Michael Bishop

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions No. LXXXV (Fowler + Bishop + Brunner + Blish)

/ Joachim Boaz / 19 Comments

Dallas Part V (and some older finds) (Part IV, Part III, Part II, Part I)!

Love Brunner, want his short stories, enough said….

Also, I have a love hate relationship with Blish (love his “hard” SF and dislike his juveniles of which he wrote a many and often in a “hard” SF series)—The Frozen Year (1957) supposedly is his attempt at a “realistic” SF novel.  I’ll just have to see…  I feel weirdly compelled to read it.

As for the Karen Joy Fowler collection—yes, she wrote in the 80s!—the book sorters at the Half Price Books failed to realized that it was a signed copy!  So for a mere dollar I now have only my second signed SF work after D. G. Compton’s Scudder’s Game (1988).  As people have probably realized, I completely eschew conventions and have little connection with fandom and thus do not go out of my way to procure signed editions…

Michael Bishp=one of my new favorite authors (after reading Beneath the Shattered Moons and A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire).  Hence, Catacomb Years (1979) is a welcome addition to my collection.

Thoughts?

1. No Future in It, John Brunner (1962)

(Uncredited cover for the 1965 edition) Continue reading →

Book Review: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, Michael Bishop (1975*)

/ Joachim Boaz / 27 Comments

funeral

(Gene Szafran’s cover for the 1975 edition)

Nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novel

5/5  (Masterpiece)

*First, a preliminary note on the publication history:  I read the original, unabridged 1975 edition.  However, Michael Bishop “completely rewrote” the novel in 1980 (according to ISFDB and his introduction to the later edition).  The 1980 rewrite—initially titled Eyes of Fire but later confusingly released under the original title, A Funeral For the Eyes of Fire-–was the one republished and recently available as an eBook through SF Gateway according to Bishop’s wishes.  I would prefer my readers, if they are interested in the volume, to not hesitate in snatching up the original.  I suspect both are worth reading.

Fresh off Michael Bishop’s strangely wonderful And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (variant title: Beneath the Shattered Moons) (1976) I eagerly devoured his first published novel, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975)—and with this work, bluntly put, he enters my pantheon of favorite SF authors.  Bishop, completely in command of his narrative, weaves together a literary and anthropological tapestry filled with stories within stories and delicate interplay between these layers.

The deceptively simple premise unfurls into a complex and moving meditation on culture clash and the power of ritual, threatening at every moment to explode into violence.  This is perhaps the most sophisticated rumination I  Continue reading →

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions N. LXXX (Bishop + Herbert + Malzberg + Offutt)

/ Joachim Boaz / 15 Comments

Stopped briefly in St. Louis to peruse a used book store and came across these…  Another work by one of my new favorite SF authors, Michael Bishop.  Short stories by Frank Herbert, and an intriguing post-apocalyptical vision by Andrew J. Offutt (with a fantastic Powers cover).

Unfortunately, Malzberg’s lesser novel Tactics of Conquest (1974) — according to later admission expanded from a short story in only four days! — tempted me, but it was only one dollar…

Thoughts?

1. Stolen Faces, Michael Bishop (1977)

(Steve Hickman’s cover for the 1978 edition) Continue reading →

Book Review: And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (variant title: Beneath the Shattered Moons), Michael Bishop (1976)

/ Joachim Boaz / 6 Comments

(Jonathan Weld’s cover for the 1976 edition)

4/5 (Good)

Michael Bishop’s And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (variant title: Beneath the Shattered Moons) (1976) is a melancholic and allegorically inclined parable about a coming cataclysm that threatens a programmed and hierarchically rigid society (accomplished via genetic modification).  Bishop’s voice is an intensely humanistic once, futuristic technology is present but not a central concern…. The simple but effective plot is the perfect vehicle for his moralistic ruminations: a man forced into action, a world compelled — despite the external forces at play — to adapt.

 And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees is the first of Michael Bishop’s works I have read and I am definitely intrigued enough to place his supposedly superior Nebula-nominated first novel, Funeral for the Continue reading →