SFFWRTCHT: A Chat With Author/Editor Mike Resnick
Originally published at Grasping for the Wind. Please leave any comments there.
As of 2011, Mike Resnick is first on the Locus list of all-time award winners, living or dead, for short fiction, and 4th on the Locus list of science fiction’s all-time top award winners in all fiction categories. The author of sixty-two novels, including Santiago, the Widowmaker series, and the Starship series, twenty-two collections, and editor of forty anthologies, he’s also authored non-fiction books, including The Business of Science Fiction with Barry Malzberg, which is currently nominated for a Hugo. A former editor of Jim Baen’s Universe with Eric Flint, Mike has authored hundreds of short stories which have been published in magazines like Asimov’s and Fantasy & Science Fiction. His latest novel, The Buntline Special, is out from PYR, and the first sequel is forthcoming. Active on Facebook, you can also find Mike as @ResnickMike on Twitter or through his website www.mikeresnick.com. He and his wife and collaborator, Carol, own and operate a large collie breeding and exhibition business near Cleveland, Ohio.
SFFWRTCHT: Mike, tell us a little about Buntline Special, a weird western with Thomas Edison fighting magic?
Mike Resnick: Lou Anders, my editor at Pyr, asked me to do a “Weird Western”, which would be both fantasy and steampunk. All my adult life I had wanted to write a novel about Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo, the only two college-educated gunslingers. I set up a situation that required Thomas Edison to be in Tombstone a year before the Gunflight at the OK Corral. I used a lot of historical incidents, plus magic (an Indian medicine man turned Bat Masterson into a real bat) and Edison’s inventions supply the steampunk.
SFFWRTCHT: Does the followup Western for Pyr pick up where Buntline left off or is it stand alone?
MR: The Buntline sequel is The Doctor and The Kid. It begins about two months after the events in the previous book. You can doubtless figure out who the Doctor and the Kid are. If there’s a third, it’ll feature Doc and Theodore Roosevelt, and a fourth will feature Doc plus paleontologists Cope and Marsh.
SFFWRTCHT: Like,all these space-operas are in the end cowboys with rayguns. What about doing a straighforward space western?
MR: There are those who say the Santiago and Widowmaker books are space Westerns. I disagree, but I’m just the writer.
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