Gardner Dozois: "People for decades now have been saying that genre is a bad thing, and we'd all be better off if there weren't any genres. I really don't agree with that. Genre has been a hothouse, force-breeding innovations in the work. Maybe in some ways it's distorted it in a negative way, but it's also forced evolution much more quickly, at a pace it never could have had if it was being driven entirely by novels. By the time you read someone's novel and it inspires you to respond to it or to build on it, and you write your novel and publish it, you're already five or six years down the line, whereas someone can do something startling and innovative in a short story, and writers can be responding and building it into genre evolution by the time the year is over. It's taken us through literary generations of evolution much more quickly and effectively than could possibly have happened if there were not science fiction magazines to provide this sort of hothouse."