Michael Bishop (author) - Career Overview - Selected Short Fiction

Selected Short Fiction

In his introduction to an interview with Michael Bishop, in a reference to Bishop's short story collections, Nick Gevers writes "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.". Author, critic and sometime collaborator, Paul Di Filippo writes

"Since his first short-story sale in 1970, Michael Bishop has revealed a questing spiritual intelligence uniquely concerned with moral conundrums. While his works are often full of both the widescreen spectacles associated with science fiction and the subtle frissons typical of more earthbound fantasy, his focus remains on the engagement of characters with ethical quandaries any reader might encounter in his or her daily life. . . While only occasionally delving into explicitly religious themes, Bishop's personal Christian faith—wide enough to embrace references to Buddhism, Sufism and other creeds—shines through in every tale. . . Acknowledged as one of the genre's finest and most meticulous short-story writers, Bishop boasts six collections to date that function as treasure troves of both science fiction and fantasy. (A seventh lives up to its title, Emphatically Not SF, Almost, by hosting only mainstream tales.) "

"The Quickening", Bishop's Nebula Award winning novelette of 1981, is, according to Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove "…perhaps, a perfect modern fable. A fable about America and her values. For what is being torn down stone by stone is a world spoiled by the trite commercial values of American culture." It's the story of an ordinary American man who awakes to find himself in Seville, Spain. He soon discovers that the population of the whole world has been scattered, creating a potent stew of race, ethnicity, culture and language.

A major theme throughout much of Bishop's work (and especially so in his short fiction) is the role of religion in the daily lives of human beings. When several readers wrote letters of protest to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine about its 1983 publication of Bishop's novella "The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis," Isaac Asimov himself wrote an editorial defending the work and the editor's decision to publish it. He wrote "…we had a remarkable story that considered, quite fearlessly, an important idea, and we felt that most readers would recognize its legitimacy – if not at once, then upon mature reflection."

When Bishop's story "Dogs' Lives" was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 1985, it became one of only a handful of genre stories to appear in the prestigious anthology series. The story might have languished in limbo, had the author not pulled its submission to Harlan Ellison's never-published anthology The Last Dangerous Visions.