Lover of Gloves

Her name was Judy-Lynn del Rey. And she became the most powerful editor in science fiction history.

Born in 1943 with achondroplastic dwarfism, Judy-Lynn grew up devouring science fiction in New York City's public libraries. At a time when the genre was dismissed as pulp fiction for teenage boys, she saw something else entirely: the future of storytelling.

She started at the bottom—an office assistant at Galaxy, the most prestigious science fiction magazine of the 1960s. Within four years, she was managing editor.

Then Ballantine Books came calling.

When she arrived at Ballantine in 1973, science fiction and fantasy were afterthoughts in publishing. Fantasy in particular was considered unsellable—unless you were Tolkien. Judy-Lynn thought that was nonsense.

Her first major move was audacious: she cut ties with one of Ballantine's bestselling authors, John Norman, whose "Gor" novels were popular but notoriously misogynistic. It was a risk. She didn't care.

Then came the gamble that changed everything.

In 1976, someone brought her an opportunity: the novelization rights to an upcoming space movie by a young director named George Lucas. Hollywood thought the film would bomb. Studio executives were skeptical. Most publishers passed.

Judy-Lynn said yes.

The Star Wars novelization sold 4.5 million copies before the movie even premiered.

She would later call herself the "Mama of Star Wars."

In 1977, she launched Del Rey Books—her own imprint, with her husband Lester editing fantasy while she oversaw everything else. Their first original novel was Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara. It became a phenomenon.

She didn't stop there.

Remember The Princess Bride? The original 1973 novel had flopped. It was headed for obscurity. Judy-Lynn rescued it, reissuing it in 1977 with a striking gate-fold cover and an aggressive marketing campaign. Without her intervention, there might never have been a movie.

She published the Star Trek Log series. She championed Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant trilogy—convincing Ballantine to release all three books on the same day from a completely unknown author. Unprecedented.

She published Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon—the first science fiction novel ever to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

And she did all of this while competitors called her imprint "Death-Rey Books"—because she was utterly dominant.

Between 1977 and 1990, Del Rey Books had 65 titles reach bestseller lists. That was more than every other science fiction and fantasy publisher combined.

Arthur C. Clarke called her "the most brilliant editor I ever encountered."

Philip K. Dick went further: "The greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins"—the legendary editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

But here's what burns: the science fiction community never nominated her for a Hugo Award while she was alive. Not once. The men who ran the industry praised her in private and overlooked her in public.

In October 1985, Judy-Lynn suffered a brain hemorrhage. She died four months later, at 42.

Only then did the Hugo committee vote to give her the Best Professional Editor award.

Her husband Lester refused to accept it.

He said Judy-Lynn would have objected—that it was given only because she had just died. That it came too late.

He was right.

Judy-Lynn del Rey transformed science fiction from a niche hobby into a cultural force. She made fantasy into a mainstream publishing category. She bet on Star Wars when no one else would. She saved The Princess Bride from oblivion. She published the first #1 New York Times science fiction bestseller.

She did all of this standing 4'1" tall in an industry run by men who underestimated her at every turn.

The next time you pick up a fantasy novel, or watch a Star Wars movie, or quote The Princess Bride—

alternatively titled, “how to be a decent human being to people who are suffering enough as it is to help your supposedly entitled ass”

1. get off your cell phone.         - cashiers ( not to mention the people patiently waiting in line ) don’t need to hear about how little Kelsey’s doing on the soccer team, or how your mother-in-law is coming into town for her birthday and you’re just SO INCONVENIENCED by having to purchase paper plates and cheap napkins before her arrival.  just tell them you’ll call them back when you’re done.       - if you can’t be assed to think about other people, at least acknowledge the cashier with a smile or a wave.  if they speak to you or ask you a question, don’t shush them.  tell your BFF Tanisha to hold on for what might be a total of four seconds. 

2.  when an item doesn’t immediately scan, please say anything but “oh, it must be free!”  please, dear god, anything but that.  you’re not being funny.  or clever.  or original.  they hear this at least ten times a day.  

3.  the number of items listed on the express lane is not a suggestion.  if you know that you have more items, don’t go there.  it’s that simple.  the express lanes have to be kept open for people who have small orders, so they’re not stuck behind someone with a cart piled high with what’s maybe a week’s worth of food and clothes you’ll inevitably be returning. 

4.  while unloading your cart, put the big items ( i.e., packages of toilet paper, crates of water bottles ) last.  there’s very little room for the cashiers to work with.  when you’re done unloading your cart, pull it up to the loading space and start putting the bags and other items into your cart instead of standing there and staring off into space or fiddling with your phone. 

5.  when you ask a cashier a store-related question ( i.e., how many coupons are allowed per order, whether or not you’re getting the right BOGO deal, etc. ), and they answer you politely and confidently, don’t challenge them.  they work there.  you don’t.  they know the way the store works.  you don’t.  if they’ve forgotten something or made a mistake, by all means, ask them about it – but do it politely.  we all make mistakes.  

6.  do not – i repeat, do not – put your money down on the counter or conveyor belt, especially if the cashier is visibly ready to take it.  hand it over to them.  if you need to count out some change, tell them so they can wait.  oh, and if they’ve already cashed you out, don’t hand over some random amount of change after the drawer’s open.  

7.  if your card’s declined, it’s not their fault.  don’t ask them why it wasn’t accepted.  they don’t know.  and don’t get angry or impatient with them, or insist you have money because you just deposited a check – they do not care.  they cannot help you with problems that are clearly on your end.  

8.  do not yell at a cashier.  once again, for the people in the back:  do not yell at a cashier, especially someone who’s clearly new to the job.  would you appreciate being yelled at for something beyond your control, or a simple, fixable mistake?  no.  so don’t do it to them.  

9.  if you get an answer you don’t like from a cashier and ask to speak to a manager, guess what?  you’re most likely gonna get the same answer from them.  here’s a news flash: the customer is not always right, the company will not always pander to your temper tantrums, and making a scene in front of a line of people with quickly-diminishing patience will not change their minds. 

10.  overall, please just be polite.  these people are working their asses off to help their customers, most of which don’t appreciate their efforts at all.  they’re constantly ignored, mistreated, questioned and degraded, and over time, it really does a number on their emotional state.  just be kind and courteous.  they’re human beings, not mindless drones.  smiles and nice conversations go a long way.  

i am not being metaphorical, i work in a garden center, stop buying plants 'to bring in the bees and butterflies' and then immediately poisoning every caterpillar that dares to consume a single leaf

She wants to learn photography. Do it stupid. Take a million photos. Don't think about why they're not good. Enjoy the process of taking photos.

Pick out tge ones you like the most and figure out why you like them. Is it because the subject is centered? Is it because you caught them doing something cool? Is it because the light made cool shadows?

They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.

Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. It’s led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and we’ll help back.

The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. We’re still a million less on this island than pre famine. And it’s not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through it. We’ve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but it’s because there’s that cultural memory of not being able to.

Your husky isn’t “hyperactive”, it’s bred to pull sleds for 8 hours straight and you have it in a 400 sq ft yard.

Your English sheepdog isn’t “pushy”, it’s bred to herd sheep, and you have neither to space nor the herd to allow it.

Your terrier isn’t “nippy”, it’s bred to kill rats and your hamster looks a hell of a lot like one.

Your Catahoula isn’t “mean to animals”, it’s bred to hunt any and all animals smaller than it, and you didn’t acclimate it to your cat.

Your Lhasa Apso isn’t “yappy”, it’s bred to bark at any tiny noise and alert watchmen to intruders

Well. They did, at the time. 

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis. 

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time. 

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

---

I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead: 

I used to prep, wash dishes, and cook at mellow mushroom. I had chronic pain that wasn't NEARLY as bad as it is today, but it was still very debilitating. I told my employer "i cannot stand more than 4 to 6 hours. I CANNOT do shifts longer than this due to my illness." And even though i made my boundaries VERY clear, everyday i worked it was 8 hours at the least and 10 or 12 at the most. I would go up to my manager and say "look i really need to leave, my shift is over, my chronic pain is killing me." And he'd say "we really need to here, you HAVE to push through." And so i did, and after one, ONE month of that job my crps got incredibly worse to the point where i could no longer walk my dog around the block which was .5 miles. I quit, and that was FOUR years ago, and ever since that day I HAVE BEEN BEDRIDDEN AND HAVE TO USE A WHEELCHAIR. It is my biggest regret in life.

My best friend who has seen my whole journey has recently developed undiagnosed chronic pain, and she is in the EXACT same scenario i was 4 years ago. Busting her ass at a pizza place with extreme pain that hurts her so much she tells me "im in so much pain i don't even feel like a person." She doesn't feel LUCID. And her manager and coworkers are saying the same thing "if you don't help us you will let us down, we'll be in the shit."