Remembering Michael D. Weaver
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I was on ISFDB and noticed that today marks the 20th anniversary of Mike Weaver’s death.
Michael D. Weaver broke into the SF field with Mercedes Nights in 1987 and looked like he was going to be The Next Big Thing (or one of them, anyway). He published seven novels in nine years before dying at the age of 37.
At St. Martin’s Press, I worked on his first two novels, particularly his second one, My Father Immortal. In those pre-email days, he would call almost every day about this or that. He came to New York for the SFWA Authors and Editors party with his girlfriend, whose name was Angel (if my memory serves) and whose dress and looks led some people to think she had been hired from an escort service. (She hadn’t.) I got drunk at the party and made the mistake of telling Mike how I thought his novel was ideal for teens — how the book worked as a great metaphor for adolescence. He didn’t call for several days after that.
If memory serves, he died in a freakish accident — something like falling in the yard and having his head land in a bucket or puddle, where he drowned.
[Click the images for bigger versions.]
The Wolf-Dreams Trilogy, Avon Books (1987-89)
I don’t see much about him online but in this time when many of us are mourning Kate and Gardner and Ursula and others, I thought I’d share a few memories of him. I found photo a Mercedes Nights (I think the cover art is by Bill Sienkiewicz) and a few others to go with this post.
Gordon Van Gelder is the publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. His last article for us was A Few Thoughts on Jack Cady’s The Off Season.
I met Mike back in 1981 when we were both going through the Defense Language Institute at Lackland Air Force Base. He helped me form a gaming group in our dormitory (we played Dragon Quest rather than Dungeons & Dragons), and we shared music and books. I introduced him to Robert E. Howard, Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, and Karl Edward Wagner…and Marvel comics. Before I moved on from DLI, he agreed to work with me on a massive project I’d started developing in the late 1970s. We collaborated through about 1983, but he ran into some issues in the Air Force and wanted to start shopping stuff around to publishers. He was always far more self-confident than I could ever be, and his writing had made some serious jumps. I was in no hurry to start collecting rejection letters, so I supported him looking around for a publishing deal for his own work. It was so awesome when he landed his first sale. Later, when he was able to get Bill Sienkiewicz for a book cover, we both laughed like madmen. To us, that was the big time. After I married and moved from California to Illinois, we drifted. Tragic that he passed so young. I could never find out how he passed away.