The Life of Michael

Celebrating 75 great years!

and

Jun 29, 2025

HDR sepia tone photo by Greg Preston with Michael Whelan leaning against a door frame in the upper floor of his studio. His hands are in his pocket and one leg crosses the other with toe pointing down. His smile creases a dimple in one cheek. Book shelves fill the wall to the right of the doorway, and a stairway bannister occupies the immediate foreground right. The rest of the walls are cover with art and ephemera. — Photo by Greg Preston, *The Artist Within, Book 2*

The newsletter this week falls on a special day—Michael Whelan’s 75th Birthday! Please join me in wishing him all the best as he celebrates this magnificent milestone!

A few days ago, we were chatting about a prelim he recently unearthed that included art direction from Don Munson from Del Rey. Coincidentally, that note was dated 6/25/1984. Michael couldn’t believe that it had been almost 41 years to the day.

“Kind of chilling,” he said. “Can I be that old?”

75 great years! Thanks, Michael!

My mind went right to the new Mike Flanagan film Life of Chuck, an adaptation of Michael’s all-time favorite Stephen King short story. The film is a wonderful affirmation of life, delighting in the wonder that makes life so special for each one of us.

Age creeps up on all of us. It’s difficult to get a sense of scale in a story that is still unfolding, certainly not from the inside. It takes perspective, which leads me to our feature for this week, a conversation between Michael and his son that led to the painting THE ASTROPHYSICIST.

I hope you enjoy sharing this magical moment! There so much more of Michael’s story to explore.

-Michael Everett

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In a desolate parking lot, a young man in jeans and t-shirt lies back on a grassy island to shine a spotlight straight up into the night sky. Sparsely stippled, the heavens are awash in celestial vision as if touched by the clouds of a nebulae, rendered delicately in lavender over dark blue. Power runs from the light the man holds to a nearby car battery where jumper cables are clamped to the terminals. Fanned facing down, a book lies discard on the curb next to a soccer ball, which lies in the grass just beyond the man's head. Below the curb at his feet, a basketball rests on the cracked blacktop. — THE ASTROPHYSICIST (2008), Acrylic - 24" x 36"

When I started this painting, the major theme concerned the power of the human intellect to light our way into the universe. The balls in the picture came from a conversation I had with my son Adrian about space travel.

Explaining my sense of despair about the inadequacies of the space program, I was telling him about my childhood dream to be on a spaceship that went to Mars and how I felt that the human race would never get there.

I quoted an article by Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson called “Space: You Can’t Get There From Here” that I had read in Natural History Magazine. He outlined the [mostly unrecognized] scale of the problem of human space travel: "Space is vast and empty beyond all earthly measure....The Moon is far when compared with where you might go in a jet airplane, but it sits at the tip of our noses compared with anything else in the universe.

“If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the Moon would be the size of a softball some ten paces away — the farthest we have ever sent people into space. On this scale, Mars at its closest would be a soccer ball a mile away. Pluto, a baseball 100 miles away. And the nearest star to the Sun is a half million miles away."

Adrian shared my interest in astrophysics and cosmology. When he posed for this, he was a physics major in college. His response was that previous generations had also thought that many goals were impossible, but that technological advances and advances in scientific understanding brought them into realization.

I'm not sure. We may have missed the window in which the collective will and the resources necessary for such a trip could sustain and pull off such an effort. Adrian felt I was being unduly pessimistic, so that’s him in the painting lighting my way.

Additional images from THE ASTROPHYSICIST

LEFT: Detail from THE ASTROPHYSICIST featuring a narrow grassy island surrounded by blacktop striped yellow for parking spaces. A man lies on his back there shining a spotlight up to the heavens. A swath of trees runs shadowy along the horizon. Above a beautiful night sky of swirling celestial clouds is interrupted only briefly by the stippling of stars. CENTER: Figure detail from THE ASTROPHYSICIST featuring a dark haired, bearded young man lying on his back. He holds a spotlight just over his chest pointed up at the heavens. Jumper cables run from a battery to the spotlight he is pointing straight up into the heavens. RIGHT: Foreground detail from THE ASTROPHYSICIST featuring the weathered blacktop of a desolate parking lot. Yellow stripes mark parking spaces next to a grassy island. One stripe is intersected near the base by the circle of a manhole cover. — Details from THE ASTROPHYSICIST

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New Generation, New Discoveries

Adrian went on to earn his PhD in Astrophysics. Notably he led a team that discovered a star cluster with extragalactic origin that was named Price-Whelan 1.

He hypothesized that this new star cluster (117 million years old) was created in the collision between the Magellanic Cloud and the Milk Way. If you’d like to read more about Price-Whelan 1, you can find more about the discovery here.

Rotating animation of galaxy and Magellanic Clouds showing the star cluster's location. — A visualization of Price-Whelan 1 in relation to the Milky Way (white) and the Magellanic Cloud (large and small, purple)

Reader Poll Results

It looks like the familiar wins out again with the human cover taking a sizable lead over the alien for The Madness Season. Interestingly, it was an even split between covers for readers who had bought the book, with an impressive 22% buying both covers.

Side-by-side presentation of alternate covers for THE MADNESS SEASON by C.S. Friedman. On the left is the alien backed by a burning yellow sun. On the right is a human male backed by a cool blue planet with thin, swirling clouds.

Weekly Art Recap

Grid of images 3 across in 2 rows corresponding to the list below. — Art featured from June 23 - 28

Thanatos - cover for the 1st book of Incarnations of Immortality by Piers Anthony
Terminus - mulling over the faded promise of the Apollo program
Drive Time in Orbit City - 5th in the 2025 Leftovers & Palette Gremlins gallery
Out of the Shadows - a crossover between the Faded Star and Passage series
The Gunslinger Followed - completing the famous 1st line of The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Coming Soon(ish)…

There will be no art release this week in observation of Michael’s birthday and the July 4th holiday. We’ll resume Whelan Wednesdays the following week on July 9 at 11am ET with the reveal of a new original painting.

For paid subscribers, we will be releasing an exclusive digital wallpaper of DAETRIN, the cover art for The Madness Season by C.S. Friedman. I’m aiming for Wednesday on that.

The daily posting schedule might be a little irregular for a few weeks as I (Mike not Michael) settle in with Lola, an 8 month old pup that I rescued from the park this week. I’ll be sharing Lola’s hijinx on my Bluesky if you want to follow along with this sweet girl.

LEFT: Day one - A brown/black stray dog perches on a rock in the park. Her head is tilted as she looks curiously at the camera. She’s clearly a bully breed with a white patch on her chest. CENTER: Day one - The stray tentatively peeks under a traffic barrier to the sidewalk at the edge of a bridge. RIGHT: Day two - Lola, as she has now been named, has been loaded in the car with the help of a couple of good samaritans and some doggie treats. She sits in the backseat, peeking her head around the headrest of the passenger seat. Her tongue is out and she’s looking directly at the camera. — Lola on her rock in the park, coming out for treats, and heading to her new home

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Rohvannyn Shaw

The happiest of birthdays to Michael, who has inspired me ever since I first discovered his work 30ish years ago, on the covers of the Pern novels. To this day he's still one of my favorite artists of the modern era, perhaps my favorite. A note, though - I really respect a person who shares responsibility for raising a future astrophysicist. Both artists and astrophysicists have their own special parts to play in exploring this wonderful, beautiful universe of ours. Both can be their own beacon of light. May everyone reading this note feel a moment of joy today. :-)

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Andrew Porter

I took photos of Michael at home a long time ago, working on cover artwork, and doing such as taking out the trash. Also took photos of him at SF Convention art shows, sharing his art with his mentor.

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