by Mike Resnick
“We took a cab,” he said. “Everyone knows that whenever you need information you come to Blind Benny.”
“Right,” said the shorter one. “You think we don't read your books?”
“You do?” I said, surprised.
“Everyone does,” said the shorter one. He pulled out a copy of The Bloody Corpse Cries Foul and walked up to me. “Would you autograph it?”
“Sure,” I said, reaching for a pen.
“Could you say ‘To Vinnie, the one man I was always afeared of’?”
“You got to excuse my partner,” said the taller gunsel. “He ain't never got past third grade. It's ‘the one man I was always ascared of.’”
“I liked third grade,” said Vinnie defensively.
I scribbled an inscription and handed it back to him.
“I can't read your signature,” said Vinnie, peering at it.
“That's okay,” I told him. “I didn't write it anyway. I thought everyone knew that Scaly Jim Chandler writes them.”
“That's why it's so good!” exclaimed the taller gunsel.
“I really appreciate this, Wings,” said Vinnie. “It almost makes me sorry about what I got to do next.”
He slugged me in the belly, and as I doubled over he cracked me over the head with a club I hadn't even seen in his hand.
I spat blood. It tasted salty. The salt invigorated me, and I caught Vinnie with a roundhouse left, but before I could follow up his partner had sapped me from behind with a blackjack. I started seeing images of Velma with her clothes on, so I knew they'd done me some serious damage. I came up swinging, catching Vinnie with a right to the jaw and Blind Benny with a left to the solar plexus.
“What the hell are you hitting me for?” he demanded.
“When I have time for aimed shots, you'll be the first to know,” I grated through torn lips.
The blackjack caught me on the side of the head again, and as I fell to the ground Vinnie and his partner began covering my unprotected body with kicks that would have done a soccer player proud. Time after time one foot or another would crunch into my face. I felt the cartilage in my nose give way, and I heard the sharp crack! as my jaw broke.
Finally Vinnie pulled out a pistol and aimed it at me.
“You can't say you wasn't warned, Shamus,” he said, pulling the trigger. Five shots buried themselves deep in my liver and spleen.
That did it. Before I'd merely been annoyed. Now I was mad.
—end of excerpt—
Locus, the trade journal of science fiction, keeps a list of the winners of major science fiction awards on its Web page. Mike Resnick is currently fourth in the all-time standings, ahead of Isaac Asimov, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert A. Heinlein. He is the leading award-winner among all authors, living and dead, for short science fiction.
Mike was born on March 5, 1942. He sold his first article in 1957, his first short story in 1959, and his first book in 1962.
He attended the University of Chicago from 1959 through 1961, won three letters on the fencing team, and met and married Carol. Their daughter, Laura, was born in 1962, and has since become a writer herself, winning three awards for her romance novels and the 1993 Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer.
Mike and Carol discovered science fiction fandom in 1962, attended their first Worldcon in 1963, and more than fifty science fiction books into his career, Mike still considers himself a fan and frequently contributes articles to fanzines. He and Carol appeared in five Worldcon masquerades in the 1970s in costumes that she created, and they won four of them.
Mike labored anonymously but profitably from 1964 through 1976, selling more than two hundred novels, three hundred short stories, and two thousand articles, almost all of them under pseudonyms, most of them in the “adult” field. He edited seven different tabloid newspapers, and a trio of men's magazines as well.
In 1968 Mike and Carol became serious breeders and exhibitors of collies, a pursuit they continued through 1981. During that time they bred and/or exhibited twenty-seven champion collies, and they were the country's leading breeders and exhibitors during various years along the way.
This led them to purchase the Briarwood Pet Motel in Cincinnati in 1976. It was the country's second-largest luxury boarding and grooming establishment, and they worked full-time at it for the next few years. By 1980 the kennel was being run by a staff of twenty-one, and Mike was free to return to his first love, science fiction, albeit at a far slower pace than his previous writing. They sold the kennel in 1993.
Mike's first novel in this “second career” was The Soul Eater, which was followed shortly by Birthright: The Book of Man, Walpurgis III, the four-book Tales of the Galactic Midway series, The Branch, the four-book Tales of the Velvet Comet series, and Adventures, all from Signet. His breakthrough novel was the international best seller Santiago, published by Tor in 1986. Tor has since published Stalking the Unicorn, The Dark Lady, Ivory, Second Contact, Paradise, Purgatory, Inferno, the Double Bwana/Bully!, and the collection Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun? His most recent Tor releases were A Miracle of Rare Design, A Hunger in the Soul, The Outpost, and The Return of Santiago.
Even at his reduced rate, Mike is too prolific for one publisher, and in the 1990s Ace published Soothsayer, Oracle, and Prophet; Questar published Lucifer Jones; Bantam brought out the Locus best-selling trilogy of The Widowmaker, The Widowmaker Reborn, and The Widow-maker Unleashed; and Del Rey published Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia and Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Amulet of Power. His current releases include A Gathering of Widowmakers for Meisha Merlin, Dragon America for Phobos, and Lady with an Alien, A Club in Montmarte, The World behind the Door for Watson-Guptill, and The Alternate Teddy Roosevelts for Subterranean Press.
Beginning with Shaggy B.E.M. Stories in 1988, Mike has also become an anthology editor (and was nominated for a Best Editor Hugo in 1994 and 1995). His list of anthologies in print and in press totals forty-eight, and includes Alternate Presidents, Alternate Kennedys, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, By Any Other Fame, Dinosaur Fantastic, and Christmas Ghosts, plus the recent Stars, coedited with superstar singer Janis Ian, and The Dragon Done It, coedited with best seller Eric Flint.
Mike has always supported the “specialty press,” and he has numerous books and collections out in limited editions from such diverse publishers as Phantasia Press, Axolotl Press, Misfit Press, Pulphouse Publishing, Wildside Press, Dark Regions Press, NESFA Press, WSFA Press, Obscura Press, Farthest Star, and others. He recently served a stint as the science fiction editor for BenBella Books, and in 2006 he became the executive editor of Jim Baen's Universe.
Mike was never interested in writing short stories early in his career, producing only seven between 1976 and 1986. Then something clicked, and he has written and sold more than 200 stories since 1986, and now spends more time on short fiction than on novels. The writing that has brought him the most acclaim thus far in his career is the Kirinyaga series, which, with sixty-seven major and minor awards and nominations to date, is the most honored series of stories in the history of science fiction.
He also began writing short nonfiction as well. He sold a four-part series, “Forgotten Treasures,” to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, was a regular columnist for Speculations (“Ask Bwana”) for twelve years, currently appears in every issue of the SFWA Bulletin (“The Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues”), and wrote a biweekly column for the late, lamented GalaxyOnline.com.
Carol has always been Mike's uncredited collaborator on his science fiction, but in the past few years they have sold two movie scripts—Santiago and The Widowmaker, both based on Mike's books—and Carol is listed as his collaborator on those.
Readers of Mike's works are aware of his fascination with Africa, and the many uses to which he has put it in his science fiction. Mike and Carol have taken numerous safaris, visiting Kenya (four times), Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Botswana, and Uganda. Mike edited the Library of Africa
n Adventure series for St. Martin's Press and is currently editing The Resnick Library of African Adventure and, with Carol as coeditor, The Resnick Library of Worldwide Adventure for Alexander Books.
Since 1989, Mike has won five Hugo Awards (for “Kirinyaga,” “The Manamouki,” “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge,” “The 43 Antarean Dynasties,” and “Travels with My Cats”) and a Nebula Award (for “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”), and has been nominated for thirty-one Hugos, eleven Nebulas, a Clarke (British), and six Seiun-sho (Japanese). He has also won a Seiun-sho, a Prix Tour Eiffel (French), two Prix Ozones (French), ten HOMer Awards, an Alexander Award, a Golden Pagoda Award, a Hayakawa SF Award (Japanese), a Locus Award, three Ignotus Awards (Spanish), a Xatafi-Cyberdark Award (Spanish), a Futura Award (Croatian), an El Melocoton Mechanico (Spanish), two Sfinks Awards (Polish), and a Fantastyka Award (Polish), and has topped the Science Fiction Chronicle Poll six times, the Scifi Weekly Hugo Straw Poll three times, and the Asimov's Readers Poll five times. In 1993 he was awarded the Skylark Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction, and both in 2001 and in 2004 he was named Fictionwise.com's Author of the Year.
His work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Dutch, Swedish, Romanian, Finnish, Danish, Chinese, and Croatian.
He was recently the subject of Fiona Kelleghan's massive Mike Resnick: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Work. Adrienne Gormley is currently preparing a second edition.
