Michael Bishop - Free Library Land Online - Reference

Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 14:36:56 +0300

Ancient of Days

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 01:55:40 +0200

Now back in print--a powerful science fiction masterwork from the Nebula Award-winning author of Count Geiger's Blues. Ancient of Days is among Michael Bishop's most appealing works--the story of a prehistoric man found wandering in a Georgia orchard, whose honesty and deep spirituality bring him into conflict with the modern world.**

No Enemy But Time

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 01:55:39 +0200

John Monegal, a.k.a. Joshua Kampa, is torn between two worlds—the Early Pleistocene Africa of his dreams and the twentieth-century reality of his waking life. These worlds are transposed when a government experiment sends him over a million years back in time. Here, John builds a new life as part of a tribe of protohumans. But the reality of early Africa is much more challenging than his fantasies. With the landscape, the species, and John himself evolving, he reaches a temporal crossroads where he must decide whether the past or the future will be his present.No Enemy But Time won the 1982 Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of the year.

Who Made Stevie Crye?

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 01:55:42 +0200

Mary Stevenson Crye, a widowed young mother known as Stevie to family and friends, lives in a small Georgia town with her two children and a balky PDE Exceleriter. As a free-lance writer, she depends upon this device, once a state-of-the-art variety of typewriter, to generate income for her little clan. When the PDE Exceleriter goes noisily on the fritz, and a mess of things go wrong as a result-from her meeting with a weird young typewriter repairman named Seaton Benecke and Seaton's creepy pet, a monkey named 'Crets . . . to her "repaired" machine's tendency to type segments of her everyday life as she either lives or hallucinates it . . . to- -well, just know that the horror of Stevie's husband's death from cancer, along with her concern for the sexual angst of her son Teddy and her fight to solve her problems via her literary calling, leads her not only to the doorstep of the fortuneteller, Sister Celestial, but also into even scarier descents into Southern Gothic darkness. A novel of the American south, a tender and biting parody of 20th-century horror novels, and a gripping account of one woman's battle to save her sanity, Who Made Stevie Crye? will unleash a host of reactions from any reader-from laughter to disquiet to outrage to incredulity. In print again on the 30th anniversary of its original publication, this rare novel awaits new readers to frighten, bemuse, scandalize, and delight.**

Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

Tue, 24 Nov 1987 01:55:40 +0300

Battle of the Titans

Philip K. Dick died in February 1982 -- but not the 1982 of most history books. In this 1982 America has won the Vietnam war, colonised the moon -- and re-elected Richard Milhous Nixon FOUR times. Dick is remembered for his early realist novels, whilst his bitingly satirical SF circulates illegally in samizdat form. But if Phil Dick is really dead, who is the bearded amnesiac who wanders into to the Georgia office of an unsuccessful psychotherapist?

The ghost of Philip K.Dick?

Soon the seditious scribbler is making plans more bizarre than his own wildest inventions: to remake reality -- and fix "King Richard" Nixon once and for all...

"A wonderfully inventive novel and a lovingly crafted homage, by one

of the best of the younger SF writers" -- Publishers Weekly

"Succeeds remarkably well. . . masterful" -- Locus

A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 01:55:41 +0200

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 against a background of complex gender and religious polarization. The colorful details of alien settings and cultures are lovingly woven into this story of passionate individuals caught up in the sweep of history toward tragedy, change, and eventual renewal.

Transfigurations

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 01:55:41 +0200

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 daughter, Elegy Cather, comes to Bosk Veld to carry on his studies of the Asadi where he left off. With her is an intelligent ape, Kretzoi, physically adapted to resemble the aliens.Together with Thomas Benedict, Chaney's old partner, Elegy begins to unravel the enigma of the Asadi. As Kretzoi insinuates himself into their rituals, so we are drawn into what is perhaps the most convincing portrayal of the alien yet.

Brittle Innings

Wed, 11 Nov 1992 15:32:24 +0200

Frankenstein meets Field of Dreams in this nostalgic, gracefully written but fundamentally flawed baseball novel. Set in a sleepy Georgia town during WW II, this coming-of-age saga is based on the real-life story of Danny Boles, a major league scout who died of throat cancer in 1989. The fictional Boles leaves his rural Oklahoma digs to become shortstop for the Hightower Hellbenders, vaulting the Class C team into a pennant race in the process. Veteran writer Bishop (No Enemy but Time) delivers smooth and polished baseball prose and does some nice tricks with sports colloquialisms. He also tackles gritty issues such as the origins-in sexual abuse-of Boles's stuttering, the ravages of war and the rampant racism that plagued the sport. More problematic is Boles's huge teammate, slugging first baseman Henry "Jumbo" Cerval, who bears a suspicious resemblance to the gargantuan outcome of Victor Frankenstein's grand experiment. In the beginning, Bishop presents Cerval as a literate, likable freak. As the season unfolds, Cerval is revealed as the original monster, having escaped and survived for almost a century in the frozen North. Bishop milks the ludicrous premise for an intriguingly macabre ending, but the real problem is that Henry is far more interesting as a flawed human than as a scientific creation. That flaw aside, Brittle Innings should prove an engaging read for both sports buffs and fiction fans.

Count Geiger's Blues

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 01:55:38 +0200

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.**

A Murder in Music City

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:09:34 +0200

Nashville 1964. Eighteen-year-old babysitter Paula Herring is murdered in her home while her six-year-old brother apparently sleeps through the grisly event. A few months later a judge's son is convicted of the crime. Decades after the slaying, the author stumbled upon a secret file related to the case and with the help of some of the world's top forensic experts—including forensic psychologist Richard Walter (aka "the living Sherlock Holmes")—he uncovered the truth. What really happened is completely different from what the public was led to believe.
In this true-crime page-turner, the author lays out compelling evidence that a circle of powerful citizens were key participants in the crime and the subsequent cover-up. The ne'er-do-well judge's son, who was falsely accused and sent to prison, proved to be the perfect setup man. The perpetrators used his checkered history to conceal the real facts for over half a century.
Now, for the first time, the author...