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 ...

Urban warfare in a post-collapse scenario is cruel to all combatants. But when the fighters are children, their resilience and passions combine to make for a bittersweet tragedy.

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...

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 ...

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...

Matthew 28vs 18-20And JESUS came and spake unto them, saying,All POWER is given unto me in heaven and in earth 19Go ye therefore, teach all nations, baptising them inthe name of the FATHER and ofthe SON, and of the HOLY GHOST: 20 Teaching them to observe allthings whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo,I AM with you always, even unto the end of the worldAmen

"[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...

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...

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 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 ...

Blue Kansas Sky spans the past and future with a collection of the author's four short novels, including a coming-of-age tale set in Kansas in the late 1950s, an apartheid story from 1980s South Africa, and a twenty-first century spaceship adventure.

Through the means of what he calls "speculative fiction", Michael Bishop examines the various links between man and the supernatural by exploring the relationships and conflicts between mortals and deities of other worlds, in other times and within other cultures. His scope isn't limited to alien environments, however. Bishop's talent for transforming the commonplace into the fantastic often reaches into our own backyards, and the results are astounding:- A father's love for his so...