A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
This retrospective Michael Bishop collection of fifty short pieces (thirty-four stories, fifteen poems or prose-poems, and one amusing Moon-based play about writing SF, "The Grape Jelly and Mustard Method") spans the author's entire career, from "Asytages's Dream," written while Bishop was a college student, to "Yahweh's Hour," an acerbic but moving work of science-fantasy political satire composed in 2020.
The collection's most distinctive attribute, however, lies in the fact that no contribution is longer than 3,000 words and most are shorter, a kind of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories for lovers of short fiction, heartfelt pieces that afford the reader as much meat as they do flash.
"A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals," set on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, embodies a requiem for the entire human species. "Philip K. Dick is dead, a lass" memorializes in verse science fiction's preeminent bard of the reality breakdown." "Love's Heresy" and "The Library of Babble" appear to be channeling the labyrinthine mind of Jorge Luis Borges, albeit with surprising jinks all their own. And the list of narrative explorations grows and grows . . .
Humor and horror, music and whimsy, primates and pathology, mice and men, religion and rebellion: these stories and poems cover the waterfront of human experience while acknowledging the singularity of each human life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A jam-packed package of 50 short stories and poems, this career-spanning collection from Nebula Award winner Bishop (Unicorn Mountain) finds the last anthropologist of humanity sorting through its castoffs and press releases with alien eyes ("A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals") and poets singing of the extraterrestrial fetish collection gathered in humanity's honor ("Secrets of the Alien Reliquary"). Trials of faith form the collection's backbone; a disciple cares for an aging, paralyzed Jesus in "Sequel on Skorpiós," while the paroled murderer of a transgender teenager learns to repent not from the religious propaganda he's forced to watch but from within in "Yahweh's Hour." Humor plays a part as well, as in "The Contributors to Plenum Four," a gleefully irreverent collection of fake author bios whose works (with titles like "Quasars and Cumquats") fill the pages of a phony anthology. But even the sweeter pieces contain sharp bits that stick in the throat, like the memory of a kindly elderly neighbor who develops Alzheimer's in "Tears." The result will be a treat for any fan of speculative fiction.
