There are many things wrong with this picture of the professional editor, the main one being that it simply isn't so. As an editor myself, over a period of years, and also from working with many editors--including the editor of DAW Books, Donald A. Wollheim--I can say that most editors have kept their own personal sense of wonder about good science fiction, and that they spend much of their professional lives in search of a good new writer. Because no matter how many fine writers an editor may have in his (or her) "stable" of published authors, it's never possible to rely on "names" alone. Authors die. They get sick and miss deadlines. They go off for a year to Europe, Africa, Katmandu or Trappist monasteries. They have babies or decide to spend the next three years researching the Great American novel. For whatever cause, this leaves the editor with nothing to publish; and when he doesn't publish, he doesn't make any money.

And so the editor spends a good deal of time leaving no stone unturned in the search to find and encourage new writers. And one of the stones turned by Don Wollheim was Starstone, the magazine of apocryphal Darkover fiction by the Friends of Darkover. I have always encouraged young writers to write in my world; I think it's fun. Besides, how else can I get to read Darkover stories without going to the trouble of writing them?

Don knew that I made a habit of publishing, in Starstone, various short bits of Darkover fiction which I considered too short, or too fragmentary, to develop into novels. He spoke to me once about doing an anthology of short Darkover fiction, and when I told him there simply weren't enough of these short stories to make up a paperback, he suggested that I might include the best of the short stories written by the Friends of Darkover, some of whom showed tremendous talent.

Another misconception about professional editors in the science fiction and fantasy field is that they have a prejudice against women authors. This is another misconception, so exasperating that I have been known to call any woman who repeats it to me a liar to her face. One young woman who sank to the level of vanity publishing excused herself by saying to me (to me!). "Well, I had no choice. Everybody knows that women can't get published in fantasy or science fiction." And this, believe it or not, in the days of Ursula le Guin and Anne McCaffrey winning Nebulas and Hugos!

Well, even back when ninety percent of science fiction readers were men, there were a great many women who never made any secret of their sex writing and editing science fiction. Weird Tales was ably edited for many years by Dorothy McIlwraith, Famous Fantastic Mysteries (one of the best pulps) by Mary Gnaedinger, and Amazing Stories, for a long time, by Cele Goldsmith. Leigh Brackett, Catherine L. Moore, Wilmar Shiras and Judith Merril--not to mention myself--were all writing long before the current explosion of feminism, back in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Nor did the supposedly all-male readership of the science fiction magazines complain about any of them.