Goodbye, Mr. Mike

Mike Resnick, my writing mentor and dear friend of 30 years, died on January 9, 2020, at age 77, from complications of lymphoma. His daughter Laura posted the details on his Facebook page.

Mike was a giant in the field of science fiction and fantasy. He was loved, honored, and respected by all those who knew him. He left behind many friends, family, and adoring fans. The above photo was taken when we first met in 1992 at MagiCon in Orlando (I think), although it might be from ConFrancisco in ’93.

In addition to the stacks of brilliant novels and short stories he wrote, many of them award-winners, Mike will be remembered as a generous and supportive editor who launched the careers of dozens of young authors, myself included.

The following snapshot (which I adore) is more recent, captures his signature sideburns and wry smile, and reflects the twinkle in his eyes for which he was so well known. I will miss him more than I can say.

Mike’s biblio
Mike’s Wikipedia page
Obit on Heavy.com
Magic Feathers, our collected stories

I wrote the following article for the Mike Resnick Special Tribute Issue, Galaxy’s Edge #43, March 2020:

In Memoriam: Mike Resnick

The Mike and Nick Show

By Nick DiChario

In the months and years to come, I’m sure many people will write about Mike Resnick the author. As they well should. His multiple awards, books and writings, and impressive career accomplishments deserve to be acknowledged in the science fiction and fantasy community. What awards did he win? Which works were nominated and who published them? How many anthologies did he edit? At what conventions did he deliver his most legendary and hilarious guest of honor (GOH) speeches? I’ll leave all that to the genre experts and trivia buffs. It’s Mike my friend and mentor I’d like to talk about here. For those of you who knew him well, you might see your own stories somewhere within mine. For those who didn’t, maybe you’ll come to know Mike a little better and understand why so many of us loved him as much as we did.

The first time I spoke to Mike was by phone back around 1990 or so. I was struggling my way through a summer creative writing workshop at Brockport University with Nancy Kress. Mike called Nancy one evening after class and asked her if he could speak to me. At first, I thought she was joking. Mike and I didn’t know each other. Why would a giant in the science fiction world want to talk to an unknown kid taking a creative writing seminar in upstate New York? It made no sense. Until I got on the phone, and Mike said, gruffly, “What did you think you were doing sending an unsolicited story to an invitation-only anthology?” Then it hit me. It was true that I’d submitted a story to Mike for his Alternate Kennedys anthology. And it was true the anthology was by invitation only and I hadn’t been invited. But Nancy had read the story and thought it was a good fit for the book. She’d encouraged me to send it and use her name in the cover letter. And yet here was Mike, one of the biggest names in the field, scolding me for it over the phone. I was sure my career was over before it began. But a few seconds later (it felt like an eon) he let me off the hook. As it turned out, it was Mike who was joking. He loved the story and wanted to publish it. Ha ha. Meet Resnick the comedian.

Mike’s interest in the story launched my writing career. He bought “The Winterberry” even though it had been rejected everywhere else I’d sent it. He saw something in it, and he saw something in me, that he was willing to bet on. Not long after that, I met Mike for the first time at MagiCon in Orlando (1992), my first Worldcon. Mike took me on that year as his project, guiding me through “the hucksters room,” introducing me to everyone he knew, dragging me to parties, and showing me how to get everything there was to get out of a convention, and then some. We became fast friends. Then collaborators. Then lifelong comrades.

Mike never stopped advocating for me. Every time he edited an anthology, he’d ask me to contribute to it. For a while, in the mid-90s, there were many books and many stories. By then he knew I was going to have a tough time publishing in the genre. I didn’t write traditional science fiction or fantasy. My work tended to fall between the cracks. He knew I couldn’t help it, and he didn’t want me to change, so he asked me to collaborate with him, thinking his name would help me sell. He was right. I had a lot to learn back then and took advantage of his experience and professionalism. We loved writing together and eventually produced enough stories to publish a collection of our own titled Magic Feathers: The Mike and Nick Show (2000). Once you pen a book with someone, you have a special bond that will never be broken. Now, Magic Feathers, nearly forgotten by almost everyone else, holds some of my fondest memories of Mike and our time writing together.

Our friendship would change not only my trajectory but Mike’s too. He could never get over the fact that a Hugo and World Fantasy nominated story could pile up so many rejections, a piece that would later be reprinted several times and in other countries and end up in an anthology titled The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century. This was a wake-up call for him. He hadn’t realized how difficult it had become for new writers to break into the field. He decided he needed to do something about it, or we’d run the risk of losing talented authors to other genres. In that spirit, he made it a point to publish beginning writers whenever he could. He started collaborating with more newbies, helping them jumpstart their careers, and he supported them as he’d once supported me. Whenever he went to a conference, he’d tell the tale of The Mike and Nick Show to anyone willing to listen. His mantra was, “Pay it Forward!” And he did. Every chance he got. His new discoveries would eventually number so many we’d come to be known collectively as “Mike’s Writer Children,” and he loved every one of us.

Once Mike got a taste for collaborating, he couldn’t get enough of it. He soon expanded from working with new authors to working with experienced ones. In addition to me, he’d go on to collaborate with Barry Malzberg, Catherine Asaro, Harry Turtledove, James Patrick Kelly, David Gerrold, Nancy Kress, Pat Cadigan, Eric Flint, and Janis Ian, among others. Enough to fill two volumes of work, With a Little Help from My Friends (2002), and With a Little More Help from My Friends (2012). He enjoyed every minute of it. All this while producing his own books and stories, selling options to Hollywood, winning Hugos, Nebulas, HOmers, American Dog Writers awards, and international honors from Spain, Japan, France, Poland, etc. Sixteen years after Magic Feathers, he’d publish his only other single-author collaborative short story collection with someone not named DiChario: Soulmates, with Lezli Robyn, who is now my good friend and the new fiction editor of Galaxy’s Edge.

I came to love Mike for so many reasons I’ve lost count. One of the biggest was that he and his wife Carol loved my parents. When I brought Mom and Dad to Worldcons, which I often did, the Resnicks couldn’t wait to see them. My folks (Nick and Josie) were not sci-fi readers, writers, or fans, but Mike and Carol took time out of their busy conference schedules to share a meal with them or take them on a tour around town. This meant the world to me. Mike and Carol had almost nothing in common with my parents (other than me). Mike and my dad shared a birthday (March 5). Mike loved my mom’s cooking, which he experienced for the first time in 2009 when he visited my hometown of Rochester, NY, to be GOH at Astronomicon. After that, he tried every gimmick in the book to get Josie to move to Cincinnati and take over the cooking duties at the Resnick household. Never mind what Carol and Nick might have to say about it. Mama’s Sicilian spaghetti sauce had mesmerized him.

Of course, I was not naïve to the fact that Mike had much closer personal relationships with other people than he did with me. But I can honestly say it never felt that way. Whenever I produced a story, he insisted upon reading it. If I needed advice (writing or otherwise), he was always there for me. Always. If I needed a favor, he’d drop everything to do it. Always. He asked me to write the introduction to his special edition of Seven Views of Olduvi Gorge (1994) when I was an absolute no-name. He could have asked any high-profile writer in SF to do it, and they would have jumped at the chance. When I asked him to write the intro to my first novel, A Small and Remarkable Life (2006), he couldn’t have been more excited. Mike believed in me more than I believed in myself. He never gave up on me, even though there were times when I gave up, when I thought I was falling short of his expectations and mine, when I wasn’t writing or publishing enough, or when I was simply feeling all the insecure things authors feel because we are who we are and we do what we do. But let me be clear. That was how I felt, not Mike. For the nearly thirty years that I knew him, he never stopped praising my work or encouraging me to write. After he became the fiction editor of Galaxy’s Edge in 2013, he kept asking me to send him stories. And he leveraged the magazine to continue publishing aspiring authors right alongside icons in the field. That’s the kind of friend Mike was. Faithful to the end.

But I’m not alone in my deep appreciation for Mike Resnick, am I? My experiences might be your experiences. The Mike I remember could very well be the Mike you remember. He touched the lives of so many people. Friends like Mike come along once in a lifetime. I was lucky, very lucky, to know him for as long as I did. I’m sorry I didn’t stay closer to him these past few years when he was going through so many medical challenges. He kept saying he was fine, getting better every day, and soon he’d be back to his old self again. I wanted to believe him. Maybe you wanted to believe him as much as I did. It didn’t seem possible that this extraordinary man would one day not be here with us. And while I’ll miss him far more than I can say, I know he lived the life he’d always wanted to live. At the heart of things, he was a science fiction guy, and he couldn’t have been happier for it. He loved Carol and his daughter Laura more than anything in the world, but he considered the science fiction community his extended family.

I asked him once if he could pick between writing one book that would be remembered forever, or writing many books that would all be forgotten, what would he choose? He didn’t even hesitate before saying that if writing many books meant he could live the life he was living, and writing one book that would last forever meant he’d have to give it all up, the answer was obvious. He was living his dream. He didn’t need anything more. Being remembered couldn’t hold a candle to that.

But we will remember him. And we will hold the candle he has lit in us all.