INTRODUCTION

Born in 1945, Michael Bishop has been an author of ambitious and eloquent SF and Fantasy for thirty years, a highly significant figure on the humanist, literary side of American speculative fiction since early in his career. His many fine short stories have been collected in Blooded On Arachne (1982), One Winter In Eden (1984), Close Encounters with the Deity (1986), Emphatically Not SF, Almost (1991), At The City Limits of Fate (1996), and, most recently, Blue Kansas Sky, published in 2000 by Golden Gryphon Press. These volumes, combining the sublimely exotic and the drawlingly familiar, satirical humour and timeless tragedy, constitute one of the finest short fiction oeuvres in SF's history.

But Bishop has also achieved great success as a novelist. His mastery of the extravagant otherworldly odyssey found commanding expression in A Funeral For The Eyes of Fire (1975, revised as Eyes of Fire in 1980, with that revision achieving hardcover publication under the original title in 1989), And Strange At Ecbatan The Trees (1976), Stolen Faces (1977), and Transfigurations (1979). Also in his first decade as a writer, he began to delineate the potential destinies of his home region, the South, with the sequence made up of A Little Knowledge (1977) and Catacomb Years (1979). And this was only the beginning.

Bishop's mature novels were to unite his by now well-honed strengths of sociological insight and the vivid evocation of Southern places: No Enemy But Time (1982), which won the Nebula Award, takes its protagonist to a superbly realised prehistoric past in person and in dream; Ancient Of Days (1985), in neat reversal, brings an ancestral hominid to the hectic present; Who Made Stevie Cry? (1984) is a Horror parody which had strangely little impact, but Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas (1987, also published as The Secret Ascension) is an exhilarating tour through literary alternate worlds, and Unicorn Mountain (1988) is a telling fantastic commentary on the milieu and menace of AIDS. Count Geiger's Blues (1992) is a full-blown satire, and Bishop's masterpiece, Brittle Innings (1994), introduces SF's first and founding Monster into wartime Minor League baseball. These are all remarkable novels: forceful, individual, well written and well characterised, works of power and wit. And Bishop is a noted poet in the bargain...

(Although many of Michael Bishop's novels are out of print, ElectricStory.com is making No Enemy But Time and Unicorn Mountain available in e-book form; in addition, No Enemy But Time has recently been reissued in the UK by Gollancz in trade paperback.)

I interviewed Michael Bishop by e-mail in July 2000.

THE INTERVIEW

NG: You had a very peripatetic childhood, didn't you? Why was this? And do you think that travelling so much at an impressionable age has influenced your mature writing?

MB: I travelled as a child because my father enlisted in the military during World War II and remained in the service even after the war concluded. My parents separated while he was on assignment in Japan in 1950, when I was not yet five, and then I did a lot of travelling because even though my mother had made a home for us in Mulvane, Kansas, south of Wichita, and worked in the personnel department for McConnell Air Force Base, every summer, as soon as school let out, I took off for my dad's current duty station and spent the next three months with him. In this way, even within the U.S., I became familiar with several different cities and their environs: Memphis, Tennessee; Cheyenne, Wyoming; St. Louis, Missouri; Denver, Colorado. And every summer my dad carried me with him for at least one visit to my grandparents' farm in eastern Arkansas, near Harrisburg, Marked Tree, and the minuscule Bay Village. And, yes, this exposure to so many different places as a crewcut kid shaped my outlook and consequently my writing. It gave me a sensitivity to the power of location over daily behavior and simultaneously to the fact that human beings can adapt extraordinarily well to places unfamiliar to them, given time and open minds.

NG: Considering your work as a whole, your authorial philosophy seems liberal and humane, very moral in its emphasis much of the time. Is this assessment accurate? And what influences -- personal and literary -- have made you the writer that you are?

MB: Let me confess real discomfort talking about my "authorial philosophy" because so much of what I do strikes me as intuitive and situation-directed, even though I agree with the much more dogmatic Flannery O'Connor -- long a personal icon -- that fiction should not hold up evil as good or good as evil. I part company with her, though, in seeming to suppose that the distinctions between the two are hard-edged and self-evident, or unequivocally laid out for study and acceptance in Judeo-Christian scripture. I classify myself after a lot of literal soul-searching (some, I know, would call that phrase oxymoronic) as a Christian, but a skeptical one who often picks up in prayer the whisper of the void. (John Fowles once wrote, "An answer is always a form of death," and I believe that.) In any event, it outrages me to see people treat other people as something less than human for any reason at all: race, class consciousness, religious differences, sex or sexual orientation, intellectual pride, etc. But because the human condition, along with ignorance and/or greed, continually triggers brutality, I have no shortage of outrage, and outrage often fuels my fiction.

As for particular literary influences, the first writers I read with enthusiasm as a young person were Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, and Somerset Maugham, specifically The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, and Of Human Bondage. I later came to, and relished, the work of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner. Before getting out of high school, I tried at one point or another to write like each one of these models. At the same time, though, I was reading H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury, and once I got to the University of Georgia in 1963, Flannery O'Connor's wickedly miraculous short stories exploded into my awareness, along with the astonishing tales -- ficciones -- in Jorge Luis Borges' remarkable collection Labyrinths. (Take a look at my stories "Alien Graffiti," "Love's Heresy," and "The Bob Dylan Tambourine Software & Satori Support Services Consortium, Ltd." for fairly obvious examples of Borges' influence.) After college, I read heavily in the SF field, and I especially admired Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, Barry N. Malzberg, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison, whose titles often struck me as pure (if outrageous) poetry. The academic Joe Sanders has written a cogent paper demonstrating parallels between Maugham's Of Human Bondage and my own Brittle Innings, parallels of which I was completely unaware during the writing. I can't begin to sort out the practical stylistic or thematic consequences of my influences, category or otherwise, but I do think that Steinbeck's idealistic championing of the proletariat -- take a look at In Dubious Battle -- also had an enduring impact.

NG: In your early years as an SF writer, you were considered an exoticist, an impression given much weight by the colourful alien settings of novels like A Funeral For the Eyes of Fire, And Strange At Ecbatan The Trees, Stolen Faces, and Transfigurations, as well as of many of the stories in Blooded On Arachne. Why were you so preoccupied then with the possibilities of xenology and highly speculative anthropology? Was this consciously in keeping with the spirit of so much Seventies SF -- the exotic romanticism of authors like Ursula Le Guin (whom you professedly admired), George R. R. Martin, James Tiptree, Jr., Gardner Dozois...?

MB: Another confession: As a teenager and even a young adult, I simply thought that aliens and alien planets were ... neat. Pretty embarrassing, in retrospect -- except that my enthusiasm for the outré and the alien had almost certainly grown from encounters with these qualities in the works of Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, and Ray Bradbury, whose short stories in A Medicine for Melancholy and The Martian Chronicles struck me as the lyrical literary embodiment of the exotic as it manifested itself both close to hand (The October Country) and across interplanetary space. But, yes, the works of Le Guin, Tiptree, Dozois, Ellison, and Aldiss also influenced me, as did those of more "grounded" talents like J. G. Ballard and Thomas M. Disch. In fact, I had a secret ambition -- unachieved -- to write Le Guin-style off-planet tales with the ironic sensibility of Disch. My first novel, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, attempted that feat, as did my third, Stolen Faces, and my fourth, Transfigurations. My early work was definitely a product of that supercharged 1970s milieu, though.

NG: You seemed to undergo a transition in the early 1980s, shifting from xenology to palaeontology -- thus, No Enemy But Time and Ancient Of Days still deal with strange hominid beings, but within the constraints imposed by Earthly locales and the plausible ancestral scenarios drawn up by palaeontologists. Why this move to the (relatively) mundane?

MB: Thomas Disch once referred to some of the most common science-fiction conventions -- tropes, not weekend gatherings -- as Dumb Ideas. He was alluding to aliens and telepathy in particular, I think, but may have had a whole gamut of such notions in mind, ranging from time travel to the Nietzschean superman concep