Michael Bishop, who has died aged 78, wrote many stories that inhabit the borderlands between science fiction and mainstream, drawing on influences as diverse as Ray Bradbury and Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas M Disch and Philip K Dick, Dylan Thomas and Tolstoy, but also reaching back as far as the Greek historian Herodotus for inspiration. The common element in his work was a desire to explore the human spirit.
Early examples were set in vivid alien and alienating faraway worlds, such as his debut novel A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975, revised as Eyes of Fire, 1980), set among the androgynous inhabitants of distant Trope. In Transfigurations (1979) a scientist tries to unravel a seemingly irrational alien culture.
