Popular Work and Themes
Two notable trends run through the majority of Resnick's science fiction work. The first is his love of fable and legend. Many of his stories chronicle larger-than-life characters with colorful names like "The Widowmaker", "Lucifer Jones", "The Forever Kid", and "Catastrophe Baker" and the legendary adventures they pursue. Resnick is also interested in the formation of history and legend, and sometimes includes bards as characters. The book The Outpost deals most with these themes, as it includes a story told from multiple perspectives and a bard who openly intends to exaggerate and edit his accounts to make them more interesting. Resnick's books in this vein bear some resemblance to Westerns, but are clearly science fiction. The other main subject of Resnick's work is Africa - African history, African culture, colonialism and its aftermath, and traditionalism. He has visited Africa often, and draws on this experience. Some of his science fiction stories are allegories of African history and politics. Other stories are actually set in Africa or have African characters.
Resnick's style is known for the inclusion of humor; he has probably sold more humorous stories than any science fiction author except Robert Sheckley, and even his most grim and serious stories have frequent unexpected bursts of humor in them. Resnick enjoys collaborating, especially on short stories. Through 2012 he has collaborated with 48 different writers on short fiction, two on screenplays, and three on novels. He is also a long-time participant in science fiction fandom. Resnick has been the Guest of Honor at some 38 science fiction conventions, and Toastmaster at a dozen others. Since 1988 Resnick has edited over 40 anthologies. He has also sold screenplays based on his novels to Miramax, Capella, and Jupiter 9, and often has multiple properties under option to Hollywood studios.
His work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Dutch, Latin, Swedish, Romanian, Finnish, Portuguese, Slovakian, Chinese, Catalan, Danish, and Croatian.
He is also the series editor for The Stellar Guild series published by Phoenix Pick. The series attempts to provide greater visibility to lesser known science fiction and fantasy authors by pairing them up with best-selling veterans of the genre.
Read more about this topic: Mike Resnick
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