<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Mike Resnick (March 5, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois) first began writing SF professionally in the 1960s, but his work from that period consisted primarily of pastiches of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He turned to other genres very quickly and didn't return to SF until the 1980s. The first few novels of his second career were well written but basically very light space adventures including a series about a star traveling carnival, but his subsequent series, which opened with Eros Ascending (1984) and ended with the fourth, Eros at Nadir (1986) was noticeably better, the saga of an orbiting bordello. Each volume in the series was a separate story, involving everything from malfunctioning computer systems to murder mysteries, but the setting was vividly realized and virtually a character itself.

Resnick proved himself to be a master of the western transposed into space with Santiago (1986), in which a larger than life bounty hunter becomes a symbol for human freedom in an increasingly bureaucratized interstellar community. A sequel, The Return to Santiago (2003) reprises much of the same material, but adds some new twists. The "Widowmaker" series, originally a trilogy but later extended to a fourth volume, is in much the same style, chronicling the adventures of a larger than life gunfighter and his various clones.

A veteran of several visits to Africa, Resnick adapted the histories of many African nations and peoples for some of his more serious work. The best of these are the "Kirinyaga" stories, in which Kenyans settle a colony world and attempt to restore tribal customs, including some that outsiders find reprehensible. Several other novels were thinly disguised portrayals of the evils of both colonialism and tribalism, as in Paradise (1989) and Purgatory (1993). "Kirinyaga" won the Hugo Award in 1989. The "Penelope Bailey" trilogy from the early 1990s, Soothsayer, Oracle, and Prophet, is a cleverly plotted space opera wrapped around a unique problem, the necessity to defeat a woman who has a psychic ability to see the outcome of every possible course of action.

Many of Resnick's stories, particularly after 1990, reflect a rather dark view of human nature, notably in the effective if somewhat one-sided "Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge" (1994), in which aliens excavate remains of extinct humanity and see only our most disgraceful achievements. The novelette won a Nebula Award. A similar position is taken in A Hunger in the Soul (1998), in which a plague that exterminates the human race is seen as a blessing for the rest of the universe. Although best known for his novels, Resnick has written a number of excellent shorter pieces including two about Theodore Roosevelt, "Bwana" and "Bully", both published in 1990. He has also won Hugo Awards for "The Manamouki" (1991) and "The 43 Antarean Dynasties" (1998). His daughter, Laura Resnick, writes fantasy and romance novels.