ike Resnick loves telling tall tales, as anyone who has read his recent book The Outpost might suspect. In fact, he's amazed that as a serious science-fiction writer he's been allowed to get away with selling so many humorous novels and short stories. However, not only has he been allowed to sell his funny fiction right next to his serious stuff, along the way he's even
become a hit in e-publishing. Last year he was Fictionwise.com's author of the year, and this year he's been their top-selling author for the last six months. And that just flabbergasts him.
Resnick has actually had more than one successful career in his life. He made a very nice living writing adult fiction, he was a leading exhibitor/breeder of champion collies, and now, in his third career, he has become a Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science-fiction writer.
He published his first genre novel in 1965, but quickly moved into other genres, eventually focusing on the adult field, where he wrote hundreds of books, short stories and articles under pseudonyms.
Resnick's second writing career as science-fiction author took off with the publication of The Soul Eater in 1981. Other Resnick novels include Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future, Ivory and The Outpost. His award-winning short fiction includes "Kirinyaga," "The Manamouki," "Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge" and "The 43 Antarean Dynasties." He has written 75 books and more than 100 short stories, edited 30 anthologies and received more than 50 awards for his work. His long-awaited novel The Return of Santiago will be released in February.
Resnick chatted with Science Fiction Weekly about fandom, his top-selling status in e-publishing and why he'll never retire.
You're a very prolific writer. Of all the many, many short stories and novels and collections and nonfiction you've written, what drives you as a writer?
Resnick: I love to write. I like to tell stories.
Why?
Resnick: Nobody else tells quite the ones I want to tell. Nobody else has quite my worldview. My stories are as unique as everyone else's, but I happen to like 'em better. Also, I really do enjoy writing. Most writers hate writing and like having written, but I like writing.
Well, you must, because you're very, very prolific.
Resnick: And the biggest kick is not seeing my name in print. I've done that too often. It's at the end of the day, reading what I've written and realizing it's reasonably close to what I hoped it would be when I sat down to write.
Not everybody can say that.
Resnick: Including me. But some days ...
What has surprised you most in your career so far?
Resnick: Seriously? That I've been able to make a living at it. I always thought that the kind of science fiction I wanted to tell, there wasn't that much of a market for it. And in fact, the reason we're not in Chicago, like you, is that I left Chicago in 1976 and bought the second-biggest boarding and grooming kennel in the country, which we hoped would make up for our economic shortfall when I started writing the science fiction I wanted to write. You know, when the science fiction out-earned the kennel four or five years in a row, nobody was more surprised than me. We sold the kennel!
That's been the surprise. Look, when I was 21, I went to my first WorldCon and I saw a Hugo. In fact, I saw a rack of 'em. They were being given out by Isaac [Asimov], and they were being given to people like Phil Dick and Jack Vance. I always thought if I led a good life and I worked very, very hard, someday somebody would let me touch one. I've just been amazed at the response, in terms of awards, that my career's had.
And they not only let you touch them. They let you take them home!
Resnick: Right. I look at them every now and then and I can't quite believe it.
On the other flip of the coin, what's the biggest challenge you've had in your career?
Resnick: Oh, it varies, really, one project to the next. The biggest challenge I had a few years ago was learning how to write screenplays, which is totally opposite from learning how to write books. And of course short stories are totally opposite from both of those. So it varies with whatever new challenge you're trying.
How's your screenplay-writing career going?
Resnick: In movies, you mean? Well, we've been paid for a couple of scripts. Santiago, which I believe they're going to be making this year—they keep telling me that! It's been sworn to me four or five different years, but this year it looks like they finally got the money together. And
Miramax paid us for a script for The Widowmaker, then decided they didn't want to make it after all. Somebody else is making it now, but because Miramax owns our script, they're not even allowed to use a word of it. So they've got a different writer just to be on the safe side.
Do you like screenwriting?
Resnick: I like the fact that it's a challenge. I will only give Hollywood seven or eight weeks a year because they drive me crazy. You can't create art by committee no matter how hard you try. I like sitting here alone at three in the morning and knowing that, good, bad or indifferent, it's going to be my words. And the words count. Hollywood deals in images, not in words. That's why they don't like dealing with writers. In terms of science fiction, Hollywood deals with emotions, not with ideas, and that's why they especially don't like dealing with science-fiction writers [laughs]. We've managed to overcome all that, but it drives me crazy dealing with these guys, so we don't very much.
And you've also published much more short fiction in recent years.
Resnick: Yeah, I didn't think I was going to enjoy it very much. I never did when I was a young man. I always thought you needed an idea to be 90,000 or 100,000 words to say something important. And that was ridiculous, because it's a field that has maybe one or two great novels and demonstrably 40 or 50 great short stories. What I think I really meant was I couldn't do it. And then I wrote "Kirinyaga," which won all kinds of awards and did all kinds of things for my career, and then I realized that, yeah, I could do important short stories too. It was a lot of fun. Over the last 10 or 12 years, I've not only sold a couple hundred stories, but I've found that I enjoy them more than novels. I can't afford to do them as much, but I do enjoy them more. I still consider myself a novelist, but I have 20-plus Hugo nominations, and they're all for shorter works.
When you start working on something, how do you decide whether it's going to be a short story or a novel?
Resnick: If it's complex enough, it's a novel, and if it's not complex enough, if it's a one-punch kind of thing or you only have one interesting character, then it's a short story. It varies from one piece to the next. After awhile, you get a feel for it. I think when you're a beginner, you come up with 8 million ideas a week, and most of them do not play to your strengths. It takes you a long time to realize what your strengths are and what they aren't. But you have a little subconscious editor that over the years starts figuring out not only what story you'll do well, but what length you should do it at.
What's your writing process?
Resnick: I sit down to write at about 10 or 11 each night and I write 'til about 5 in the morning. I leave all the pages out for my wife, who gets up earlier than me. She's been my unaccredited collaborator and line editor for close to 40 years. And by the time I wake up, she's gone through it and made copious notes, and I sit down and go back to work.
It sounds like she's a real help to you.
Resnick: I think without her I'd still sell. There's no question about that. But I wouldn't be half the writer I am.
That seems like a great partnership.
Resnick: I think so. She is my credited collaborator on screenplays, because otherwise they wouldn't let her into the story conferences, and she has a much better notion of what they want than I do. She didn't train as a prose writer, so she's much more visual. You know, there's a song in a Tony-winning musical by Larry Gelbart, the guy who did M*A*S*H and some other stuff, called City of Angels. And it's about a mystery writer who's selling out to Hollywood, and in the end he doesn't, of course. But in the process, the producer/director sings a song. He's the real villain of the piece. It's a song about how he's going to remake this guy's prose into something really awful. But there's a stanza that's so true that whenever we're going to sit down and work on a screenplay, I print it and paste it up on the computer. It goes, "Don't cling to the words / to which you gave birth. / Remember how many / a picture is worth." And she's much better at remembering that than I am [laughs]. I cling.
So what are you working on now?
Resnick: I just finished a short story this week that I just sold to Asimov's. In fact, I think I have three or four in press at Asimov's. Right now I have two contract offers for books, and my agent is negotiating, and when she's done I'll know who I'm writing for and what I'm writing. In the meantime, I'll probably do a couple more short stories while she's negotiating.
What can we look forward to coming out in Asimov's?
Resnick: I have two stories that I think are Hugo-ballot quality. I'm usually right. I'm always wrong about who is going to win a Hugo, but I'm usually right when I think one of my stories will make the ballot. They're called "Robots Don't Cry" and "Travels With My Cats." I also have another one in Asimov's called "Here's Looking at You, Kid." I think they'll all be out next year. I have a very major novel coming out that Tor had been after me to write for about 15 years. I finally did, and it's called The Return of Santiago.
Which is coming out in February.
Resnick: Yeah. Santiago has been continuously in print for about 16 years, which also flabbergasts me. I'm just very stubborn, so when they asked me to write a sequel I found other things I wanted to write. Finally, I wrote this. I know my fans and readers don't believe it, although it is truly a sequel—but not a single person from the first book is in the second. That made it much more palatable for me to write.
Doesn't it take place in a different time?
Resnick: It takes place about 100 years in the future from the first one. Santiago, the book itself, was subtitled "A Myth of the Far Future." What I tried to do was create the kind of myth that they might have then, which would be the equivalent of frontier myths of our current day. One of the continuing characters was a wandering poet who wrote up all these bigger-than-life characters in little Robert-Service-type verses. In the sequel, I didn't want to tell the same kind of story. So I had a small-time thief steal into an abandoned house and find the original manuscript that the poet left behind and decide that what he really wanted to do with his life was become the chronicler of all these characters. And to do that he needed a Santiago.
If you read the first book you know why, and if you didn't it would take me half an hour to explain. And so off he goes, writing poems and trying to create a Santiago or find one. It was the same flavor, but a totally different story. One of the problems with those kinds of stories, especially when they are very big ones, you think you've hit most of the bases, and you really don't want to tell it again. You'd just be repeating yourself. So it took me a long time to figure out how I could please Tor and still please myself.
I've heard about something called An Ambiguous Clay.
Resnick: I don't know where you saw that, but that was something I was going to write and never did. I replaced that on my contract with The Outpost, which came out a couple years ago.
I read that. It was a fun book.
Resnick: Ah, that was the most fun I ever had writing a book. It's certainly not my best book, but it's my favorite.
Why?
Resnick: Because I sat down every night and laughed myself silly writing those things. It was a parody of every science-fiction and space-opera story I could remember. You know, not just the battle ones in the '30s. There's parodies in there of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, "The Ship Who Purred" (that was a salacious bow to my friend Anne McCaffrey). I got to do all my friends. Really, I loved writing it. I hope someday somebody asks me for a sequel, because that I would love to do [laughs]. It wasn't like anything I can remember. It was certainly about as bawdy as you're allowed to get in science fiction. I can remember one critic was saying, "It's sexist guff." Of course it's sexist guff, it's a parody set in a rugged frontier bar, for God's sake.
Is there one piece you've written that you feel has been overlooked?
Resnick: Yeah, I think probably the best novel I ever did was called Paradise, and whenever I see myself written up they're always talking about Santiago or Ivory or "Kirinyaga." I think Paradise was the best of them all, if only because it was a totally new approach nobody had done before. It's a, oh, what would I call it, an allegorical science-fictionalized history of Kenya. And I don't think anybody ever did that before. Certainly nobody ever wrote one in which a country, slightly disguised, was actually the star of the book, rather than the characters. And I thought it did exactly what I wanted it to do, and I was proud as hell of it—and it didn't make that much of an impression. I think it may have made the Nebula preliminary ballot, and I sold it to a few other countries, but it didn't do anywhere the business or get the kind of reviews that, say, The Dark Lady or "Kirinyaga" or some of the others got. You can't worry about it. By the time I was getting reviews I was writing three or four books ahead of where they were reviewing.
You seem to have a fascination with Africa in your work.
Resnick: Yeah, I do. We've been there half a dozen times, and I love it. And more to the point, I find more story material there than anywhere else. If we're supposed to extrapolate alien societies, there are none more alien than the ones I've found in Africa. I said somewhere or other that I think every science-fiction writer—in fact every reader and every person—can probably agree with two things. First, if we reach the stars we're going to colonize them. And second, if we colonize enough of them, we're going to come into contact with a sentient race somewhere. And I think Africa offers 51 splendid and very distinct and different examples of the effects of colonization on, not only the colonized, but also the colonizers. And it's usually been detrimental to both sides. Those who don't learn from the past tend to relive it—so hopefully somebody will learn.
Do you have more trips planned?
Resnick: Not right at the moment. They're shooting people all over that continent. A little more recently we've been to France about half a dozen times, but always on their nickel. I seem to be as popular in France as Heinlein was here. They keep flying me over—and when they pay the expenses, of course we're happy to go. I think we've been there seven times in four years. I was in Slovakia about a year and a half ago, also by invitation. You know, most people don't realize it, but unless you're a national best-seller you probably make more money in the rest of the world than you do in the United States. Not in one particular contract, but you add them all up and your typical science-fiction book is going to sell in 10 or 12 countries. You get to meet a lot of interesting people there. And if you're popular enough and you write long enough, they start inviting you over there. That's a wonderful way to see the world [laughs].
Do they invite you over for conventions?
Resnick: Yeah, every trip to France—well, one was for an award and six were for conventions. The trip to Slovakia was for a convention, and I went up to Canada last year for a convention. So as long as they keep inviting me, I'm happy to go. I've been the guest of honor, maybe 25 or 30 conventions around here in the U.S. I've also toastmastered a bunch of them, which is always fun. You get to insult all your friends.
You seem to have fun speaking, at least the times I've seen you.
Resnick: I wasn't even aware you had seen me. I really enjoy it. I think I toastmastered WindyCon five or six times before we essentially stopped going. I can't even remember why. It seems to me there was a convention in Florida that finally became in conflict with WindyCon, and we have family in Florida. Yeah, Tropicon. It's usually within a week. For the last five or six years we've gone down south. If my family would have the good grace to die or move back to Chicago, we'd probably go back to WindyCon. We enjoyed Chicago while we were there. Grew up there. Grew up on the South Side. Can't tell you how many times I saw the White Sox lose [laughs]. Oh, my father was a fan, and all during the late 1940s and early 1950s used to drag me out there to every double-header. I think I saw the Sox lose 185 games out of 200 I watched. By the time we moved up to Highland Park in the mid-'50s and the Sox were good, we were too far away to go watch [laughs].
Regarding e-publishing, your stories have been doing very well online.
Resnick: That has also surprised me. I just found out from Fictionwise I was their runner-up author of the year this year to Lois Bujold. Last year, I was their author of the year. It's a combination of sales and reader ratings. This year I was their best-selling author, but Bujold had better ratings [laughs]. That has flabbergasted me, because I sell well enough to make a decent living, but I'm not up there in the best-seller class. You don't find me side by side with, you know, Ray Feist or Annie McCaffrey on the best-seller list. But at Fictionwise I outsell everybody. I outsold Stephen King and Isaac Asimov this year. I wake up in the mornings and I don't believe that, but I have the figures.
Why don't you believe it?
Resnick: It's really surprised me, because I think I've had three or four best-sellers in my whole life. Paperback, hardcover, whatever. But Fictionwise has just been a revelation. So I'm allowed to think that people who read electronically are much brighter. They're certainly more discriminating [laughs].
The people reading this interview will probably agree with you. What's the one thing as a writer you haven't done yet?
Resnick: Well, there's probably nothing I haven't done as a writer. The one thing I haven't done is as an editor. I've always wanted to put out a magazine for a year or two. I've edited 30 or 35 anthologies, but they've almost always been to themes. And when you have a theme anthology, you're rather handcuffed in that you invite people to write to that theme and, whether it's alternate Kennedys or Sherlock Holmes in the future, it's a story that wouldn't have been written if you hadn't requested it. So you're almost obligated to buy it no matter how many times they've got to go back and rewrite it. If you don't buy it, you at least give them a kill fee. It doesn't really show editorial taste. It shows editorial guesswork, in the 20 or 30 people I invite to a book.
But I would much rather just, for a year to two, sit down and work with writers based not only on what comes in, but on what ideas I can feed to them and be free of those horrible theme restrictions which publishers seem to be convinced are the only way anthologies can sell. So that's the one thing I'd like to do, edit a magazine for a couple of years. I don't know if I have the time to do it, and I'm sure I couldn't afford to do it, but you're asking me about wish fulfillment here.
What do you think are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer today?
Resnick: Well, everybody seems to agree that my biggest strength is dialogue, and I figure I probably overuse it a little bit because I happen to agree with them. And I think I probably plot very well. The most important thing for me and for a writer is accessibility. You're supposed to challenge your reader on a lot of levels as far as preconceptions, but you're not supposed to make it difficult to turn the page, and I try very hard not to.
About 10 years ago I threw out my thesaurus, because I figured if I had to look up a word, so did the reader, and I never wanted to give him an excuse to put my book or story down long enough even to walk over to pull out a dictionary or a thesaurus. I tend to read my stories aloud, before I show them to my wife even, even if I'm alone in a room, because frequently you'll stumble over a word or two that's grammatically correct but it's awkward. You don't realize that after six or seven hours of writing, but you realize it the second you say it aloud. And as I say, I do everything I can to make it easy for the reader. I would be the antithesis, say, of Clark Ashton Smith, who I love reading, but he sends me off to the dictionary at least twice a page.
I also don't believe in making up endless alien words. That really puts me off, because none of those languages exist anyway, and I don't know why I should have to learn them for the duration of one book. Unless you're doing work for hire, basically when you're a writer, you're writing what you wish other people would write. Stuff you wanted to read.
Do you feel you have weaknesses as a writer today?
Resnick: Oh, sure. Everybody has weaknesses as a writer.
What are they?
Resnick: One of my weaknesses is verisimilitude. I'm one of the few people whose second drafts are much longer than the first drafts, because I tend not to put in any details that my wife assures me are necessary for books [laughs]. I just whip through it quick. Part of it goes back to the 200 books I wrote under pseudonyms for the men's field, we'll call it, back in my 20s. They were for guys who didn't want it good, they wanted it Thursday, and I learned how to write awfully fast. I still haven't learned to write as carefully as I should, which is why I always have to go back and do another
draft or two when I'm doing anything serious.
Speaking of your first writing career, when you started writing, was the men's field just where you fell in naturally, or did you want to be a science-fiction writer right from the beginning?
Resnick: I wanted to be a science-fiction writer. I wrote a few science-fiction books in the '60s and had the bad fortune to sell them, and I quickly realized you shouldn't hack in a field you love. I stayed away from science fiction for about 12, 13 years to give people a chance to forget them.
They didn't; they come back and haunt me every goddamned autograph session. At least I tried [laughs]. No. When I was 23, 24 I was looking for work, or even earlier than that. The only job in all of publishing that was available in Chicago at the time was editing tabloids and men's magazines, so I took it. I learned the field pretty well. I found out that many of the publishers also did books. Mine didn't. So there was no conflict of interest for me to sell books to those editors I knew who also did men's magazines and tabloids. As Barry Malzberg says, "You'll learn a hell of a lot at two or three cents a word that they don't teach you in Creative Writing 101." And I'm not the only one who did this. [Robert] Silverberg, I think, did a couple of hundred of them. Malzberg did about 100. Even Marion Zimmer Bradley did a batch of [anonymous] lesbian books.
Was it just easier to get into?
Resnick: I don't think you could do it today. I don't think it pays anything anymore. There's always been a field in American letters where if you were fast and facile and willing to work under a pseudonym, you could make a lot of money while you were learning how to write. Over the years it's been sex books, it's been Gothics, it's been doctor-and-nurse romances. These days it's probably the lower-level Harlequin romances. But there's always been a field where you could do it. It just happens in the '60s it was the sex field. And as soon as I could get out, I did, and I think that probably held true for everybody else who was in it. We never saw a penny of royalties. Nobody ever expected them. You got paid for about four out of five books. The fifth never paid, and once you cashed your check that was it. You never saw anything else again. But you could make good money, especially if you combined it with some of the men's magazines and editing—a lot of us were making a hundred grand a year when we were in our 20s, back in the 1960s when that was enormous money. That was a real nice way to learn how to write. I don't think any of us have any apologies about it. We're just all glad we're out of the field.
When you look back at your science fiction, what themes do you see in your work?
Resnick: Oh, two or three. One of them, as you say is, of course, African themes. Another one is these Inner Frontier stories, these mythic stories I try to tell. The third one is humor. I get away with more humor than I ever thought I'd be allowed to. I just did a collection of short stories called In Space No One Can Hear You Laugh, which is a collection of 37 or 38 humorous short stories I managed to get into print. And I've sold six or seven humorous novels, and that's a lot for a guy who's supposed to be a serious writer. So I would say those three things: Africa, mythic stuff and humor.
When you're working on your humorous books, like The Outpost, is that just more fun to write than the serious stuff?
Resnick: Oh, absolutely. If I had to write only one kind of book for the rest of my life, or one kind of thing, I'd do humor. It's the one thing where I feel very, very self-confident. It's the one where I don't necessarily show it to my wife every morning, because I'm so sure it's good I send it off before she wakes up, or before I go to bed, I should say. But for all the serious stuff, I need her.
What is the secret for you continuing to write well after so many books and characters?
Resnick: Hey, I just turned 60. I only have to do it a few more years. Except I don't know any writer who's ever retired. Gravity slows us down, but that's not the same thing.
Well, you know Silverberg retired twice.
Resnick: I just talked to him today. He's writing again. He's semi-retired. He essentially priced himself out of the market—on purpose; it was the one way to get himself to slow down—plus he wanted to do some traveling, but he'll write till he dies, too. For a guy who doesn't write, he did a novel last year. He's doing a novel now. He does a monthly column for Asimov's. And he'll do short stories when he feels like it. That's some retirement. That's like my friend Barry Malzberg's retirement: Since he's retired he's like the fourth most prolific guy I know [laughs].
So will you ever retire?
Resnick: Never. I enjoy writing too much. You know, one of the things I live in fear of, and I think a lot of writers do, is the thought that someday they are going to find out that if they didn't pay us for it we'd do it for free. And if we got really desperate, we'd pay them to print it. We don't want them to know that at negotiating time. That's why we all have agents. We're afraid we'd blurt it out.
Do you ever run out of ideas?
Resnick: No. After you get used to writing, ideas are the easiest thing to come by. I think about a third of my ideas are from stories, movies, plays where I think they missed a better story.
Who do you think are the best writers in the field right now?
Resnick: Well, I think we have a lot of them. I think we just lost a wonderful one in George Effinger, and another very good one in Charlie Sheffield. I think right at the moment among the best would be [David] Brin, [Gregory] Benford, Malzberg, a wonderful new lady called Kay Kenyon—I'm really taken with her writing—Allen Steele, Joe Haldeman, Connie Willis, Nancy Kress, Harry Turtledove. I could go down the line and give you 30 or 40 more. I'm impressed with a lot of people. I'm impressed basically with anybody who could write a story that would never occur to me, and all of them do [laughs]. That's one of the things I like about this field.
Who do you sit down and read when you get a chance?
Resnick: Oh, I hardly ever sit down and read much science fiction, except for the current stuff, 'cause I have to see what's going on. But I would say in the history of science fiction, Robert Sheckley, Alfie Bester, Barry Malzberg, Olaf Stapledon and Catherine Moore would be my five favorites. Another one would be Cyril Kornbluth.
Are you happy with the overall level of science fiction today?
Resnick: I think we've reached a higher level of mediocrity. Greatness is nothing you can predict. There could be three great stories in a year and then not for five years. When I say a higher level of mediocrity, I don't mean that as a slam. I mean the run-of-the-mill story that is not going to get anthologized to win any awards is a hell of a lot better than the run-of-the-mill story of 30 or 40 years ago. And the same with novels. Some of that stuff, you never know how they got into print.
Do you feel the publishing market is healthy right now?
Resnick: I don't think right now any part of it's healthy. You look around and we've lost half our magazines in the last five years, and we didn't have many to start with. There's only one electronic publisher that's paying anything, that's SCIFI.com. I won't count Fictionwise cause they only buy reprints. And in novels themselves, Del Rey and Bantam have cut back. Ace has cut back. Avon has certainly cut back. I don't think anybody except Tor really is pushing out a lot of books, and from what I hear Tor is cutting back too. This is a terrible time for beginners because there's no mid-list anymore. All the media books have taken that over. Once upon a time if you were an eccentric writer like me or Gene Wolfe or Harry Turtledove, whoever, you could take 10 years building your audience. Your advances could go from five to 10 to 12 to 17 to 23 to 34 grand, whatever. Today, with that mid-list taken up by the media books, which are absolute sure sellers, you're going to make five grand or you're going to make 50, nothing in between. To go from five to 50 takes a hell of a leap of faith on the part of the publisher—and very few publishers are willing to make that leap. So an awful lot of writers are simply not being allowed to develop the way we were given the chance to do 20 and 30 and 40 years ago.
What advice do you have for new writers who are just starting out?
Resnick: My advice is the same as always. Stick it out until you can't. God didn't want everybody to be a writer, no matter how hard they try and how much they want to be. You'll find out soon enough.
One of the things I find appalling is that the Scott Meredith Agency—was the place that created fee reading. Now they were not the only fee readers around—by the end they may not have even been the biggest—but they got in hundreds of manuscripts every week. Now you multiply that by 40 or 50
agencies that read for fees, and you figure that for every person who is willing to pay four hundred bucks for an opinion, there are an awful lot who either don't even know they could pay it or don't have any intention of paying it. There's probably 3 or 4 million manuscripts a year going begging. That's a lot. It's like acting and prostitution, writing is—there are always talented amateurs who are willing to undercut you [laughs].
What other changes or developments or currents have you noticed in publishing?
Resnick: Well, the first one, of course, is the proliferation of fantasy, especially fantasy series. The second is the fact that almost nobody can sell a 60,000-word book anymore. You've got to sell over 100,000 words. It's as if the publishers don't trust the readers to know good from bad, but they sure know thick from thin. And what would be a third? The major one would be the proliferation of media books, above and beyond anything anybody ever anticipated. And I don't know that any of them are necessarily good trends. I think one or two are probably not. But those are the major things: that science fiction's far outweighed and outnumbered by fantasy, that everybody is writing fat books, and media books. Oh, I'll give you another one. I think the novel to which there are not prequels or sequels is an endangered species, and I consider that perhaps the most tragic of all.
I don't know for a fact, I've never talked to any shrinks about it, but I think it's probably the fact that almost every reader now has grown up on television, where they see the same pabulum and the same unchanging characters week in and week out, and now they demand it in their books. You know, I can remember when The Godfather II was one of the only two or three movies that was a direct sequel. Now every other movie that comes out has a roman numeral after it. It probably makes me an old codger who thinks the snow was whiter and the winters were colder and the air was cleaner—and maybe they were.
Some of my friends lament the fact that those 60,000-word books aren't being published anymore, too.
Resnick: I used to write a lot of thin books. You don't have to be a better writer to write a 200,000-worder, but you have to write totally different stories. You know, some books are worth 60,000 and some are worth 200,000, and we're just not telling those shorter, very good, stories anymore. Take a look at Asimov. Almost all his good stuff was done early in his career, when they let him write 70,000-worders. And almost all his bad, bloated stuff was the last 10 years of his life, because he was getting zillions of dollars and they were predetermined best sellers, but he had to give them 150,000 words, and he just wasn't very good at it. There are some wonderful 60- and 70,000-worders, but nobody is buying them today. In fact, I don't even think people are reprinting them today. I think people see thin books on the stands, they just avoid them, and I don't know why. The biggest change would be DAW. When Don Wollheim started that company he must have had a rule that no book could go over 160 pages. And now his daughter has been running it far more profitably—I'll be the first to admit it—I think her rule must be that nothing can go under 500 pages [laughs].
I still love science fiction. I've been a fan all my life. I consider myself at least as much a fan as a pro. I write for a hell of a lot of fanzines. I work at some conventions, and more of my friends are fans than pros, I should think.
And now you've got a lot of fans.
Resnick: Well, they're fans of my work. I'm talking about science-fiction fandom as a discrete social unit, which used to be a little bit bigger and less fragmented than it's become.
It's not an odd thing to enjoy science fiction these days.
Resnick: Yeah, but it's more than the fact that now there are media fans and there are costume fans, and there are this fans and that fans, and they don't talk to each other. First of all, I can remember WorldCons—this is going to sound like a joke, but it's not—when people who read and wrote science fiction were not a minority of the attendees. I can remember when we got into this, 95 percent of the fans wanted to be science-fiction writers. The other five percent wanted to be artists. Now all they want to do is watch, not read, and I think that that's fragmented fans. The fandom I grew up in, you can find traces of it in Chicago, and a lot of it in Cincinnati and Boston, but it's gotten smaller each year. It's fandom that knows what the Tucker Hotel is, and understands when you say FAPA you're not sneezing, you're talking about an amateur press association.
How does the world today compare to the future you imagined when you were a kid?
Resnick: It's a little more warlike. It's a lot dirtier. You know, we all imagined beautiful shining Frank Paul-type futures when we are kids. Personally, though, my life is exactly what I imagined. I always knew I wanted to grow up to be a science-fiction writer. The other thing I wanted to do was breed and exhibit collies, and I was one of the leading breeders and exhibitors of them in the 1970s. So I did everything I wanted to do.
But you're not done yet.
Resnick: No. No. Just more of the same. People ask me what's my best book. The honest answer is my second-best book is the one I'm working on now and my best book is the one I'm going to work on next [laughs]. And seriously, when I hand in a book or a short story or an article or a poem or anything else, it's perfect. I can't change a word or I wouldn't hand it in. And then I get to see a copy-edited manuscript and I change a word or two, and I see the galleys and I find a few more changes I want to make. And then I pick it up and read it three or four years later, and even if it's a Hugo winner, I wince that I let something like that get out of the house. And as long as I feel that way I'm still getting better, and I should keep at it. The day I don't feel that way, it's time to hang it up.
Through your life, what do you think is the coolest invention?
Resnick: [Laughs.] OK, I'm going to say the computer, of course. But on the lecture circuit, I do point out that we in the science-fiction trade and we in the writing trade tend to have a very skewed view of this, because if you want to see what had more influence on more American lives than the computer over the last 25 years, it's the microwave. The computer in a lot of homes is very much like Stephen Hawking's book on time—everybody has it and nobody reads it.
Do you think that's true with the Internet the way it is, with e-mail and the Web?
Resnick: Oh, sure. More and more people are doing it, but I would say probably a third of the computers that get bought don't get used. I think people may try once or twice and then just give up on it. Especially the older generations that are just scared to death of it. One of my parents thought it was magic, and the other one was just scared to touch it. I know a lot of people of their generation felt much the same.
I don't think it's going to go away, though.
Resnick: Oh, no. Of course, it's not going to go away. It rules most of your life. Now if you'd asked me 25 years ago, I would have said penicillin. To the generation that won World War II, it was probably a hell of a lot more important than the computer will ever be, but we move on.
When you're not writing, what are your interests?
Resnick: Let's see ... my interests would be Africa, musical theater, collies, basketball—not as a player anymore. And really science-fiction fandom. Those would be my primary ones. I have a number of lesser ones. Oh, and horse racing. I am a horse racing fanatic. For 17 years, I wrote a weekly column on horse racing without betting. I've been known to fly halfway across the country to watch Seattle Slew hook up Affirmed or Dr. Fager take on Damascus, but I don't bet.
What's your favorite musical?
Resnick: Oh, probably Sweeney Todd. I like most of Sondheim and most of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. I know that a number of other writers, most of them from New York, are very, very interested in musical theater too. We're always trading tapes and CDs and various bootlegs videos of shows.
Would you like to add anything else?
Resnick: As a kid, this is exactly what I wanted to do, and every now and then I have to pinch myself to make sure I'm really doing it.
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