Transfigurations

In a clearing in a continental forest on the planet BoskVeld, a hominoid species of alien, the Asadi, daily act out their enigmatic rituals. These lithe, mane-bearing simian creatures trudge about obsessively, their rainbow eyes spinning like pinwheels. Egan Chaney in his anthropological study, “Death and Designation among the Asadi,” has persuasively suggested that their lifestyle has devolved from a level of high technological sophistication to one of brute simplicity.

Six years after his disappearance into the Wild, Chaney’s daughter, Elegy Cather, arrives on BoskVeld to find him. With her she brings an intelligent ape, Kretzoi, genetically adapted to resemble the Asadi. Together with Thomas Benedict, once Chaney’s assistant and later the compiler of his controversial “Death and Designation” monograph, Elegy strives to unravel the secret history of the Asadi.

As Kretzoi infiltrates their rituals, we, too, begin to grasp the full incomprehensibility of a truly alien species and the complex horror of its devolution. Working in the modes of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and the anthropology-inspired fictions of Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Bishop dramatizes in Transfigurations both the innate difficulty and the scientific rapture of unriddling the unforthcoming Other.

Cover and book design by Patrick Swenson

Paperback

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-1-933846-70-5

Copyright © 2017 by Michael Bishop
“Introduction” © 2017 by Joe Sanders

A portion of this book, under the title “Death and Designation Among the Asadi,” © 1973 by UPD Publishing Corporation, originally appeared in Worlds of If

The author has significantly revised this FP/Kudzu Planet Productions edition of Transfigurations from its original 1979 Berkley/Putnam edition, as well as from a subsequent revised version published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, as part of its SF Masterworks Program. Indeed, this edition contains the author’s preferred text.

Fairwood Press
21528 104th Street Court East
Bonney Lake, WA 98391
http://www.fairwoodpress.com

Electronic version by Baen Books
https://www.baen.com