to live up to the title of the book as much as you're able to.

Of course, the title Best of the Year is a misnomer in many ways, because it's all a matter of subjective personal taste. The book really should say something like "Gardner Dozois Liked These Stories This Year," or "Gardner Dozois Liked These Stories the Best on the Day He Was Putting the Collection Together." They don't allow you to get away with such waffling in the publishing industry, where the authoritative term Best of the Year has a certain cachet that will make the readers buy the book.

I have a very simple aesthetic for both Asimov's and Best of the Year. I don't have any real agenda or didactic scheme or philosophy I follow. I'm not grinding any particular political axe or using the book to showcase any particular aesthetic or didactic agenda. The only criterion I use is whether I liked the stories or not. Again, I think, perhaps naïvely, that if I like the stories, then probably a lot of my readers will, too. If I respond to the story as a reader honestly, then a lot of my audience is also going to respond emotionally.

Of course, I have a wider range aesthetically than many people do, so not everybody is going to respond as emotionally, as strongly as I do to everything that's in an issue of Asimov's or an issue of Best of the Year. But I think there'll be enough of different kinds if things in either -- because I do insist on a mix, a balance -- there's a good chance any given reader will get their money's worth out of picking up either Asimov's or one of the Best of the Year volumes. That's pretty much what I try to do.