Transfigurations by Michael Bishop

Get ready for adventure and excitement to blow your mind. Really blow your mind.

Transfigurations is American author Michael Bishop's 1979 science fiction novel about anthropologists and their encounters with a jungle tribe on a distant planet in the far reaches of outer space. As a once avid reader of cultural anthropology myself, detailed studies like Colin Turnbull's The Forest People, Raymond Firth's Tikopia Ritual and Belief and Michael Harner's Hallucinogens and Shamanism, I found Mr. Bishop's book an enthralling page-turner. And, to be more precise, Transfigurations treats readers to not one but two adventures.

I could only locate a handful of reviews of the book and none going into any depth. Perhaps the novel's relative obscurity is a good thing since the many surprises are not given away by reviewers or the publisher. Thus a reader is left to make their own discoveries. And let me assure you, many of the discoveries will be positively jaw-dropping.

Keeping in the spirit of not revealing any more than I should in my capacity as reviewer, I offer the following bare bones outline on each of the two adventures in the hope you will seek out a copy and read for yourself.

ADVENTURE #1
The first third of the novel was previously published in novella form under the title Death and Designation Among the Asadi. Here anthropologist Egan Chaney recounts his field work among the Asadi in a rain forest on the planet BoskVeld.

There are a number of mysteries looming around the Asadi. Other than small insects, why is this tribe of about 500 (considered the optimum number for a tribe on any planet), the only form of animal life in the forest? Since they do not use either spoken words or any form of sign language, what are the details revolving around their evident eye communication? Why are social relations among the Asadi so extremely antisocial? And most dramatically, what is the relationship between the uncommunicative Asadi, a tribe with no detectable tools, arts or crafts, and their distant ancestors, the Ur’sadi, supposed builders of temples?

As for the Asadi themselves, they are nearly as tall as humans when standing upright, creatures of grey flesh and heads heavy with draping fur. When the sun comes up, they assemble on a rectangular forest clearing the size of a football field where they stroll around with no apparent purpose, sometime engage in violent, loveless sex, sometimes bend at the waste to glare at one another. In many ways, the Asadi are more like chimpanzees than humans.

But, as Egan Chaney himself admits, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge. There are those Asadi eyes as per his report: “like the bottoms of thick-glassed bottles. Except that I’ve noticed the eye really consists of two parts: a thin transparent covering, which is apparently hard like plastic, and the complex, membranous organ of sight that this covering protects. It’s as if each Asadi is born wearing a built-in pair of safety glasses.”

Chaney goes on to chronicle how the Asadi eyes change colors with dazzling speed, sparkling and zooming through the complete visual spectrum in seconds. Moreover, these changes appear to be controlled and self-willed in the same way human speech is self-willed; in other words, the Asadi choose the colors they flash as we human choose the words we speak.

Over a series of weeks living among the Asadi, Egan Chaney admits their behavior simply does not make sense. But then there is a first dramatic event, then another and another and another. In the aftermath of these striking happenings, when Egan Chaney reluctantly departs the forest in a futuristic helicopter and returns to his colleagues in town, he is a much changed man. So much so, in a matter of days, Egan Chaney returns to the forest, never to be seen again.

ADVENTURE #2
Six years following Egan Chaney's disappearance, his daughter, Elegy Cather, now a twenty-three year old university educated anthropologist, is joined by Chaney's prime colleague, fellow anthropologist Thomas Benedict, in her quest to enter the forest to study the Asadi and, most importantly, find her missing father. Elegy's quest forms the bulk of the novel.

Elegy has some serious help in her expedition in the form of an extraordinary creature designed to assimilate itself into the Asadi tribe: genetically engineered from both the genes of chimps and baboons (please keep in mind we are in the distant future and this is science fiction), Kretzoi is outfitted with an Asadi-like mane of hair and surgically implanted eye lenses to replicate Asadi eyes. With a human-like capacity for abstract thought, Kretzoi can directly communicate with Elegy via American sign language. I found the inclusion of Kretzoi one of the most fascinating aspects of the story.

Michael Bishop has a background in anthropology. Another fascinating aspect of his novel: these futuristic social scientists make direct comparisons between their own work with the Asadi and the insights of twentieth-century anthropologist Colin Turnbull in the field with African pygmy (The Forrest People) and among the Ik, an African tribe kicked out of their hunting grounds and left to starve (The Mountain People).

And how about those ancestors, the Ur’sadi? Egan Chaney made a number of stunning discoveries he noted in his field report and material evidence he returned with that found its way into the town’s archeological museum. And closely related in some mysterious way to the Ur’sadi is a purplish-black blind creature looking like a cross between a bat and a winged lizard. What’s that all about?

Lastly, there's the issue of human boredom and hatred culminating in brutality toward "the other." In an interview, Michael Bishop spoke out against such stupidity: "In any event, it outrages me to see people treat other people as something less than human for any reason at all: race, class consciousness, religious differences, sex or sexual orientation, intellectual pride, etc. But because the human condition, along with ignorance and/or greed, continually triggers brutality, I have no shortage of outrage, and outrage often fuels my fiction."

Again, I purposely went light on plot and detail so as to leave the excitement of the adventures to each reader.


American author Michael Bishop, born 1945