Childhood friends Gary K. Wolf and John J. Myers grew up together in Earlville, Illinois. Today, Wolf is an author best-known for creating Roger Rabbit. Myers is best-known as the Catholic Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey. Together, they’re writing an action/adventure science fiction novel entitled Space Vulture.
In Wolf and Myers’s novel, “heroic Intergalactic Marshal Victor Corsaire and cowardly con man Jack Edward join forces with a beautiful and courageous widow and her two young sons to battle Space Vulture, the most villainous marauder in the cosmos.”
Of the early days of their collaboration, Wolf says, “We were in the seventh grade. We were both big readers, and we both liked science. John came to me with a book he’d discovered. He told me I had to read it because it was science and it was fiction. It was science fiction. That book was Anthony Gilmore’s pulp classic Space Hawk. I read it and loved it just as much as John had. We were hooked. After that, we sought out and read all the science fiction books we could find. I can honestly say that Space Hawk changed my life. Without Space Hawk, there would be no Roger Rabbit.”
“For as far back as I can remember,” says Myers, “reading has been one of my favorite pastimes. I still read voraciously. Space Hawk made as much of an impression on me in my early years as it did on Gary. We can both still quote passages from that book verbatim. Nowadays my reading is mainly theology although I do make time for fiction and even science fiction which I greatly enjoy.”
“One day, almost as a joke,” says Wolf, “I told John we ought to collaborate on a science fiction novel of our own, an homage to Space Hawk, doing a story as appealing to science fiction readers of today as Space Hawk was to us. To my great joy, John said, ‘Let’s do it.'”
They wrote the novel over a five-year period, collaborating by phone, e-mail, and face-to-face during Wolf’s frequent visits to Newark from his Boston home.
This is Myers’s first work of fiction, although he has published extensively in the scholarly and religious press. Wolf has published five previous novels including Who Censored Roger Rabbit, upon which the Spielberg/Disney movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit was based.
Agent Mickey Freiberg of The Acme Literary Agency brokered the six figure deal with Tom Doherty Associates editor Moshe Feder. Space Vulture will be published in late 2007 or early 2008.