‘Exciting, witty and touching’
Ian Watson
‘Transfigurations is as complex, as carefully thought-out, and as compelling an SF novel as you’ll find anywhere, ever’
Theodore Sturgeon
For Ian Watson
Transfigurations
MICHAEL BISHOP
Contents
Cover
Praise
Dedication
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Introduction
Prologue
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Chapter One: Moses Eisen
Chapter Two: Jaafar, Elegy, and Kretzoi
Chapter Three: Once, Upon the Japurá River
Chapter Four: A Visit to the Museum
Chapter Five: The Wild
Chapter Six: Lovers
Chapter Seven: A Captive
Chapter Eight: In the Chaney Field Hangar
Chapter Nine: Bojangles
Chapter Ten: The Experiment Ends
Chapter Eleven: Autopsy
Chapter Twelve: A Time Between Times
Chapter Thirteen: Bojangles’s Brother
Chapter Fourteen: The Love of Cannibals
Chapter Fifteen: Following the Script
Chapter Sixteen: Thus We Vindicate Schliemann
Chapter Seventeen: Inside
Chapter Eighteen: Chrysalis
Chapter Nineteen: Parturition
Chapter Twenty: Transfigured Lives
Gateway Website
Also By Michael Bishop
About the Author
Copyright
Enter the SF Gateway . . .
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
INTRODUCTION
I’ve got some good news for you: you are going on a long journey.
You will also meet a mysterious stranger – a good many mysterious strangers, actually, some human and some not. You will witness behaviours and rituals that will baffle you, intrigue you, and even frighten you. Did I say frighten? Yes, and perhaps horrify you as well. That’s my idea of good news? You have no idea.
The Alien is a science-fiction staple. Sometimes Aliens come here to blunder around the landscape creating havoc of one kind or another. Even if the Aliens in question are from civilisations vastly superior to ours, they do a fair amount of blundering thanks to their failure to understand certain things about us, biologically or culturally or both. Assuming, that is, they aren’t doing it deliberately because they’re here to enslave us.
And sometimes we go to the other worlds and blunder around their landscape. We are the Ugly Terrans, cluelessly stamping all over sacred traditions and disrupting the ecology so land developers can build comfortable housing for colonists.
But these are simple stories. The real story of alien contact will be much stranger and far more complicated, and we’ll have to wait a long time before it happens. In the meantime, though, this tale by Michael Bishop gives us plenty to think about.
Michael Bishop built his brilliant reputation by approaching Aliens from an anthropological perspective. However, he did not forget that his anthropologist explorers are human beings – fallible and weak if well-intentioned, highly intelligent but also selfish and egotistical. While the Aliens are . . . alien.
BoskVeld is a world far from our solar system – don’t worry about how we get there, that’s not important. What’s important is, the Aliens, called the Asadi, are not merely weirder-looking cavemen or hominids, or possessed of a form of intelligence that either seems primitive but is actually superior, or really is primitive but is ultimately purer and more virtuous than ours, or is superior deliberately disguised as primitive for malign purposes. The Asadi are none of these things – they’re a whole lot stranger.
The first part of this novel was published in Worlds of If as ‘Death and Designation Among the Asadi’ and was nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo. If you have read that extraordinary novella, you have only scratched the surface of Transfigurations. Egon Chaney’s efforts to make sense of the Asadi psyche, to reconcile a race that has no technology or culture and barely has a societal order with a mysterious structure they couldn’t have built and artefacts they couldn’t have made become the obsession that consumes him, as obsessions tend to do but in a quite unexpected way, one that proves to be only the beginning for Chaney’s colleagues Moses Eisen and Thomas Benedict, and his daughter, the exquisitely named Elegy Cather. And then there is Kretzoi, whose unique nature may illuminate a possible connection between the Asadi and humans, heretofore unsuspected by anyone . . . except, perhaps, Egon Chaney, who presciently names some of the Asadi after people he already knows.
The answers they seek – how do the Asadi live, what made them the way they are, how they are connected to the strange, eyeless winged creatures that seem to be the only other animal life on the planet, and, of course, what really happened to Egon Chaney – lead them to bigger questions: What if it’s not survival of the fittest but survival by the fittest? How far will you follow your nature to survive? Is there anything too extreme? Can love still exist? If humanity does have a connection with an extraterrestrial race, can
