Jim Baen's Universe

The Editor's Page

Columns

Editor's Page February 2007

Written by Mike Resnick

So here I am, the new Executive Editor of Jim Baen's Universe. And here you are, wondering who the hell I am and what I like.

Who I am is easy. I'm Mike Resnick, I sold my first science fiction novel exactly 40 years ago (don't hunt for it; it's pretty awful). I sold my first few science fiction stories even earlier (you might very well enjoy hunting for them; they were the "redeeming social value" in a trio of men's magazines, stuck in there to make all the naked women legal). I attended my first Worldcon in 1963—I was a mature 21, my child-bride was 20—and we've been going back ever since.

I started selling stories and articles when I was a teenager. Somewhere along the way to 2007 I learned how to write acceptable prose (though I'm sure there are critics who would disagree). After producing a few million lesser words in lesser fields, I've now sold over 50 science fiction novels, close to 200 stories, more than a dozen collections, even a couple of screenplays, and I've edited close to 50 anthologies. Along the way I've won a bunch of Hugos (5), lost an even bigger bunch (23), and according to Locus I have won more awards for my short science fiction that any writer living or dead. (I have also lost more, but you have my permission to forget or ignore this fact.)

I've edited anthologies, as I said, and I spent a couple of years this decade editing science fiction for BenBella Books, but until now I have never edited a science fiction magazine. I've wanted this freedom for a long time. By freedom, I mean that just about every time you sell an anthology, you must sell it based on a theme, and while it's interesting to edit the best Alternate Kennedy stories or the best Sherlock Holmes in the Future stories, it is a bit limiting for both the writer and the editor. Here at Jim Baen's Universe I am free to select the best stories regardless of theme or subject matter, to help writers produce the best stories they can write rather than the best Space Cadet or Dinosaur or Christmas Ghost story they can write.

So what do I like?

It's going to sound like a cop-out, but I like good writing. I used to write in the "adult" field, so I guarantee you can't shock me. I've sold perhaps 60 funny science fiction stories, so you're not going to get turned away because your story isn't serious enough. I've won awards at every length, so I will not react unfavorably to any length.

But give me a story that's poorly written, carelessly conceived, clumsily worded, or filled with cardboard characters, and I don't care if you've been my friend for half a century, you're not going to sell me. Jim Baen's Universe is not just paying the best rates in the field, but much the best, literally 3 times more than Analog, Asimov's and F&SF pay for short stories by major authors, and for that kind of money, we expect—and I demand—stories that are worth what we're paying. Simple as that.

Other than the demand for good writing, the market's wide open. I don't believe in editorial soap boxes. I learned a long time ago that trying to shoehorn a writer into a style or subject I liked, rather than helping him create what he liked, was counter-productive. I love Robert Sheckley's humor, and I loved the humor in Robert E. Howard's Breckenridge Elkins stories—and neither of them wrote the kind of humor I do. I can admire Edgar Rice Burroughs' fantastic adventures and Eric Flint's alternate historical adventures and Fred Saberhagen's futuristic adventures, and none of them read remotely like my own adventures. Indeed, when I make a list of my favorite science fiction writers—Alfred Bester, Barry Malzberg, C. L. Moore, Clifford D. Simak, Robert Sheckley, James White, a number of others—I find the one thing they have in common is that none of them writes like me. In fact, that's one of the prime reasons I admire them: because they come up with stories and styles and approaches that are fascinating to me precisely because what they write is so different from what I write. (Why in the world should I want to read Imitation Resnick or Watered-Down Resnick when I can read unique and original Heinlein and Zelazny and Willis? And on those occasions that I want to read a Resnick story, whose writing I immodestly admit to liking, well, I'm on pretty good terms with the source and will simply suggest that he write one.)

Over the years, I've edited a number of stories that have won or been nominated for Hugo Awards, but the editorial feat of which I am proudest is that in the decade of the 1990s I bought more first stories than any of the major magazines, indeed than all of them put together, and that 8 of "my" discoveries made the Campbell ballot (science fiction's Rookie of the Year award), and one of them—my daughter, in fact; good genes there—won it.

I am committed to editing the best science fiction around, but I am equally committed to encouraging the next generation to produce it. When Burroughs and A. Merritt and Olaf Stapleton had shot their bolts, along came Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon. A decade later we had Sheckley and William Tenn and Jack Vance. Then came Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, A few more years and we had Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne McCaffrey. Then along came George R. R. Martin and Connie Willis and Orson Scott Card. A new batch of superstars makes the scene every few years. Along with presenting the best of the current ones, we owe it to the readers, and indeed to the field itself, to find and present the next generation as well.

Newcomers have a lot of stories to tell. They don't fall into the trap of telling the same story over and over again. That they leave to television, and that we'll leave to lesser magazines, which is one of the reasons I am so committed to finding the best of them.

I'm glad to be aboard. . Eric is still the head honcho, and production schedules being what they are very little of my editing will show up here before the last couple of months of 2007. But I'm at work on those future issues right now, and I promise to do my best to please you.

—Mike Resnick