Mutiny (23 page)

 
Character and

Ship Descriptions

Commander Wilson Cole:

There's not much special or heroic about Cole's appearance. Normal height, normal weight, no scars—not what you'd expect the most decorated man in the Fleet to look like (but then, Audie Murphy looked like an innocent, clean-cut kid, still wet behind the ears, rather than the most-honored soldier of World War II). He might be an inch or two below normal, or maybe just a little shorter than people expect their heroes to be. This is a guy who wins his medals with his brain, not his brawn, so as long as he doesn't look like Sylvester Schwarzenegger or Arnold Stallone, whatever you do will be fine.

Makeo Fujiama:

"Mount Fuji" was given the nickname not because he is the Captain, but because he's close to seven feet tall. He's Oriental in look and heritage, but wears the Westernized uniform of the Republic's Navy. He has a

strong face that belies his attitude; he's not a shirker or a coward, he's just a used-up man who has lost a wife and three kids to this war and is
tired-
—of the war, of command, of living. But he was a good officer once, and from time to time it still shows in his attitude and bearing.

Teddy R:

It's an old ship, war-scarred, tired. If it were around today, we'd say that only the rust was holding it together. The inside hasn't been remodeled, redesigned, re-anythinged in more than half a century. The corridors remind you of a middle-of-the-road hotel that's seen better days. If there's a modern fictional equivalent, try Herman Wouk's
The Caine.

The first description of the Polonoi:

The Polonoi are humanoid, bipedal, about five feet tall, burly, and muscular (males and females alike). They are covered, top to bottom, with a soft down, which is orange in normal Polonoi.

But the Polonoi in the military are a genetically crafted warrrior class. They have orange and purple stripes, not unlike a miscolored tiger. They are more muscular, able to respond faster physically to any dangerous situation. But what makes this warrior caste really odd is that their sexual organs, their eating and breathing orifices, and all the soft vulnerable spots (the equivalent of our bellies and midsections) have been engineered on the back sides (two words; not "backsides" in the traditional meaning) of them. They are warriors, built to win or die; to turn one's back on an enemy is to present him with all one's vulnerable areas. On the front of the face are large eyes that can see well at night and into the infrared, and a speaking (not breathing, not eating) orifice. Large ears protrude from the sides of the head and are cupped forward; they can hear very little that happens behind them. Their arms and legs are jointed similarly, but not identically, to Men's. Their hands have two opposing stubby thumbs and three more fingers that are so long and pliable that they act almost as tentacles.

If you were to stand a warrior Polonoi next to a Polonoi of any other caste, the casual—indeed, even the expert—observer would have a hard time believing they were even remotely related.

And that's Podok, and all the other Polonoi crew members.

Addendum:

The front of a warrior Polonoi is essentially natural armor, heavy bone beneath the skin. Hit it and you can break your hand. Stab it and you'll break your blade. You
can
shoot it, but the normal handgun, whether it fires projectiles, energy pulses, or lasers, isn't likely to be fatal.

Also: I didn't mention it, because if Podok's not eating in the covorillo it won't matter, but what she, and all military caste Polonoi, have is a long (perhaps 30 inches) prehensile tongue that can extend from their eating orifice. It doesn't see, doesn't smell, and doesn't hear—but has an undefined alien sense that lets it function
as if it
could see, hear, and smell. It can bring food to its mouth, and do a few other things— much as an elephant can do with its trunk—and when not being used the prehensile tongue goes back inside the body.

Locus,
the trade journal of science fiction, keeps a list of the winners of major science fiction awards on its Web page. Mike Resnick is currently fourth in the all-time standings, ahead of Isaac Asimov, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert
A.
Heinlein.

Mike was born on March 5, 1942. He sold his first article in 1957, his first short story in 1959, and his first book in 1962.

He attended the University of Chicago from 1959 through 1961, won three letters on the fencing team, and met and married Carol. Their daughter, Laura, was born in 1962, and has since become a writer herself, winning two awards for her romance novels and the 1993 Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer.

Mike and Carol discovered science fiction fandom in 1962, attended their first Worldcon in 1963, and fifty sf books into his career, Mike still considers himself a fan and frequently contributes articles to fanzines. He and Carol appeared in five Worldcon masquerades in the 1970s in costumes that she created, and they won four of them.

Mike labored anonymously but profitably from 1964 through 1976, selling more than two hundred novels, three hundred short stories, and two thousand articles, almost all of them under pseudonyms, most of them in the "adult" field. He edited seven different tabloid newspapers and a pair of men's magazines, as well.

In 1968 Mike and Carol became serious breeders and exhibitors of collies, a pursuit they continued through 1981. (Mike is still an AKC-licensed collie judge.) During that time they bred and/or exhibited twenty-seven champion collies, and they were the country's leading breeders and exhibitors during various years along the way.

This led them to purchase the Briarwood Pet Motel in Cincinnati in 1976. It was the country's second-largest luxury boarding and grooming establishment, and they worked full-time at it for the next few years. By 1980 the kennel was being run by a staff of twenty-one, and Mike was free to return to his first love, science fiction, albeit at a far slower pace than his previous writing. They sold the kennel in 1993.

Mike's first novel in this "second career" was
The Soul Eater
, which was followed shortly by
Birthright: The Book of Man, Walpurgis III,
the four-book Tales of the Galactic Midway series,
The Branch
, the four-book Tales of the Velvet Comet series, and
Adventures,
all from Signet. His breakthrough novel was the international best-seller
Santiago,
published by Tor in 1986. Tor has since published
Stalking the Unicorn, The Dark Lady, Ivory, Second Contact, Paradise, Purgatory, Inferno,
the Double
Bwana/Bully!
, and the collection,
Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun?
His most recent Tor releases were A
Miracle of Rare Design, A Hunger in the Soul, The Outpost,
and the
The Return of Santiago.

Even at his reduced rate, Mike is too prolific for one publisher, and in the 1990s Ace published
Soothsayer, Oracle,
and
Prophet,
Questar published
Lucifer Jones,
Bantam brought out the
Locus
best-selling trilogy of
The Widowmaker, The Widowmaker Reborn,
and
The Widow-maker Unleashed,
and Del Rey published
Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia
and
Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Amulet of Power.
His current releases include
A Gathering of Widowmakers
for Meisha Merlin,
Dragon America
for Phobos, and
Lady with an Alien
for Watson-Guptill.

Beginning with
Shaggy B.E.M. Storks
in 1988, Mike has also become an anthology editor (and was nominated for a Best Editor Hugo in 1994 and 1995). His list of anthologies in print and in press totals more than forty, and includes
Alternate Presidents, Alternate Kennedys, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, By Any Other Fame, Dinosaur Fantastic
, and
Christmas Ghosts,
plus the recent
Stars,
coedited with superstar singer Janis Ian.

Mike has always supported the "specialty press," and he has numerous books and collections out in limited editions from such diverse publishers as Phantasia Press, Axolotl Press, Misfit Press, Pulp-house Publishing, Wlldside Press, Dark Regions Press, NESFA Press, WSFA Press, Obscura Press, Farthest Star, and others. He recently agreed to become the science fiction editor for BenBella Books.

Mike was never interested in writing short stories early in his career, producing only seven between 1976 and 1986. Then something clicked, and he has written and sold more than 175 stories since 1986, and now spends more time on short fiction than on novels. The writing that has brought him the most acclaim thus far in his career is the Kirinyaga series, which, with sixty-four major and minor awards and nominations to date, is the most honored series of stories in the history of science fiction.

He also began writing short nonfiction as well. He sold a four-part series, "Forgotten Treasures," to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
is a regular columnist for
Speculations
("Ask Bwana") and the
SFWA Bulletin
("The Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues"), and wrote a biweekly column for the late, lamented GalaxyOnline.com.

Carol has always been Mike's uncredited collaborator on his science fiction, but in the past few years they have sold two movie scripts—
Santiago
and
The Widmvmaker,
both based on Mike's books—and Carol
is
listed as his collaborator on those.

Readers of Mike's works are aware of his fascination with Africa, and the many uses to which he has put it in his science fiction. Mike and Carol have taken numerous safaris, visiting Kenya (four times), Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Botswana, and Uganda. Mike edited the Library of African Adventure series for St. Martin's Press, and is currently editing
The Resnick Library of African Adventure
and, with Carol as coeditor,
The Resnick Library of Worldwide Adventure
, for Alexander Books.

Since 1989, Mike has won five Hugo Awards (for "Kirinyaga," "The Manamouki," "Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge," "The 43 Antarean Dynasties," and "Travels with My Cats") and a Nebula Award (for "Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge"), and has been nominated for twenty-seven Hugos, eleven Nebulas, a Clarke (British), and six Seiun-sho (Japanese). He has also won a Seiun-sho, a Prix Tour Eiffel (French), two Prix Ozones (French), ten HOMer Awards, an Alexander Award, a Golden Pagoda Award, a Hayakawa SF Award (Japanese), a Locus Award, two Ignotus Awards (Spanish), a Futura Award (Croatia), an El Melocoton Mechanico (Spanish), two Sfinks Awards (Polish), and a Fan-tastyka Award (Polish), and has topped the Science Fiction Chronicle Poll six times, the Scifi Weekly Hugo Straw Poll three times, and the Asimov's Readers Poll five times. In 1993 he was awarded the Skylark Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction, and both in 2001 and in 2004, he was named Fictionwise.corn's Author of the Year.

His work has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Dutch, Swedish, Romanian, Finnish, Chinese, and Croatian.

He was recently the subject of Fiona Kelleghan's massive
Mike Resnick: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to His Work.

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