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 ...

In a clearing of the great forest of the planet Bosk Veld, a strange, ape-like species of alien, the Asadi, act out their almost-incomprehensible rituals, rainbow eyes flashing, spinning like pinwheels.Egon Chaney, in his anthropological study, "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" has shown how their life-style has apparently degenerated from a level of complex technological sophistication and devolved to a primal simplicity. Long after his disappearance in the forest, his daugh...

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 task...

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, acco...

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...

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 teammat...

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 ...

"A wonder-filled novel of ideas" - Samuel R. Delany"Bishop's work is always ambitious ... and artistically rewarding" - Publishers Weekly**"...**one of the best [books] I've ever read" - Amazon Reviewer, 5 starsAncient of Days tells the story of Adam, a habiline man - a living specimen of a multimillion-year-old hominid species, Homo habilis. Told from the perspective of Paul Loyd, a restaurant own...

Seth Latimer, a human member of a family of clones representing a far-future interstellar commercial combine, finds himself marooned on Gla Taus with no way home unless he joins a mission to a neighboring world to negotiate the transfer of a minority population from one planet to the other. The lure of trade expansion versus the grip of local custom and belief sets the story in motion. Secrets and treacherous intentions boil to the surface as diplomacy devolves into brutal expediency again...

The Sacerdotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales of Calamity, Pilgrimage, and Atonement 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 involve...

"[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...

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 oftypewriter, 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 weir...