Michael Bishop (1945– ) is an influential US science fiction and fantasy writer who sold his first story, “Piñon Fall,” to Galaxy in 1969 and has gone on to produce several award-winning novels and stories in a career spanning almost five decades. These works include the Nebula Award–winning novel No Enemy but Time, the Nebula Award–winning novelette “The Quickening,” the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award–winning novel Unicorn Mountain, and the Shirley Jackson Award–winning story “The Pile” (based on notes discovered on his late son Jamie’s computer). He has also received four Locus Awards and his work has been nominated for numerous Hugo Awards.
Bishop’s many story collections include The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Retrospective (2012), edited by Michael H. Hutchins, and the forthcoming Other Arms Reach Out to Me: Georgia Stories. Bishop has edited seven anthologies, including the Locus Award–winning Light Years and Dark and A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ (2007). His latest anthology, Passing for Human (2009), was coedited with Steven Utley.
Bishop has also written a novel for young people (“whatever their age”), Joel-Brock the Brave and the Valorous Smalls, with pen-and-ink illustrations by Orion Zangara. Since 2012, Fairwood Press, in conjunction with Bishop’s own imprint there, Kudzu Planet Productions, has been releasing revised editions of his novels about twice a year. These include Brittle Innings, Ancient of Days, Who Made Stevie Crye?, Count Geiger’s Blues, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, and Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas.
About “The House of Compassionate Sharers,” Bishop writes, “After selling stories to Galaxy, F&SF, and Worlds of If, I began focusing on Damon Knight’s hardcover anthology series, Orbit, as well as on Silverberg’s New Dimensions and Terry Carr’s Universe. Because I especially admired Knight’s story ‘Masks’ (1968), I used it as a basis for ‘The House of Compassionate Sharers,’ which also has its roots in some of the Japanese fiction I was then reading: Kawabata, Endo, Mishima, and others.” Knight promptly rejected what Bishop calls “a bloated version that I trimmed and restructured, using Damon’s comments as guides.” After Bishop placed a revised version with a new magazine called Cosmos edited by David Hartwell, four different year’s-best anthologies reprinted the story, which Bishop described as “a ‘hat trick’ no other story of mine has ever duplicated.”
The version of “The House of Compassionate Sharers” (1977) reprinted here—still edgy, timeless, and unique—completes Bishop’s editing process by trimming a last eight hundred words since its appearance in Cosmos.