This retrospective Michael Bishop collection of fifty short pieces (thirty-four stories, fifteen poems or prose-poems, and one amusing Moon-based play about writing SF, “The Grape Jelly and Mustard Method”) spans the author's entire career, from “Asytages's Dream,” written while Bishop was a college student, to “Yahweh's Hour,” an acerbic but moving work of science-fantasy political satire composed in 2020.

The collection's most distinctive attribute, however, lies in the fact that no contribution is longer than 3,000 words and most are shorter, a kind of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories for lovers of short fiction, heartfelt pieces that afford the reader as much meat as they do flash.

”A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals,” set on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, embodies a requiem for the entire human species. “Philip K. Dick is dead, a lass” memorializes in verse science fiction's preeminent bard of the reality breakdown.” “Love's Heresy” and “The Library of Babble” appear to be channeling the labyrinthine mind of Jorge Luis Borges, albeit with surprising jinks all their own. And the list of narrative explorations grows and grows . . .

Humor and horror, music and whimsy, primates and pathology, mice and men, religion and rebellion: these stories and poems cover the waterfront of human experience while acknowledging the singularity of each human life.

What if a living specimen of Homo habilis appeared in the pecan grove of a female artist living in Georgia? What if she reached out to her ex-husband, a restaurant owner in the small town of Beulah Fork, to help her establish the creature’s precise identity? From these dramatic speculations, Michael Bishop creates a complex story spanning several years in the late 1980s and intertwining the lives of many fascinating and/or exasperating characters, including: RuthClaire Loyd, an artist tasked with an ambitious project to illustrate several species of early human progenitors; Paul Loyd, the narrator of Ancient of Days, who believes that his rekindled devotion to RuthClaire will somehow win her back; Brian Nollinger, an anthropologist at the Yerkes Primate Center, whom Paul entices into this matter with disconcerting results; Dwight “Happy” McElroy, a televangelist out of Rehobeth, Louisiana, who never passes up a chance to fund-raise, proselytize, or damn; A. P. Blair, a world-famous paleontologist and authority on human evolution, who at first believes that RuthClaire’s “hominid” is an inept hoax; and Adam Montaraz, the habiline himself, a bipedal fossil whom RuthClaire has christened and whom she dares to take into her home.

Over the course of Ancient of Days, these characters and others work out their loves and conflicts across a variety of backdrops—from rural Georgia to the bistros and back alleys of Atlanta, all the way to the forests and caves of antique Montaraz, an enigmatic island under the dictatorial sway of “Baby Doc” Duvalier of Haiti. A rare combination of science fiction, noir mystery, and comedy of manners, Ancient of Days will involve and challenge you as have few other novels.

In 1943, at the height of World War II, the Highbridge Hellbenders of the the class-C Chattahoochee Valley League deep in Georgia acquire a 17-year-old shortstop from Oklahoma named Danny Boles. The Hellbenders snap him up because he’s too young for the draft and preternaturally talented. In Highbridge, they make him the boarding-house roommate of an enormous first baseman with the awe-inspiring skill of blasting monster home runs out of the CVL’s tumbledown ballparks. Known to his teammates as Jumbo Hank Clerval, this mysterious giant and the mute Danny Boles strike up an improbable friendship that culminates at the hot season’s end in triumph and disappointment, not to mention a host of haunting discoveries in both the simmering South and the wind-swept Aleutian Islands.

Hailed by critics as a contender for the Great American Novel laurel, Brittle Innings evokes a bygone era of worldwide conflict and homeland unity. It also convincingly links documented wartime history with the immemorial mythology of the superhero and the legendary status of baseball as the unchallenged American pastime. If you read it, you will not forget it.

Count Geiger’s Blues follows the adventures of Xavier Thaxton, arts editor at a major Southern daily called the Salonika Urbanite. Thaxton thinks himself a superior man. His aesthetic standards are so lofty that he regards superheroes as pop-culture cock-and-bull, rock music as audible rubbish, and soap operas as the contemptible spew of script-writing committees.

While skinny-dipping in a pool polluted with radioactive waste, Thaxton is afflicted with superpowers all his own and becomes that which he most scorns. A radiation-induced ailment, the Philistine Syndrome, forces him to assume the persona of comic-book hero Count Geiger to allay its career- and indeed life-threatening symptoms.

Michael Bishop’s Count Geiger Blues, a novel of intellectual heft and self-spoofing kitsch, is a take on superheroes like no other: a rollicking foray into high and low culture that mines the vicissitudes and tragedies of everyday life for serious belly laughs and bona fide heartbreak.

FP201408 August 2014 Fairwood Press Books

Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

FP201411 November 2014 Fairwood Press Books

The Best of Electric Velocipede

edited by John Klima

Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

Joel-Brock Lollis's family has vanished into the labyrinthine Sporangium below a curious Georgia emporium, Big Box Bonanzas. Glimpses of an older J-B Lollis of the Atlanta Braves on a BBB television suggest that Joel-Brock may never get back his parents and sister. The Valorous Smalls—almost-ten Joel-Brock, lively teen Addi, and tiny detective Valona—forge their way into the mushroom realm to change that possible future. Young readers who enjoy quests with marvels in the kingdom of the weird—mushroom warriors! mazes! time games! giant slugs!—will find much to interest, amuse, and surprise them in Michael Bishop's unusual fantasy, Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls, well and profusely illustrated in pen-and-ink by Orion Zangara.

Michael Bishop's Nebula Award-winning novel has been newly revised for its fortieth anniversary.

Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to question the understanding of eminent paleontologists. As a result, Joshua is invited to join a most unusual time travel project and is transported millions of years into the past of his dreams. In early Pleistocene Africa, living among the pre-human species Homo habilis, experiencing the same hardships and the same intense pleasures, Joshua finds, for the first time in his troubled life, not only contentment but real love—a love that transcends almost everything.

Intelligent, thoughtful and deeply moving, No Enemy but Time brilliantly evokes the remote past and, at the same time, presents a powerful and convincing portrayal of a relationship surmounting even the most daunting barriers. It is a challenging and highly original novel exploring the nature and origins of humankind.

This collection gathers together Michael Bishop's mainstream stories set in Georgia or featuring characters from Georgia. The collection represents the culmination of a career-long project that Bishop did not fully realize he had embarked upon, but that he did always have in the back of his mind. It opens with a hommage, both poignant and funny, to Flannery O’Connor, and closes with his daringly satirical Nebula Award-nominated novelette “Rattlesnakes and Men.”

In this heartfelt science-fiction homage, Philip K. Dick dies in 1982 in Santa Ana, California, during the fourth term of the repressive imperial presidency of Richard Milrose Nixon. Soon thereafter, stripped of his memory, Dick turns up in the office of Lia Bonner, a young psychotherapist in Warm Springs, Georgia. Ultimately, Dick manifests at Von Braunville, the American moon base, as a key figure in a gonzo conspiracy to trigger a “redemptive shift” of world-changing scope. Indeed, according to The New York Times, the ending of Michael Bishop’s wittily inventive Dickian extravaganza “approaches sublimity.”

"[These] stories . . . elliptically chronicle the life of [an alternative] Atlanta, Georgia, 2000-2070. Beneath a huge artificial dome that blocks out the stars, hierarchically stashed on nine subterranean levels with computer-controlled simulations of weather and seasonal change, the citizens of this grim, bureaucracy-ridden sardine tin . . . contrive not just to endure but to prevail. Through 70 years of increasing repression, various free spirts turn a living cubicle into a facsimile of a starship in deep space, experiment with multipartner 'marriages' for the elderly, or dearly earn moments of mutual benison with an unwanted cubicle-mate. . . . bearing witness to the weedlike survival of human instinct and aspiration in the most confining and programmed environment." [from Kirkus Reviews]

The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales gathers four of Michael Bishop's unusual longer stories, from different stages of his almost fifty-year career, into a single remarkable volume. The title story, a deft mix of exotic Joseph Conrad and colorful 1930s pulp adventure, drops the reader—along with self-reliant heroine Lace Kurlansky—into a fictional Latin American country in which the ancient Maya have arisen from extinction into active involvement in a tortuous civil war. Next, in the early short novel And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees, Bishop imagines a far-future society on a harsh alien world facing three major calamitous challenges and turning to a fault-ridden genius, Gabriel Elk, to meet and overcome at least two of them. By contrast, "To the Land of Snow" follows the multi-year voyage of a 21st-century starship carrying a cargo of disaffected Buddhist colonists to a planet nearly twenty light years from Earth, all from the perspective of an unorthodox Dalai Lama born aboard the vessel itself. Finally, in the controversial "The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis," an evangelist for an otherworldly female redeemer—an evangelist who is also the navigator of an interstellar expeditionary force—sets out in scriptural format his testimony that this huge sentient insect represents the second coming of Christ. So open The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales at any story, in any order, and discover the brave, far-ranging, unpredictable talent of Michael Bishop writing at his best at these longer lengths in four exciting subgenres of the SF and fantasy fields.

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.

A Novel of an Alternative 1985 in the History of the United States

Unicorn Mountain, a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel, here appears in a re-edited and revised version in Michael Bishop's preferred text some thirty years after its original publication, when it was hailed for its adult focus, its gritty characters and situations, and its imaginative narrative elements, which include ranching in Colorado, Ute Indian lore, a Denver-based advertising firm, Swing Era music, an old Bendix TV set that transmits signals from an askew parallel Earth, and, last but no less disquieting, transdimensional migrations of living unicorns.

These four characters dramatically animate Unicorn Mountain:

• Elizabeth (Libby) Quarrels: a woman struggling to make a go of the ranch that she has won in her divorce from ex-husband, Gary, who perhaps inadvertently pushes Libby to take in and care for a disinherited first cousin of his infected with AIDS.

• Beaumont (Bo) Gavin, the first cousin, a sardonic but brilliant young man working for an independent advertising firm in Atlanta, Georgia, but one whose guilt over abandoning his late partner is as painfully mortifying to him as the disease he harbors.

• Samuel (Sam) Coldpony, a Ute Indian man who is Lib's only paid cowhand because he has a magical way with animals; also, he is perhaps the first resident of Remuda County, Colorado, to spy unicorns on Libby's upland property and to verify their existence in this reality.

• Paisley (Payz or Alma) Coldpony, Sam's only daughter, a young woman determined that her dream-calling to take part in the Utes' Sun Dance outside Ignacio, Colorado, will make her the first female to dance in that annual event.

Mary Stevenson Crye, a recently widowed young mother known as Stevie to her family and friends, lives in a small Georgia community with her two children and a balky PDE Exceleriter. As a free-lance writer, she depends upon this last-named device, once a state-of-the-art variety of typewriter, to create income for the maintenance of her small clan.

Then the PDE Exceleriter goes noisily on the fritz, and so many other things begin to go wrong as a result -- from her meeting with a weird young typewriter repairman named Seaton Benecke and Seaton's creepy pet, a capuchin monkey named 'Crets . . . to her "repaired" machine's insistence on typing segments of her everyday life as she either lives or hallucinates it to . . .

Simply let it be known that the horror of Stevie's husband's death from cancer, of her concern for the sexual angst of her son Teddy, and of her doomed but persistent struggle to solve all her problems via her literary calling lead her to the doorstep of a fortuneteller, Sister Celestial, and on to even more remarkable descents into Southern Gothic darkness.

A novel of the American south, an alternately tender and scathing parody of twentieth-century horror novels, and an involving account of one woman's battle to maintain her sanity, Who Made Stevie Crye? will unleash a gamut of reactions from any attentive reader . . . from laughter to disquiet to outrage to incredulity. Back in print again on the thirtieth anniversary of its original publication, this novel awaits new readers to frighten, bemuse, scandalize, and delight. Why not join, or rejoin, them?