CYBLING: Michael Bishop


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Michael Bishop

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Michael Bishop was born in 1945 and has been a character driven writer who has had success in the short story field as well as a novelist. A FUNERAL FOR THE EYES OF FIRE was published in 1975. NO ENEMY BUT TIME won the Nebula in 1982. BRITTLE INNINGS appeared in 1994 and features Frankensteins creation as a minor league ball player in World War II. He has written horror, fantasy, satire, and poetry.

He is considered one of the premier writers in the humanist, literary traditions and has been nominated several times for the Hugo and Nebula.

His latest offering, BLUE KANSAS SKY from Golden Gryphon contains four novellas that show him at his best, with the title story being one of finest storys I (Baryon)have ever read.

Baryon: A lot of your early stories were bought by Damon Knight. How was he to work with and did he give you any advice that you still follow today?
Bishop: Actually, Damon took only two of my stories for the ORBIT series, "The Windows in Dante's Hell," which Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison chose for their best-of-the-year volume, and "In the Lilliputian Asylum," a story poem that appeared again last year in my poetry collection TIME PIECES. Damon had high standards, and he rejected, with good reason, six or seven of my early efforts, including stories that later achieved publication elsewhere. He didn't give advice so much as subtle guidelines that one had to infer from his rejections. A very canny man, whom I admire to this day.

Baryon: Are there any future plans to reprint or revise "The White Otters of Childhood"?
Bishop: It _may_ appear in a selection of my best sf and fantasy work in a future Golden Gryphon Press volume. This project is still in negotiation, however.

Baryon: Whom do you read for pleasure?
Bishop: Lots of different folks, depending on my mood. I greatly admire the fiction of Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, Russell Bates, Stewart O'Nan, Tobias Wolfe, Andre Dubus, Flannery O'Connor, J. F. Powers, and dozens of others who don't come immediately to mind because I haven't been reading them lately. I spent a couple of weeks this past year rereading Melville's MOBY DICK, and I think Willa Cather a beautifully austere American novelist. I still have two of her novels yet to read and have been putting off doing so because I want to savor the fact that I still have that pleasure ahead of me.

Baryon: Will there be another Philip Lawson book?
Bishop: Paul Di Filippo and I -- the split personality constituting the psyche of Philip Lawson -- have in fact talked about doing at least one more Will Keats/Adrienne Owsley mystery, this one centering on the world of a so-called "outsider" artist. We both have other projects to finish before we undertake it, however.

Baryon: When did you first decide you wanted to be a writer?
Bishop: Probably when I was in the seventh or eighth grades, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had just encountered the works of Jack London, Jonathan Swift, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck -- maybe 1957 or '58.

Baryon: Why speculative fiction and not mainstream fiction?
Bishop: Because I also encountered the works of H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury about the same time, and THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and A MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY by Bradbury particularly fascinated me. When my early mainstream efforts garnered more rejection slips than editorial encouragement, I started writing SF and submitting to FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, GALAXY, and Damon Knight's ORBIT volumes, among others. My first acceptance came from Edward Ferman at F&SF for "Darktree, Darktide," a short horror tale inspired by Mildred Clingerman's "The Wild Wood."

Baryon: How much do your "military brat" upbringing contributed to your
Bishop: work in general and to BLUE KANSAS SKY in particular? A great deal. I sold "On the Street of the Serpents" to David Gerrold for an original Ballantine paperback anthology in 1970 or '71, and it extrapolates blatantly from my experience as a dependent in Seville, Spain, in 1962-63, when my dad served in the United States Air Force at a SAC base in Andalusia. BLUE KANSAS SKY derives from my boyhood in Mulvane, Kansas, about twelve miles south of Wichita and McConnell Air Force Base, where my mother worked in personnel as a civilian government employee. The Van Luna of my story mirrors the actual Mulvane in which I lived from the second grade through the seventh.

Baryon: Is there a touch of biography in BLUE KANSAS SKY?
Bishop: See my answer to the previous question. I might point out, though, that the correspondences are not one-to-one, by any stretch, and yet the flavor of the piece strongly evokes for me the flavor of my boyhood.

Baryon: A lot of critics have called you a "humanist" writer. What are your feelings about this label?
Bishop: I probably deserve it. I received two university degrees in English and none in the sciences. What science I know I had to learn on my own, and I've always gravitated to the so-called "soft" sciences, those dealing with different aspects of the human condition -- namely, anthropology, psychology, sociology -- and no one will ever mistake me for Arthur C. Clarke. On the other hand, I'm proud of the science in NO ENEMY BUT TIME, ANCIENT OF DAYS, and the novella "Cri de Coeur," and I thank the _real_ scientists, including Louis and Mary Leakey, Richard Leakey, Donald Johansen, and SF's own Geoff Landis for doing their best to educate me in their specialties.

Baryon: BRITTLE INNINGS was about Frankenstein's Monster playing minor league baseball in the 1940s. Where did you come up with this idea?
Bishop: If the Frankenstein creature had survived Mary Shelley's novel, where would he have gone and what would he have done? It occurred to me that he would best fit in among human beings already regarded as, well, misfits of sorts. And during World War II, all the ballplayers still practicing their profession qualified as misfits. They were too young, too old, or not quite healthy enough to serve in the military, and the number of minor leagues in the United States dwindled from forty-some before the war to ten or fewer during the war itself. The narrator of BRITTLE INNINGS is a 17-year-old mute, and although he blinks to find himself rooming with a first baseman of Jumbo Hank Clerval's great size and stunning ugliness, he doesn't immediately assume Jumbo either sub- or superhuman, simply another 4F American male trying to earn a living as a stay-behind ballplayer.

Baryon: Has the film option on BRITTLE INNINGS expired?
Bishop: No. Twentieth Century Fox bought the film rights outright, and the book still stands a remote possibility of one day becoming a movie. At this point, I might rejoice if it did not, however, for Hollywood, as Brian Stableford observed in a review, would probably turn the premise into the clunkiest possible travesty of itself. And baseball films seem to have fallen out of favor.

Baryon: You have UNICORN MOUNTAIN available for download. How is it doing as an ebook? Are ther plans for others?
Bishop: ElectricStory.com accepted NO ENEMY BUT TIME as an e-book along with UNICORN MOUNTAIN, and so _both_ are available. The former has a wonderful cover by my son, Jamie Bishop, now resident in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his German-born wife Steffi Hofer. Bob Kruger, the president of ElectricStory, has told me that NO ENEMY vies back and forth with Tony Daniel's THE ROBOT'S TWILIGHT COMPANION as his company's best-selling title. I assume that UNICORN MOUNTAIN is not doing too badly, but at this point can't really say. It, too, has an attractive cover, but by an artist whose name -- may he please forgive me -- escapes me at the moment.

Baryon: Your stories have a wide range of locales, from a domed Atlanta to studying aliens in their own environment,from a space ark type ship to the Holy Land, and apartheid Africa to a woman's mind. How do you do research or do you wing it?
Bishop: I do a _lot_ of research, usually from books but more frequently of late via the Internet, although I still prefer books. I probably tend to do too much research -- first, because I become fascinated by my topics and, second, because it delays the necessity of having to sit down, squeeze my imagination, and write.

Baryon: BLUE KANSAS SKY features four unique stories with unique characters. How did they come about?
Bishop: I could write an essay for each story. Let me just say that "Blue Kansas Sky" evolved out of a desire to recreate -- not nostalgically, but both humorously and quasi-realistically -- the experience of growing up in a small midwestern town and also out of hope of turning the fairy tale "Iron John" into a compelling quasi-mainstream narrative. "Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana" stems from all the research I did on apartheid in South Africa; I had hoped to write a novel, but didn't feel comfortable writing so long a work in a country that I had never visited. The novella is my literary compromise. "Cri de Coeur" grew from the fact that I wanted to write a hard science-fiction story after publishing the baseball fantasy BRITTLE INNINGS, and a colony-ship story was my challenge to myself. Geoff Landis, as I've already alluded, helped me a great deal. And "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" I wrote to demonstrate that the truly alien will most likely defy our best efforts to comprehend it. I also liked the diary format, and I was a big fan of George P. Elliott's "Among the Dangs." (Forgive me if I misspelled that nearly forgotten writer's surname.)

Baryon: You've worked with Jim Turner at Arkham House and now his son, Gary, with Golden Gryphon. How does it differ being published by the small press versus the big New York Companies?
Bishop: First, Gary is Jim's brother, not his son. Jim never married. The primary difference in publishing with a small press is that the writer feels almost like a partner in the creation of the book-artifact and in its marketing. You feel that the publisher would not have undertaken the project if he or she didn't want the book to look good and sell well. With some New York- based houses, you often feel that your book is anonymous product; indeed, that you yourself are anonymous. Small publishers almost always restore the essential ingredients of caring and commitment.

Baryon: Any advice for the struggling writers out there?
Bishop: Read Stephen King's ON WRITING.

Baryon: What's in the future for us to be on the lookout for?
Bishop: A mainstream novel, not quite finished and not yet sold, called AN OWL AT THE MAN-GOD'S PASSION, a collection of my best SF and fantasy work from Golden Gryphon Press, and a mainstream collection called OTHER ARMS REACH OUT TO ME: GEORGIA STORIES. I'm not exactly sure when these works will appear, but they _will_ appear. And, Paul Di Filippo and I hope, a third "Philip Lawson" novel, WHO WROTE MY NAME ON WATER? Mike's latest book is BLUE KANSAS SKY from Golden Gryphon Press. Order direct from them (www.goldenggryphon.com ) for $24.95 or from your local book store. A review of it is available at He also has UNICORN MOUNTAIN and NO ENEMY BUT TIME available as ebooks from www.electricpublishing.com Each is 7.99 and is available in different formats. [I'm trying to assemble a collection of eight stories for the e-publisher Fictionwise.com, but negotiations for this project are still in progress. -- MB.]


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