Mike Resnick is the leading award winner for short fiction among all science fiction writers, living or dead. He has won five Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and has been nominated for 30 Hugos, 11 Nebulas, a Clarke (British), six Seiun-shos (Japanese) and a mind-boggling array of other awards. He has sold fifty-eight novels and more than two hundred short stories. And he has edited fifty anthologies.
Not only that, he’s a swell guy who took time out of his jam-packed schedule to reveal what’s going on behind the scenes with his latest book, Flagship.
SciFiBookshelf.com: For a reader who hasn’t read any of the Starship series yet, do you think it would be hard to jump in? Or would you recommend going back and starting with Book 1, Starship: Mutiny?
Mike Resnick: If it’s difficult to jump into any of my series at any point, then I did something wrong. I’d like to think that a reader would enjoy reading them all, and in order, but no, it’s not necessary.
SciFiBookshelf.com: Do you draw on any real-life battles for inspiration, or make them up entirely?
Mike Resnick: I make them up entirely, and I’m a lot less concerned with the weaponry and the blood than I am with the brains and motivation behind them.
SciFiBookshelf.com: Being such a prolific and award-winning writer, do you have any advice for aspiring science fiction writers you’d like to share? (Without, of course, spoiling the upcoming release of The Business of Science Fiction?)
Mike Resnick: Same that I’ve been giving out for 40+ years. Writers -write-; dilettantes talk about writing, but hardly ever get around to actually doing it.
SciFiBookshelf.com: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
Mike Resnick: In the field, Jack McDevitt’s TIME TRAVELERS NEVER DIE. Ouside the field, SERIOUSLY FUNNY, a study of the cerebral stand-up comics of the 1950s and early 1960s.
SciFiBookshelf.com: And finally, what are you working on next?
Mike Resnick: The novel I’m working on now, for Pyr, is THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL, a kind of Western Steampunk. I owe a novella, tentatively titled “Six Blind Men and an Alien”, to Subterranean. And I owe four or five stories to anthologies. All of these should be done no later than mid-April. Then Eric Flint and I have to write an overdue (due to his heart surgery) novel for Baen titled THE GODS OF SAGITTARIUS, and Lezli Robyn and I will owe a YA novel or two before the year is done, and I’m sure I’ll sign for and at least start another solo novel by summer. Oh, and Barry Malzberg and I do a quarterly column for the SFWA Bulletin; a collection of 26 of the better ones will be out this summer, titled THE BUSINESS OF SCIENCE FICTION.
Starship: Flagship (Hardcover)
Book Five of the Starship Series
Mike Resnick
ISBN: 978-1-59102-788-1
December 2009
MikeResnick.com
pyrsf.com
Wow! Great interview! Who new Mike Resnick is such a down to earth guy?
I liked reading Mike Resnick's Starship series. His writing uses a lot of brains.