Introduction:
THE QUALITY OF YEARNING
by
KELLY ROBSON
The City and the Cygnets brings together Michael Bishop’s complete UrNu cycle—a novel, and seven stories of varying length—into a complete, far-reaching volume. In this future history, the United States has contracted into independent city states isolated from one another, and from the world, by domes. The Atlanta Urban Nucleus is a conservative theocracy governed by a comically warped form of muscular Christianity, Ortho-Urbanism. The social and racial hierarchy is enforced by the church, which uses police-state tactics to quell revolt. And into this tense world-in-a-dome crucible comes the ultimate disrupter—aliens.
And into my hands comes this many-hundreds-page book. A new Michael Bishop novel, new to me, and likely new to you. I call myself blessed.
I’ve been a fan of Michael Bishop for most of my adult life. In 2013, when my wife Alyx and I moved across the continent from Vancouver to Toronto and had to cull our massive book collection, we left not one Michael Bishop book behind. They are permanent residents of the bookshelf reserved for our most treasured volumes. The novels and stories that mean the most to me—Brittle Innings, Count Geiger’s Blues, “Cri de Coeur,” “Simply Indispensable,” and “I, Iscariot” among them—are always on my mind.
The writers we love most in our youth are not always the ones we wish to be buried with. Over the years, our tastes change, our needs change, and their work changes too. Not all writers can sustain decades of excellence. But Mike can. Mike has. Mike does.
God, I wish I could write like him. I’m constantly stunned by his extraordinarily dexterous five-fingered command of language, his surprising vocabulary, his humor and playfulness, his burning intelligence, and, most of all, his compassion. He is the one writer who has most influenced my own work—to the point where, in a fit of enthusiasm while being interviewed by Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe for the Coode Street Podcast, I claimed Mike as my mentor. I quickly had to backtrack and explain.
You see, Mike’s work is so good. I’ve read so much of it over the years, my favorites multiple times. Brittle Innings has been my yearly re-read for more than two decades, against all odds because I don’t like baseball and usually don’t have time for books barely graced by female characters. So yes, if you cut open my brain, you will see Mike’s sentences written there. He is my mentor sine corpore—without body. I’m using Latin here to make it sound grand and non-creepy. But all it really means is I like his work. A lot.
Every place in the world deserves its own future histories, imagined by the people who live there. Few places get them. We’ve seen plenty of future New Yorks, Los Angeleses, Toykos, and Londons. These cities have had so many stories told about them—past, present, and future—that their imaginary versions create their own gravity, bringing immigrants and visitors from around the world. How many come because of the stories they’ve heard about the cities? Most: I would even say, all.
But these international metropolises are not the only places worth telling stories about.
The future Atlanta of The City and the Cygnets is a bomb waiting to go off. Its inciting incident, identified specifically in the chronology, is the 1973 assassination of Alberta Williams King, mother of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was (horrifyingly) shot by a young black man who claimed anti-Christian motivation. From this moment, The City and the Cygnets extends one hundred years into the future, in an Atlanta within a disarticulated United States where domed cities exist as “monuments to privilege, and tombs for all those trapped within.”
This is prescient. Though written at a time when most other science-fiction writers were obsessed with urban decay, Michael Bishop imagined the large cities of the USA as what they have become—expensive, overpopulated places where have-nots live in vertical poverty. Ours are towers; in an Urban Nucleus (or UrNu), these places are catacombs.
We begin with the fateful meeting of Fiona Bitler and Emory Nett-linger, two people who will ignite the fuse that brings down the Atlanta Urban Nucleus. Emory is a child. Fiona is his teacher. He is white. She is black. He is the son of the man who assassinated her civil-rights-activist preacher husband. Their relationship, born in violence and bigotry, will bring change to an alternative Atlanta in desperate need of it.
Fiona and Emory’s relationship is observed by Leland Tanner, a psychologist and human-development researcher. He goes on to conduct a gerontological study that allows senior citizen Zoe Breedlove to escape her family’s crowded subterranean boxflat by entering the Phoenix septigomoklan, a seven-person marriage. This social experiment is successful. Idyllic, even, except that the elderly participants begin inevitably to die of old age. The gerontological study is cancelled; the septigomoklanners are split up. But all is not lost.
Zoe and her spouse Parthena Cawthon are the last surviving Phoenixes. Parethena’s granddaughter Georgia is a member of the glissador corps, “the pantherine darlings of the hive,” flashy, athletic couriers who embody speed and fearlessness. Their foils are the hoisterjacks, masked terrorists who roam the hive threatening people, sometimes killing them, and mocking death by climbing the dome’s interior skin.
The glissadors provide essential services by moving goods and information around the city, while the hoisterjacks are simply violent criminals. But the hoisterjacks provide an important service too: they keep people afraid. An autocratic government like Atlanta’s Ortho-Urbanist theocracy needs its citizens to be afraid. Without fear, it cannot keep its grip on power. Because the glissadors exude youth, freedom, joy, and movement, they are beaten down, arrested, disappeared, and finally gassed to death en masse to quell a trumped-up revolt.
Here again, Michael Bishop is prescient. This is happening in the USA right here, right now, in 2019. Masked and armed riot cops confront peaceful protests demanding racial justice, while cordons of police protect the free-speech rights of white supremacists bearing actual Nazi iconography. It is enough to make me weep.
All this and we haven’t even gotten to the aliens yet.
Georgia Cawthon’s son Julian—the closest this multi-character epic gets to a main character—is orphaned in the faked glissador revolt. And as the police-state fist closes hard over Atlanta, Fiona Bitler and Emory Nettlinger return, quite literally from out of the wilderness, and bring aliens to Atlanta. This is possible because while the USA hunkered under its domes, turning its people into close-packed hermits, other nations and nation-cooperatives have gone to the stars.
These are aliens unlike any others in fiction. They’re passive, contemplative, reclusive. It’s impossible to connect with them, even when the government trots them out as part of a grocery-store bread-and-circus event. But their very existence throws open possibilities for the Atlanta UrNu, its greedy government, and a people starving for their future.
Hungriest of all is Julian Cawthon. Julian brings together all of the threads—the aliens, Leland Tanner and his geriatric septigomoklan experiment, his great-grandmother Georgia Cawthon, and a raft of other characters too numerous to mention here. All with their own vivid lives and fates, their own back stories, their own philosophical and psychological outlooks. The one thing they all share is a marrow-deep sense of yearning. This yearning is a common thread in Michael Bishop’s work. It is no common hunger. It is a yearning for connection, not with any single person but with everyone and everything—as well as for meaning, understanding, justice, and peace. Especially, it’s a yearning for connection with the godhead: John Donne’s plea to the deity to “batter my heart.”
I connect with this emotional posture on a molecular level. And no book is so satisfying to me as one that colors beyond the edges of this very common, very human, even Shakespearean (think Hamlet) but hard-to-grasp state. It’s there in Mike’s story “Simply Indispensable,” where the alien Joe Way offers humanity a key role in maintaining the coherence of the universe (an offer we reject because of our perverse inability to build consensus). It’s there in Brittle Innings, where World War Two-era baseball player Henry Clerval and his diminutive roomie Danny Boles yearn to join The Show—not simply a mark of fame and athletic prowess but of acceptance for their shared monstrousness. It’s there in Count Geiger’s Blues, where grumpy Übermensch-wannabe Xavier Thaxton gets his ultimate wish, even as true heroism remains just beyond his grasp.
And it’s here, every page soaked in yearning.
This is why writers write. Not because we know and understand things, but because we desperately want to know and understand. It’s the contradictions that fuel us, the sometimes ridiculous perversity of humanity, and our collective insistence on turning every which way but toward the light. Why do we do the things we do? Sometimes you have to drip 200,000 words onto the page in blood to begin to find out.
This is why I read and re-read Michael Bishop and will never put down his books. At my age, I like to think I know a few things about people. Mike knows more. But both of us know just enough to be bewildered. Humans aren’t simple, even—or especially—when they claim to be. This is not a simple book. But it’s a profoundly satisfying one. Satisfying in the answers it gives, and in the questions it asks that will never, ever be resolved.
* * *
Kelly Robson is an award-winning short fiction writer whose work has appeared in major science-fiction markets such as Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Uncanny Magazine. Her work, often translated worldwide, has appeared in many year’s-best volumes. She regularly contributes to Clarkesworld’s “Another Word” column. Her time-travel adventure Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach debuted in 2018 to high critical praise and was short-listed for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon awards. In 2018, her story “A Human Stain” won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. She has also been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the World Fantasy Award.
Growing up in the Canadian Rockies’ foothills, Kelly competed in rodeos and gymkhanas, and was crowned princess of the Hinton Big Horn Rodeo. From 2008 to 2012, she wrote the wine-and-spirits column for Chatelaine, Canada’s largest women’s magazine. After twenty-two years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica, now make their home in downtown Toronto.
