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 ...

"[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...

Contains books one and two of the Ascension Gate series.A gateway to the stars. A colonization mission gone wrong.The Marines hold the fate of our universe in their hands.It was supposed to be a peaceful exploration, Earth's first step in expanding to the stars. But, no plan survives first contact. Thrown into a battle for survival against the deadliest threats imaginable, the Marines must contend with ice and desert planets with mysterious creature...

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 ...

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...

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 be...

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...

IsaiahI had my chance at a family and it was stolen from me. I was told I was a joke, so that's just what I'll be.But then she gives me news that turns my whole life upside down. Nina Williams is my second chance at a family and she might just be the missing key to my heart. I just need to prove to her I'm not the joke I pretend to be.NinaAfter the loss of my parents, I'm all my brother and sister have. I'm trying to piece m...

LincolnI had my chance at love and I threw it away. I don't deserve another. I've dedicated my entire life to my community. There's no time for anything else.But then I met her. Ciara Jeffries is everything I told myself I didn't want but she might be everything I need. If I can just hold on to her.CiaraIf I don't get out of this town I'll lose my sanity, my loved ones, and my life. I need a fresh start and Austin, Texas, fe...

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...

A multinational expedition has landed on the planet Onogoro, a cold and dour world circling one star of a binary pair. Their objective is to investigate a strange alien race, known to the human visitors as the Kybers. These aliens, dwelling in a great network of ruined palaces, are partly biological creatures and partly machines, with the ability to switch themselves off at will. Expedition scientists discover that the Kyber's sun is soon to blaze up in a nova, yet the Kybers are not alarm...

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 ...