Starship: Mercenary (Starship, Book 3) (38 page)

Enter the Pirate Queens.

The most memorable of the early ones was probably Belit, who proved a perfect match for the redoubtable Conan, in Robert E. Howard’s classic “Queen of the Black Coast.”

Then Stanley Weinbaum came up with the Red Peri, who, like Belit, had a young Sophia Loren’s looks and a fictional Tarzan’s physical skills.

A. Merritt added the gorgeous Sharane, goddess, temptress, priestess, and, yes, Pirate Queen aboard
The Ship of Ishtar
.

And suddenly it was Katie-bar-the-door, and gorgeous, sword-wielding Pirate Queens were popping up all over the place, some good, some evil, all dressed for extremely warm weather. You couldn’t turn around without running into one.

And then something happened, and that something was John W. Campbell Jr., the most influential editor in the history of science fiction. He took over the editorship of
Astounding
in the late 1930s, made it the most prestigious magazine in the field, and paid so much (for that time) that it was more economically feasible for an author to rewrite a story a couple of times to Campbell’s specifications than to sell it fresh out of the typewriter anywhere else.

Campbell didn’t allow sex or sexual innuendo in
Astounding
—and nobody could deny that gorgeous, half-naked Pirate Queens had more than a little sexual appeal for the boys and the boys-at-heart who had made them so popular.

They didn’t vanish—nobody has ever made Topic Number One vanish—but they moved to the cheaper magazines, and at a quarter-cent to a half-cent a word subtlety went out the window, and most of their physical skills soon went the way of the dinosaur. Boys wanted heroes they could identify with, so the Good Guys were always males ... but they also wanted half-naked Pirate Queens, and for the better part of the next decade Pirate Queens became villains, out to conquer the galaxy (frequently by seducing it, one hero at a time).

They became such self-parodies following the advent of Campbell’s editorship and their mass migration to the cheapest pulp magazines that eventually a fine non-science-fiction writer named William Knoles wrote a very humorous piece of nostalgia for the November 1960 issue of
Playboy
titled “Girls for the Slime God,” a fond look back at all the vanished Pirate Queens and their vanishing clothes. Knoles’s definition pretty much says it all: “Unlike other Space Girls, Pirate Queens (the term is a generic one and includes High Priestesses and Amazon Despots) had things pretty much their own way until the last page. They playfully slaughtered passengers on space liners, jealously tortured the heroine, and forcefully seduced the hero.”

Alas, that was indeed the case. In 1997 I gathered together Knoles’s article, three Pirate Queen tales by Henry Kuttner, a tongue-in-cheek fictional rebuttal (“Playboy and the Slime God”) by Isaac Asimov, and a couple of related items, and the anthology
Girls for the Slime God
was published by Obscura Press.

Even last year people, including your humble undersigned, were making fun of the typical 1940s Pirate Queens. In my short story “Catastrophe Baker and the Cold Equations,” the Pirate Queen, who has been stowing away on the hero’s ship, asks him how he managed to identify her occupation so quickly. “Well, ma’am,” he replies, “in my long experience, Pirate Queens can always be identified by their exotic names, their lustful natures, their soul-destroying greed, and their proud arrogant bosoms.”

Easy targets, those 1940s Pirate Queens.

But like many another young boy who looks in the mirror and wonders where all that gray hair came from and why it no longer covers the top of his head, I have a residual fondness for Pirate Queens. So I thought I’d bring one back—but not one of the arrogant-bosomed empty-headed 1940s Pirate Queens. I reached a little further back in science fiction’s history for my source, back to Belit and the Red Peri and some of the Pirate Queens’ close relatives, like C. L. Moore’s wonderful Jirel of Joiry.

I knew she had to be good-looking, but I didn’t know why she had to be five foot four, so I made her the size of a pro basketball forward. I knew that if she grew up on the Inner Frontier and captained her own pirate ship for a dozen years, she’d have to be tougher than nails—not because she was a woman, but because she kept a crew of cutthroats in line all that time. I figured she’d probably drink a little too much, have indiscriminate sex a little too often, and swear like a sailor—but those traits would never mask her competence from Wilson Cole, who is not sexually attracted to her but sees all of her untapped virtues. He’s very much like the trainer of a headstrong two-year-old racehorse who is determined to bring out the best in her without breaking her spirit.

I’ve had a lot of fun inventing her; what surprised me was how quickly and passionately the readers took to her.

You know, maybe, just maybe, science fiction is ready for a few more [*sigh*] Pirate Queens.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L
ocus,
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. He is the leading award-winner among all authors, living and dead, for short science fiction.

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 science fiction 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 trio of men’s magazines, as well.

In 1968 Mike and Carol became serious breeders and exhibitors of collies, a pursuit they continued through 1981. 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 Widowmaker 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
,
A Club in Montmarte
, and
The World behind the Door
for Watson-Guptill.

Beginning with
Shaggy B.E.M. Stories
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 forty-eight, 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, Wildside Press, Dark Regions Press, NESFA Press, WSFA Press, Obscura Press, Farthest Star, and others. He recently served a stint as the science fiction editor for BenBella Books, and in 2006 he became the executive editor of
Jim Baen’s Universe
.

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-seven 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
, was a regular columnist for
Speculations
(“Ask Bwana”) for twelve years, currently appears in every issue of 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 Widowmaker
, 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 thirty 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, three Ignotus Awards (Spanish), a Xatafi-Cyberdark Award (Spanish), a Futura Award (Croatia), an El Melocoton Mechanico (Spanish), two Sfinks Awards (Polish), and a Fantastyka 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.com
’s Author of the Year.

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