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Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Mike Resnick recently passed away and his widow was saddled with hefty doctor bills. Go here if you’d like to help.

This is my view of the man, as an observer peering through the blinds--one perspective. Those with better knowledge can speak otherwise.

We met at a workshop, which some found useful. He was proud of his literary children and generous with his time to fans on the internet. He won and was nominated for a number of SF awards. His public persona staged an out-sized ego, but it’s hard to say how much was real, how much was showmanship, and how much was modeling himself after someone like Isaac Asimov for whom it worked so well although Asimov’s was more developed in his prolific introductions talking about other writers to talk about himself but which personalized the material within this context.

Resnick was a big man with big features and a big, boisterous personality. He liked to describe how he got his start in writing through porn novels. Not an infrequent agitator, he’d substitute “she” as God’s pronoun to stir up religious conservatives. He stirred up a feminist hive in a column he wrote with Barry Malzberg. They seemed to get the short end of the stick in some ways but kept loyal followers. Resnick's attitude toward women (who understood his sexual humor) remained the same, presumably designed to compliment the women he addressed and to agitate extremists.

I noted, afterwards, on Facebook that he’d like different conservative organizations (back when Facebook notified everyone of every act we do on its site), but it’s hard to say if he were truly a conservative or still an agitator—maybe his conservatism was an uneasy alliance as the above description might suggest. He put together an anthology titled Alternate Kennedys, which seemed designed to lift up the much mythologized Democrat of that era. It’s interesting how politics can shift and turn people toward one party or another, based on experiences.


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Here’s a review of Ivory, I had worked on it long ago, but life intervened until I’d forgotten what I was going to say (as has happened with innumerable reviews). The pre-dated review popped up accidentally. I recall naming it a minor masterpiece. My opinion has not so much altered as shifted slightly.


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