Book description
Imagine a living specimen of a multimillion-year-old hominid species,
Homo habilis, encountering the contemporary world.
Told in the first-person narrative of Paul Loyd, divorced owner of a
small town restaurant, Ancient of Days tells the story of a habiline man
found wandering in a Georgia pecan orchard, a living descendant of a
habiline tribe, brought from Africa via Haiti as a slave. Paul's
ex-wife, RuthClaire, takes in the living fossil, appropriately naming
him Adam, and as an artist she discovers Adam's mute but vibrant
artistic sensibility, falls in love with him, and marries him - much to
Paul's confusion and dismay.
And then the story begins to widen out onto a broader canvas, as Adam
first faces persecution by small town Georgia Klansmen, then, surviving
that, moves with RuthClaire to Atlanta and encounters the whole spectrum
of American culture, from art critics and media spectacles to
evangelists and punk clubs.
Throughout the peregrinations and travails of Adam, however, runs a
rich and developing strain of self-conscious spiritual, intellectual,
and artistic growth, interwoven with Adam's genuine anguish over the
problematic nature of his true humanity.
In the end, the central characters come together on the Haitian island
of Montarez in the aftermath of crisis, and in a moment of illumination
and revelation meet the mysterious and extraordinary origins of Adam and
his race in human prehistory. Michael Bishop (1945 - )
Michael Bishop was born in 1945 in Lincoln, Nebraska. After receiving an
MA in English from the University of Georgia, Bishop taught at the USAF
Academy Preparatory School in Colorado, but soon began placing his short
stories with the likes of Galaxy Science Fiction
, If
and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
. His first novel, A Funeral For The Eyes Of Fire
, brought comparisons with Ursula Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jr and
received a Nebula nomination. It was followed by a number of critically
acclaimed works including BSFA Award-nominated Transfigurations,
Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated Ancient Of Days, and No
Enemy But Time, for which he won the Nebula Award for Best
Novel. Michael Bishop lives in Georgia, where he is
writer-in-residence at LaGrange College.
