Picture a stone. No, not a smooth and slippery river stone: a little rougher. Give it a color bright but not garish, with subtler depths of shade under the brightness. Now facet the stone into many sides, ninety maybe, or a hundred. Can you picture it? That’s Mike Resnick.

Mike, of course, is not going to agree with this portrait. He’s going to look at me sideways, grin, and disown the analogy, possibly with an obscene remark. But I stand by it, because I can defend it. With Mike, you need to be able to defend your opinions. He doesn’t take things on faith.

We met a few decades ago, at a convention somewhere - I no longer remember which con or where. Carol was with him and we all had a drink. Mike and I played some pool. I won one game, he won one. There has never been a rematch, although who knows? It could happen.

But about that stone. Each facet represents a different aspect of Mike - and there are a lot of facets. One is the writer whose tough-minded look at humankind creates noisy controversy. When the 1994 story “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” was first published, I remember a fellow writer stating on-line that if that story’s view of humanity were correct, she’d want to shoot herself. But it is correct. We evolved via violence; Darwin didn’t call it “the survival of the fittest” for nothing. Back on the African savannah, “fittest” often meant “most able to trounce the other guy.” We’ve kept that violent genetic heritage. And if we ever do have to start over, it will probably also be through violence. We may not like that view, but the evidence is there. And Mike respects evidence.

He also invited controversy with the entire “Kirinyaga” series of stories. When I first read my favorite of these, “For I Have Touched the Sky,” it brought me to tears, something that rarely happens when I read fiction. The Kirinyaga stories are set on an orbital whose inhabitants, Kikuyu from Earth, are attempting to recreate their society as it existed before white colonialism. The protagonist is Koriba, a witch doctor, who will sacrifice anything in order to maintain this artificial status quo. Because Koriba is such a convincing first-person narrator, many readers (and some critics!) believed that Mike was espousing Koriba’s values. However, as the society of Kirinyaga unravels over the course of many stories, it becomes clear that Mike’s intent was to demonstrate that social arrangements cannot be frozen in time and that societies, like sharks, must keep moving or die. To some of us, of course, his intent was clear all along, through his brilliant choice of such an unreliable narrator.

The new Eutopia-orbital story included in this issue, “Kilimanjaro,” concerns the Maasai rather than the Kirinyaga. But I would give good odds that it will be just as controversial, particularly for the character Will Blumlein.

In contrast to these tough-minded stories is another facet of Mike Resnick as writer: He can be a soft-hearted romantic. If you don’t believe me, look up such stories as “Distant Replay,” currently nominated for a Hugo, or “A Princess of Earth.” These are about love, and a very sweet, nostalgic, old-fashioned kind of love at that.

Then there’s Mike’s early career, in which he wrote newspaper articles, porn, Edgar Rice Borroughs pastiches, Gothics, a retelling of Moby Dick (The Soul Eater, 1981), and God-knows-what-else. More facets.

Mike is also one of the shrewdest businessmen in science fiction. It was from him that I learned a lot about how the business side of SF works. This took place at a breakfast at some con hotel well over a decade ago, and what he told me is still relevant. Mike, unlike me, knows numbers (including a surprisingly large collection of other writers’ numbers), and he keeps track of trends. To see this facet of Mike, you have only to read the Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues, now up to XXXVI, in the SFWA Bulletin. It was Mike, in fact, who told me about the existence of Subterranean Press, when it was just a fledgling enterprise.

Sometimes, however, I know more than he. For years I maintained that fiction writing can be successfully taught. Not, mind you, that even the best teaching can turn any aspiring hopeful into Ursula LeGuin or Robert Silverberg, but that any aspiring hopeful can be taught the basics of craft that so often take an interesting idea from unsalable to salable. Mike disagreed. So I challenged him to go teach Clarion, and he did. I imagine the students had an interesting week of it. So did Mike, because he emailed me afterwards, “I was astonished at how much they improved over the six weeks of Clarion. You were right.” Ah, how sweet it is!

Mike is also a fan. At any SF con, you are much less likely to find him in the SFWA suite than in the con suite or at fan parties. No matter how many Hugos and Nebulas he wins, he still defines himself as “a fan.” And he lives up to that label in the most valuable way possible: He actually reads the stuff, in quantity. Look at any list of Nebula recommendations: Mike has read, considered, and nominated the stories he thinks worthy.

What else? Dog breeder - he and Carol advised me on what breed to buy when I was canine-shopping - proud father of writer Laura Resnick, bawdy flirt, loyal friend. That’s a lot of facets, even for a man whose middle name is “Diamond.”

If you have not read “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” before, you have an involving experience ahead of you. The same is true of “Kilimanjaro.” And after you read them, go find the volume of Kirinyaga stories and read those. Then read… but you’ll make those decisions for yourself. And you’ll encounter, at least in print, some of the facets of Mike Resnick.

For the rest, you’ll have to play pool against him. Good luck!