A Little Knowledge

Urban Nucleus #1

by Michael Bishop

2068 - AND AMERICA HAS BEEN "SAVED"

Shouting, shaking. speaking in tongues—fundamentalist sects rule a born-again America of domed cities and stern laws. The Cygnusians, Earth's first visitors from the stars. arrive on a world swept with the fever of Revival. and they are kept hidden by the Authorities until...

A compulsory municipal service in Atlanta. The preacher makes the "call" to the altar. A hinged, hourglass-eyed being starts down the aisle to be saved.

Genres: Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Religion, Fiction

209 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Michael Lawson Bishop was an award-winning American writer. Over four decades & thirty books, he created a body of work that stands among the most admired in modern sf & fantasy literature.

Bishop received a bachelor's from the Univ. of Georgia in 1967, going on to complete a master's in English. He taught English at the US Air Force Academy Preparatory School in Colorado Springs from 1968-72 & then at the Univ. of Georgia. He also taught a course in science fiction at the US Air Force Academy in 1971. He left teaching in 1974 to become a full-time writer.

Bishop won the Nebula in 1981 for The Quickening (Best Novelette) & in 1982 for No Enemy But Time (Best Novel). He's also received four Locus Awards & his work has been nominated for numerous Hugos. He & British author Ian Watson collaborated on a novel set in the universe of one of Bishop’s earlier works. He's also written two mystery novels with Paul Di Filippo, under the joint pseudonym Philip Lawson. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.

Bishop has published more than 125 pieces of short fiction which have been gathered in seven collections. His stories have appeared in Playboy, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the Missouri Review, the Indiana Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the Georgia Review, Omni & Interzone.

In addition to fiction, Bishop has published poetry gathered in two collections & won the 1979 Rhysling Award for his poem For the Lady of a Physicist. He's also had essays & reviews published in the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Omni Magazine & the NY Review of Science Fiction. A collection of his nonfiction, A Reverie for Mister Ray, was issued in 2005 by PS Publishing. He's written introductions to books by Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., Pamela Sargent, Gardner Dozois, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Andy Duncan, Paul Di Filippo, Bruce Holland Rogers & Rhys Hughes. He's edited six anthologies, including the Locus Award-winning Light Years & Dark & A Cross of Centuries: 25 Imaginative Tales about the Christ, published by Thunder’s Mouth Press shortly before the company closed.

In recent years, Bishop has returned to teaching & is writer-in-residence at LaGrange College located near his home in Pine Mountain, GA. He & his wife, Jeri, have a daughter & two grandchildren. His son, Christopher James Bishop, was one of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre on 4/16/07.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Little Knowledge is part of future history series known as UrNu, short for Urban Nucleus of Atlanta. This was the only novel in the series, which included four novellas, as well as several short stories and novelettes. Bishop revised this book and all of the rest of the series, and they were collected and published in a single volume as The City and the Cygnets in 2019, but I have only read this original version. It's set in the domed city of Atlanta in 2068, and Cygnusians arrive from interstellar space to an Earth swept up in a state-sponsored religious revival. It's a clever story with a lot of political and religious satire, but with a few too many coincidences manipulating the not too sympathetic characters. It is a thought-provoking story, now quite dated (or now an alternate history, rather) since, for example, domes weren't built around the cities, and the U.S. didn't collapse 1994-2004. I don't think it's among the best of Bishop's work that I've read.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back in junior high I was given a creative writing assignment, and I submitted a, shall we say, less-than-stellar effort about a war between humans and antimatter aliens. This was, by the way, for a class about literature of the South, and so I'm not sure exactly what the poor professor thought of this offering, but she called it "A complex and well-developed piece!" That's a phrase that always stuck with me; its the sort of thing someone says when they have no idea what to say.

And that phrase is the best praise I can offer Michael Bishops's novel "A Little Knowledge". This is very much the sort of thing I would have loved had I read it back in junior high. Nowadays I have less time on my hands to read the yellowed scifi paperbacks that were then my bread and butter, and though I can appreciate a lot that this book does, the entire thing seems maddeningly arcane.

Certainly this is a story that is complex, and a setting that well-developed. But these virtues kind of work against the novel rather than complementing it. For "A Little Knowledge" Bishop has imagined a future America made up of environmentally controlled domed cities, which are governed by a fundamentalist theocracy. Bishop can't find the right balance to acclimate us to this brave new world and the people that live in it; he is constantly giving us historical and genealogical data, but this flood of data never shapes itself into a clear context.

This is beginning to sound like a pan, and I guess I may as well state outright now that those who don't enjoy maddeningly arcane science fiction definitely ought to steer clear. But I did like this book. It's far from perfect, in fact it's a bit of a mess, and damned if I could tell you exactly what I liked about it.

So here goes. I liked a certain naturalism that Bishop brings to the genre. There are few clear villains here. There are smug, oppressive theocrats who lack subtlety in the way that they are drawn, but are seemingly just well-meaning and out of touch, as people with such ideals often seem to me. Likewise, an extremist faction that develops over the course of the book isn't given much space, but seems very believable. The core characters are very well developed, although there is a forced romance between the leads that made me wince.

I also like how batshit crazy this book is. There is a fair amount of nutty religious questing in the vein of Philip K Dick, and the ending of the book features the questionable revelation that the aliens featured in the book are reincarnated human souls, one step closer than you or I to communion with the divine. This is established when the soul of the protagonist's long dead grandmother emerges from one such alien and reveals herself, and tells us about this bizarre cosmology in countrified ebonics Bishop calls Plantation Patois. So for the What the Fuck Did I Just Read Award for 2013, I suspect that "A Little Knowledge" will be a shoo-in.

[Sol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: In the 21st century, 25 large American cities have been converted into closed domes, with their Urban Federation the successor state to the USA. Atlanta, Georgia has become a theocratic dictatorship, with Christian Ortho-Urbanism the state religion, the only legal minority religions being the New Nation of Islam, and the Federated Urban Society of Krishna Consciousness (FUSKCON). Public music and assembly are banned, and all publications require government approval.

In 2034, Fiona Bitler fled Atlanta with Emory Nettlinger, the son of her husband's assassin. The two travel to Scandipol (the Scandinavian Polity), where Emory becomes a physicist and marries Fiona. Contact is made with aliens from the constellation Cygnus, known as Cygnusians and later Cygnostikoi. In the 2060s Fiona convinces two Cygnostikoi to come to Atlanta, hoping to break the city's insularity. On the way they meet Alexander "Menny" Guest, a Cherokee employee of Atlanta who is violently opposed to bringing the Cygnostikoi to Atlanta. By 2071 six Cygnostikoi live in Atlanta's Hyatt Regency hotel, where they live in seclusion.

Julian Cawthon, an orphan whose parents were gassed by the city government for sedition, is forced to find work or be charged with parasitism. As a teenager he wrote a story which prophesied the arrival of the six Cygnostikoi and their names. Applying to the newsman Nicholas Tybourn for a job, he is shocked by a photograph of his grandmother Parthena Cawthon, who had been a member of one of Atlanta's experimental "septigamoklan" group marriages. He witnesses a church service attended by the first Cygnostik to leave the hotel, where the alien converts to Ortho-Urbanism.

At the same time, Margot Eastwin is in her final year of seminary to become a deacon, where her class is told of the coming arrival of a seventh Cygnostik. She meets Julian at the church service, and tells Julian how she entered the seminary after finding an abandoned infant in a public locker, who she called baby Moses.

The conversion causes minor unrest, with Muslims and FUSKCONites generally disbelieving the event, and Abu-Bakr, a Muslim employee of the Cygnostikoi, is killed by criminal "hoistjackers" after refusing to convert to Ortho-Urbanism. Menny, who is living in Julian's parents' abandoned plant shop, is working as a stevedore at the edge of the dome. He is convinced that the Cygnostikoi are "Indians or Englishman", the first of a wave of refugees or conquerors.

After Bakr's murder, Julian is hired by the Cygnostikoi to acquire apples and stray cats to eat. Julian witnesses them worshipping and feeding their own flesh to a Cygnostik who appears to be dead, but is merely deactivated. He discovers their names exactly match the story he wrote before their arrival.

Emory picks up the final Cygnostik and a gift statue from Scandipol, of a Cygnostik and Fiona, one figure perfect and one hideous, respectively. Menny attacks the arriving Cygnostik, but fails to hurt it. Julian is struck by the similarity of the new arrival's name, Kee Wig, to that of his mother, Queequeg. The six other Cygnostikoi convert to Ortho-Urbanism.

The first year seminary students attempt an exorcism of the Hyatt Regency, and Menny organizes his shift of stevedores into "Red Sticks" (after a traditionalist society created by the Scot-Muscogee Menewa) opposed to the Cygnostikoi. Lileplagak, the first convert, asks to be taken trick or treating by Julian. He is able to move unmolested among the revelers, and guides Julian to Margot's dorm, where the two realize they are in love, and propose marriage after she graduates. Archbishop Holman is convinced by a dream to ordain the Cygnostikoi as priests.

Julian and Tybourn are attacked by the same thugs that killed Bakr. Menny's Red Sticks beat the thugs to death, one of which proves to be Tybourn's runaway son. The two publish an analysis of Cygnostik psychology and physiology, which suggests they may be able to see at all times into a spiritual realm that humans are rarely if ever able to, and that their conversion may be a gesture of compassion to a species they see as mired in the material world. This coincides with civil unrest caused by the news of the Cygnostikoi's ordainment, and the article is suppressed.

Lileplagak and Kee Wig visit the daycare where Margot works, play with the children, and hypnotize them to sleep. This causes one child to become agitated, and as Margot calms him down, she realizes he is her "baby Moses", and that she will be forced to separate from him again.

Margot and Julian invite Menny to her graduation. After diplomas are presented, Holman ordains the Cygnostikoi, and Menny kills Lileplagak with a laser gun he had kept from his time outside the dome. At the same time, the Red Sticks blow up one of the dome's girder-cars, creating a hole in the ceiling. Fiona dies of shock.

Margot and Julian marry, and on their wedding night are visited by the Cygnostik statue, which was in fact a deactivated Cygnostik body, now inhabited by Lileplagak. Lileplagak hypnotizes the two and merges their consciousnesses, and speaks to them with the voice of Parthena Cawthon. Lileplagak claims to be her reincarnation, and that the Cygnostikoi are one of many spiritual steps of reincarnation above humanity, and the Cygnostikoi wish to help speed humanity's ascension. Julian's agnosticism and Margot's faith are shaken by this, but the two accept the revelation with equanimity.

Something of a response to Blish's earlier A Case of Conscience, which also features seemingly superior aliens contacting a repressed subterranean humanity and interacting with Christianity. Bishop not only mentions the book by name, but briefly recaps its plot. The only way he could be more clear about it is with a foreword in which he says "Yes, I read Blish's book and the similarities are deliberate". One of my chief complaints about Conscience was the underexploration of the bunker-bound humans, and the rebellion awakened by the earth-raised Lithian. Bishop goes all the way to the opposite extreme, writing a book that is almost entirely about humans, who don't really understand their otherworldly visitors, with one brief stream of consciousness segment from the perspective of Lileplagak.

The idea that the domed cities are insular is mentioned several times, and so is the novel. Despite the existence of a multi-national moon base where humans and Cygnostikoi interact, the impression is that the citizens of Atlanta don't much care. They worry about their city politics and religion, and the outside world doesn't figure into their minds. Even after learning that the world outside the domes is not a wasteland, little has changed about the citizenry. It's a caricature of the view of America as insular and weirdly religious compared to other first world countries. In walk the Cygnostiks to upset it by pledging themselves to Jesus.

If Conscience was "aliens as demons", Knowledge is "aliens as angels" (and for a third flavour, we have the "aliens as humans" Christian converts in Eifelheim). They are saintly (aside from their appetite for fresh cats), more spiritually knowledgeable than humanity, and literally "from the heavens".

Is what I would say, but Bishop weaves a complicated web of allusion, irony and misdirection. Some seem frivolous, such as the comparison of the Cygnostikoi to the four-pupilled Anableps fish, or the misattribution of the figures in the "featherless biped" anecdote of Plato and Diogenes, or the scattered Moby Dick references. Others, such as the image of the phoenix are clearly purposeful. The Phoenix is Atlanta's symbol in reference to its resurgence after the destruction of the civil war, and here is a symbol of reincarnation. The Phoenix septigamoklan prefigures and is reincarnated in the Cygnostik septigamoklan. But it is Menny, the Judas of this story, who cracks the dome (egg), a necessity for the phoenix to be reborn. And for rebirth, it must first die.

The conversion of the Cygnostiks is compared by Holman to the significance of the birth of Jesus, but the spread of Christianity was far from peaceful. There is no guarantee that the Cygnostikoi aid to humanity will be peacefully accepted, as the unrest among the Muslims and FUSKCONites shows, especially since their doctrine of reincarnation flatly contradicts most mainstream Christianity. Margot's "baby Moses" has a dream where he seems to make contact with Emory's father, and after he is hypnotized has an outburst where he claims the Cygnostikoi will “make the mess we’re in worse!” A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The Cyngostikoi are but one step above humanity, and they may know no more than we do what the result of their actions will be.

Dreams figure prominently in the narrative. Julian, Holman and Menny all receive what seem like significant dreams. But they pull in opposite directions. Menny's resolves him to oppose the Cygnostikoi, while Holman's pushes him to ordain them. Julian's foreshadows Parthena's reincarnation (they speak in the same dialect, and she died before meeting Julian), suggesting that the dreams are part of some divine plan. Yet both Holman and Menny's dreams contain images suggesting they have misinterpreted them. In Menny's dream, he is a cruel persecutor who sells the Cygnistikoi into slavery, while in Holman's dreams, the apples he finds are tumorous and crippling of the trees that bear them.



Best entry in Barlowe's Guide? Look at this thing. Words fail.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating system, which admittedly was designed for rating works of non-fiction, is largely based on my assessment at how successfully the author achieved what he or she set out to do, rather than on a more subjective sense of whether I "liked" the book or not. This becomes a problem when, after reading the book, I'm not actually certain what the author intended to do. With non-fiction, that would probably earn a low rating, because telling your audience what you're about is a big part of writing non-fiction, but with fiction, it's not necessarily "wrong" to create something which is less obvious in terms of purpose, or even whose purpose is disputable or possibly indefinable.

All of which is to say that "A Little Knowledge" left me with almost as many questions as answers when I finished it. It's even possible that's what Michael Bishop intended, and if so, good job. I can say that it was different to most sci fi I've read. Bishop is clearly less interested in technology and its world-changing effects than he is in political and spiritual relationships, so he projects a future which at times seems rather old-fashioned, technically, yet is quite strange in terms of social constructions. I couldn't tell, for example, whether the reason the main characters were all "orphans" was because there was a social proscription against nuclear families, because the specific characters were oddities, or because that's how Bishop sees the world in general. Nor could I figure out if the reason why all of the cities in the US were under domes was because they had become insular, inward-looking societies, or if the domes themselves had produced such an attitude.

Let's start with the basics: "A Little Knowledge" takes place in a future Atlanta that is run by a relatively benevolent Fundamentalist theocracy. Remember that this was written before the rise of Swaggart and Robertson, so I'm not talking about a The Handmaid's Tale-style dystopia here. Think more of Billy Graham and you'll get the idea. They even allow two minority religions (Black Muslims and Hare Krishnas) to operate within their city, just under certain restrictions. As I said, Atlanta's under a dome, and people live highly regimented lives. Our main character is an aspiring writer and agnostic who is on the verge of losing his enfranchisement, due to lack of productivity and orthodoxy. He lucks into a situation in which he will get to write about the most fascinating aspect of this society: a group of seven aliens from 61-Cygni who are living in a refrigerated suite in a high-rise hotel.

The “Cygnostiks,” as they call themselves, are an avenue for considering the question of what it is to be human, and what faith will mean in a culture confronted by beings either not made in the image of God, or in that image as seen through a very different lens. The Cygnostiks apparently have the ability to “see” into a “more spiritual realm” than the humans around them, but are sensitive to the fact that humans regard themselves as the center of the Universe. They perform rather bizarre rites of self-worship and self-cannibalism within their own group, but they really throw the humans for a loop when they “convert” to the local faith. And then things get even weirder.

The book is divided into three sections: “Genesis,” “Psalms,” and “Revelations,” with the end of the book suggesting a step toward an evolution of consciousness that made me think of Childhood's End. I didn’t find the revelation all that satisfying, to be honest. The book in general was thought-provoking, however, and for more contemplative sci fi fans, this could be of interest.

[Kevin Phyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the second half of the 21 st century the USA has merged church and state to such an extent that there is a state religion. Into this fundamentalist nation comes a group of aliens from 61 Cygni known as Cygnusians, one of whom, in a widely anticipated Event, converts to this state religion, accepting Christ as their savior! The ramifications of this in terms of philosophy and just whether the aliens even have souls are examined at length, but when the remaining aliens also convert, there seems to be a sudden suspicion about motives. Just what are the Cygnusians doing? Are they really God-fearing and do they know something about the Afterlife? Michael Bishop shows us just how large a lexicon he has and how much he knows about religion in this dense but interesting book.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've found all too few SF writers who treat religious themes as well as Bishop. This novel is a thought-piece, asking questions about the encounter of substantively different principles and peoples. An early work of his, it still contains most of his major concerns. Holds up rather well.