Those parts of the tale set during this period are perhaps less convincing – and certainly less moving – than the central passages of the book, which represent the reminiscences long afterwards of one of the original Black revolutionaries his descriptions of the successful campaign to free his people intensely invokes the haunted heartlands of the Civil War upriver from Washington, though subtly and upliftingly transformed.īisson's fourth novel, Voyage to the Red Planet ( 1990), complicatedly combines spoof, elegy and tall tale. The enslaved Blacks of the Southern states have successfully revolted during the course of the Civil War, have founded an independent Southern country, and by the late twentieth century have established an unracist, beneficent, courteous, livable comity. In Fire on the Mountain ( 1988), which is in no ostensible sense a sequel, this same utopia proves to be an Alternate History born out of a different course of US history.

The tale closes back home, but home is now an American South changed magically into a clement Utopia. As the novel develops into a quest west and then north across a USA more and more radically transformed the further the search proceeds, the talking man takes on qualities of Trickster and Redeemer, and eventually seems to contain the world's reality in his hands. The figure at the heart of Talking Man – who does not talk – seems at the story's beginning to be nothing more than a bemusedly eccentric rural Kentuckian with a knack for repairing motors – Bisson's admiration for 'shade tree mechanics' was expressed more recently in 'The Edge of the Universe' (August 1996 Asimov's). With his second, Talking Man ( 1986), he comes into his full powers as a novelist whose narrative voice is urgently and lucidly that of a teller of tales. His first novel, Wyrldmaker: A Heroic Romance ( 1981), is a too rapidly told but intermittently dazzling Generation Starship tale told in the guise of a heroic fantasy (see also World Ship). (1942- ) US author who has also worked as a New York publishing copy-writer.

The Pickup Artist by Terry Bisson