Blue Kansas Sky collects four powerful and beautifully written novellas (one previously unpublished) by one of science fiction's best writers, Michael Bishop, winner of the Nebula Award, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award.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 Green
Copyright © 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 the highly acclaimed Unicorn Mountain, Brittle Innings, and Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas. He lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Michael Bishop is one of science fiction's most humane and eloquent voices, and the publication of Blue Kansas Sky, a first-rate collection of "four short novels of memory, magic, surprise & estrangement," is a significant event. The book offers additional evidence -- if any were needed -- of the range and depth of Bishop's supremely empathic imagination. Handsomely produced by Golden Gryphon Press, Blue Kansas Sky contains a comprehensive introduction by James Morrow, three older, previously uncollected novellas, and the deeply affecting title story, which appears for the first time anywhere.

"Blue Kansas Sky," which begins in rural Kansas in the late 1950s, is a mainstream coming-of-age tale with just a hint of transcendent possibilities. The story focuses on Sonny Peacock, a 12-year-old boy whose father died in prison and who enters into a carefully concealed relationship with his Uncle Rory, an ex-convict who makes his home in the Van Luna city dump. A tightly compressed story of growth and discovery, "Blue Kansas Sky" shows us the unfolding arc of Sonny's life, from his awkward adolescence to his brief flowering to his brutal collision with the political realities of the turbulent 1960s.

Political realities of another sort dominate "Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana." In this one, which is set in South Africa during the latter stages of apartheid, Gerrit Myburgh, member in good standing of the ruling elite, survives an enigmatic collision with an elephant, becomes "selectively invisible," and shares a jail cell with a brilliant, angry young black man named Mordecai Thubana, whose obsessive pursuit of a "Grand Unification Theory" provides an overarching metaphor for a society infected by the surreal imperatives of racial discrimination.

"Cri de Coeur," a 1994 Hugo finalist, takes place on a 21st-century "wheelship" filled with colonists heading toward a new -- and unforeseeable -- future. "Cri de Coeur" is an adventure story, a meditation on the human urge for transcendence, and an acute portrait of the social dynamics of life onboard a starship. At the heart of the story is a beautifully characterized Down syndrome child whose luminous nature stands in opposition to "a universe of swallowing dark."

The collection closes with "Death and Designation Among the Asadi," the account of a "cultural xenologist" named Egan Chaney, whose life changes forever when he chooses to live among the Asadi, hominoid inhabitants of a distant planet called BoskVeld. Chaney's observations of this impenetrably alien culture -- and his gradual discovery that he himself belongs among the "milling throng" of Asadi -- form the primary substance of this eerily compelling novella. "Death and Designation..." has been largely unavailable for 20 years, and it's good to have it back. It remains one of Bishop's very finest stories, and brings this luminous, highly anticipated collection to an appropriately resonant conclusion. (Bill Sheehan)

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).

SYNOPSIS

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

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