From Amazon
Blue Kansas Sky collects four powerful and beautifully written novellas (one previously unpublished) by one of science fiction's best writers, Michael Bishop, winner of the Nebula Award, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award.
The opening story is "Blue Kansas Sky," which is original to this volume, and may or may not be fantasy. The story line alternates between the coming-of-age of Sonny Peacock, fatherless child of the '50s and '60s, and the redemption of his ex-inmate uncle, Rory Peacock. Set in 1988, the World Fantasy Award-nominated "Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana" examines South Africa's brutal institutionalized racism through the lens of a white Afrikaner who becomes a quantum-mechanical invisible man to members of his own race. In the Hugo and Sturgeon Award finalist "Cri de Coeur," three Earthly starships travel to the Epsilon Eridani star system, with disastrous results. In the Hugo and Nebula Award finalist "Death and Designation among the Asadi," an anthropologist comes to the planet BoskVeld to study an inexplicable alien race; he may be the first to unlock their secrets, or he may be going mad--or both. --Cynthia Ward
From Booklist
This volume brings four novellas by one of the pillars of literary sf in the 1970s and 1980s back in print. "Blue Kansas Sky" is an sf take on growing up in the Bible Belt. "Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana" deals with South Africa under the bad old regime. "Cri de Coeur" is a classic insider versus outsider tale, and "Death and Designation among the Asadi" is one of the foundation stones of anthropological sf as well as of Bishop's career. Their appeal is definitely greatest to literary sf readers or scholars, but since most of them have disappeared into the bibliographical olla podrida that is the fate of most short sf, Golden Gryphon deserves favor for fishing them out so that they can reappear on the sf shelves. Unfortunately, James Morrow's introduction tells much more about him than about the stories, so go straight to them.
Roland GreenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
In “Blue Kansas Sky,” Sonny Peacock comes of age in this poignant tale set in the Kansas heartland of the early 1960s. “Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana” is set in 1980s Pretoria, South Africa, where a black man’s quest for the “Theory of Everything” is juxtaposed against the inhumanity of apartheid. In “Cri de Coeur,” aboard a 21st century generation wheelship, agrogeologist and poet Dr. Abel Gwiazda and his Down’s-syndrome son Dean travel on course for a new home in Epsilon Eridani. In the final novella, “Death and Designation Among the Asadi,” reprinted here for the first time in 20 years, ethnologist Egan Chaney’s private journals of his studies of the alien Asadi are the centerpiece of the story.
About the Author
Michael Bishop is the Nebula Award–winning author of five story collections and more than a dozen novels, including Brittle Innings, Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas, and the highly acclaimed Unicorn Mountain. He lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia.
