Blue Kansas Sky (Hardcover)

This is a collection for fantasists, for realists, for anyone who enjoys one of our best unsung writers at his very best.

"Blue Kansas Sky" is a moving story of a young boy in 1950s small-town America, who struggles between his love for an uncle just released from prison and loyalty to his mother (who blames the man for her husband's death). Bishop incorporated many details from his own childhood to make this tale come alive. There's no science fiction here at all - just an engaging tale, extremely well written. Michael Bishop is adept at incorporating fresh words and unexpected turns of phrase without making the reader scramble for a thesaurus.

In "Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thurbana," a well-to-do Afrikaner "ghosts" in and out of reality after a freak auto accident and is forced to watch as the security police interrogate two black laborers - one who plays around with cosmic string theory as a hobby; another who receives pirate radio broadcasts courtesy of a metal plate in his skull. This story is very difficult to get through - not because it is poorly written (indeed, just the opposite); but because it captures in chilling detail the horrors of the old Apartheid system.

"Cri de Coeur" (Cry from the Heart) tells the story of a man who must cope with the responsibilities, and revel in the joys, of raising a son with Down's Syndrome aboard a generational starship seeking to colonize another star system.

"Death and Designation among the Asadi" deals with a human anthropologist living in the wilds of an alien planet, struggling to understand the enigmatic rituals of its lion-maned hominids - without losing his sanity. [After reading this story I asked the author what I should do if I didn't fully understand it - read it again, or embrace the mystery? His answer: "Death and Designation" is my Solaris (a novel by Stanislaw Lem). Real aliens, Lem implies, defy comprehension because they ARE alien. On the other hand, you could read my novel Transfigurations, which incorporates the novella, and which more than one critic badmouthed for explaining rather than embracing the original mystery. They may have done so with some justice.]

Blue Kansas Sky is a wonderful collection of stories that I heartily recommend. It's published by Golden Gryphon Press (a small firm specializing in anthologies).