Eyes of Fire

by Michael Bishop, Gene Szafran (Cover Artist)

On a secret mission of surveillance and experimentation the ship Dharmakaya had come. What its travelers found was a ruling race of humanoids, the Tropiards, their feelings reflected in their hard, glowing eyes of crystal.

But there were beings below these leaders, beings who threatened even as they enticed, a mysterious, mystical subculture known as the Sh'gaidu. To win them as immigrants to a new world was the goal -- but the ruling race had other goals, other motives hidden behind the crystal stare of their eyes of fire.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

262 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

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

[Larou]

This used to be Michael Bishop’s first novel, before (as he explains in an Afterword) he completely re-worked it and it became his seventh. I actually did read the first version way back when (and even might still have my copy lying around somewhere), but have to confess that I don’t remember much about it except that it was all rather weird but that I liked it. Which, as it happens, would also sum up my impression of this rewritten version. (A word on the title: the novel was called A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire at first released, then shortened to Eyes of Fire for the new version, but the original title was restored for the re-release of the re-written version. The SF Gateway edition I have been reading manages to use both of those titles. As I like the long title better (like young Michael Bishop, I’m a sucker for poetic titles), I’m going to stick with that one.)

A Funeral For the Eyes of Fire is classic “anthropological” Science Fiction (set in quotation marks because the anthropos here is, of course, alien), strongly and unabashedly influenced by Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Which means that there is not much in the way of “hard” science in the novel, but that instead it explores different ways of being in all the many kinds of ways this might imply - using the imaginative license the SF genre grants to devise societies, cultures, religions, genders and whatnot unknown to present-day man, but of course all ultimately reflecting back on what it is to be human. To ensure that (and to make certain the novels do not get too strange for a reader to follow) the central character in this kind of Science Fiction tends to be a human, an explorer or ambassador who for some plot reason or other is forced to cope with an alien world and its inhabitants.

Bishop follows that pattern and weaves some Shakesperian tragedy into it, with rather fascinating results. It takes a bit of time to get into the flow of events, not just because the reader gets thrown into things with almost no introdution, but also because of the novel’s central consciousness and supposed identification figure, Seth Latimer. In some he is like the standard protagonist of this kind of SF – mostly average, somewhat naive and very passive, a foil against which the strangness of the world he find himself placed in, can be offset (which interestingly, and in a totally off-topic aside also describes the hero of the classical historical novel from Walter Scott onwards). But although Seth is human, to us contemporaries he seems very strange, almost alien himself – he is a clone, for starters, an interstellar merchant travelling with his “original” and an older clone twin, and the glimpses we get of their relationship hint at something quite different from the burgeois core family we have grown used to. Which makes sense, of course – it’s not really to expected that humans several centuries in the future would be the same as they are today. But it soon turns out that Seth and his “family” are still the characters most familiar to the reader and that Bishop is taking us on a very strange journey indeed. Seth’s travels take him to two planets and three different cultures, each suceeding one more bizarre than the one that came before. Even for this particular subgenre of Science Fiction which by its very premise abounds in bizarre inventions, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire is something exceptionally rich and strange.

With the emotional distancing due to the protagonist’s weirdness, the effect of reading the novel is not so much that of experiencing a tragedy by Shakespeare than of watching a Noh play as a Westerner – there is undoubtedly something very fascinating about the slowly unfolding, almost ritualistic dance on the stage, but also a considerable detachment – we never quite figure out what it means, and while we are captured by its bizarre beauty we also always are at some remove from it, never get quite involved. Which I’m fairly certain is the effect Bishop was aiming for. The distancing is not total, however – A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire does not attempt to explore what actual aliens might be like (as for example Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris does), but in the moral dilemmas that its characters have to face remains firmly centered around human, even humanistic concerns. And in that sense, it also is anthropological Science Fiction, literally and without quotation marks.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not Bishop's best, but there were many aspects of the story that I liked. Michael Bishop has always been a thoughtful world-builder.