Over five decades and in more than thirty books, he created what has been called a "body of work that stands among the most admired and influential in modern science fiction and fantasy literature.
He taught English (including a course in science fiction) at the United States Air Force Academy Preparatory School in Colorado Springs from 1968 to 1972.
[12] Bishop edited seven anthologies, including the Locus Award-winning Light Years and Dark and A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-five Imaginative Tales about the Christ, published by Thunder's Mouth Press in 2007.
[12] Bishop wrote introductions to books by Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., Pamela Sargent, Gardner Dozois, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Andy Duncan, Paul Di Filippo, Bruce Holland Rogers, and Rhys Hughes.
His shorter series, Glaktik Komm, in the subgenre of anthropological science fiction, consists of two short stories and two novels published in the late 1970s.
This early period is also noted for a number of high-profile novellas: in 1973 "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" and "The White Otters of Childhood" appeared on the shortlist ballots for both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
"[21] In Stolen Faces (published by Harper & Row in 1977), a recently demoted commissioner has been reassigned to a colony planet to govern a compound which isolates the sufferers of a leprosy-like disease.
"[22] Critic Richard Delap writes "There is an abundance of exploitable elements in Bishop's story, so it is astonishing to see how the author keeps them under strict rein, always with a highly keyed visual sense but also with a literary flair that says more by implication than by direct description.
In his introduction to the British hardcover edition of the revised work, Bishop writes "…I still feel affection for the original version of A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, its callow narrator, and a few of the flavorful images and metaphors with which I salted the text.
In one of the rare reviews, Robert Frazier writes "In almost every detail, Eyes of Fire is crafted intelligently… It is not the type of sf that pushes to the heights of wonder.
In this novel, published in the UK by Gollancz (1981) and in the US by Ace Books (1982), a Japanese linguist, crewmember of the research starship Heavenbridge, arrives on the home planet of the Kybers (so-called because they're seemingly made of flesh and metal.)
: According to the author's website A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire and Under Heaven's Bridge are only tangentially connected to the series and thus not part of the sequence proper.
The alien Cygnusians that first appeared in the novella "Allegiances" have been brought into the domed city of Atlanta, causing quite a stir when one of them converts to the state sponsored religion.
"[34] Richard Delap writes that "characters…scurry through this shifting maze as if they are buffeted by the social and political activities of this future world rather than by an author plotting to reach a predestined conclusion.
Bishop's critically acclaimed novel, the Nebula Award[10] winning No Enemy But Time, was published in 1982 by Simon & Schuster under David Hartwell's editorship and the Timescape imprint.
John Clute writes that the novel "intensified the movement of [Bishop's] imagination to a local habitat, and for the first time introduced a protagonist of sufficient racial (and mental) complexity to carry a storyline immured in the particular and haunted by the exotic.
"[16] In this sophisticated twist on the traditional time-travel story, a modern-day African-American man is recruited by the military for his special ability to "dream" himself into the Pleistocene era where he becomes involved with a tribe of habilines.
Looming behind this love story is a larger theme, the formation across the entire span of history of the Family of Man, a phrase that becomes, as the novel ripens to its conclusion, no mere liberal piety but a fully realized dramatic affirmation.
"[37] Editor and critic David Pringle writes that the novel "is narrated in an oddly detached, quizzical and dryly humorous manner… The paleo-anthropological details are superbly imagined, the African landscapes beautifully described, yet the final effect is one of coolness, distance… Michael Bishop's prose style is learned, witty, Latinate, although salted with deliberately-placed colloquialisms and low jokes.
In this thematic companion to his novel No Enemy But Time (with an almost inverse conceit), Bishop tackles issues of racial and cultural prejudice, and explores the question of what it means to be human.
Author and reviewer Orson Scott Card writes that "the climax is not just an inward epiphany for a character… [T]he world changes in wonderful strange ways, and the audience can read the book passionately, with sweating fingers, eager to see what happens next, yet reluctant to leave the present moment.
Locus reviewer Tom Whitmore calls the book "a masterful pastiche" and "…the closest thing to a classic Dick sf novel anyone has ever done.
"[48] Gerald Jonas in The New York Times writes "Mr. Bishop is a solid, serious writer whose reach (in his previous work) has always seemed to me to exceed his grasp.
Unicorn Mountain successfully weaves such traditional fantasy elements as unicorns and Indian lore together with the all-too-contemporary..."[52] Orson Scott Card wrote "The triumph of this, Bishop's most artistically whole and successful novel to date, is that he set out to do something that is nearly impossible in fiction: He wrote a novel about constructing a tribe...To do it, he had to bring us to know and understand and care about more fully-created characters than most writers produce in a career.
[50] Xavier Thaxton, protagonist of Count Geiger's Blues: A Comedy (Tor Books, 1992), is the fine arts editor for a newspaper in the fictional Southern metropolis of Salonika (a satirical/alternate reality version of contemporary Atlanta) with a particularly low opinion of pop culture.
In unleashing a startling talent for comedy and a wide-ranging knowledge of pop culture in both its absurdity and its splendor, Michael Bishop has written his best book yet.
Ten-year-old Joel-Brock Lollis returns home from a baseball game to discover that his parents and sister have been kidnapped, and proceeds to recruit two employees of the local big-box department store in his quest to rescue his family.
[59] Author, critic and sometime collaborator, Paul Di Filippo writes Since his first short-story sale in 1970, Michael Bishop has revealed a questing spiritual intelligence uniquely concerned with moral conundrums.
While his works are often full of both the widescreen spectacles associated with science fiction and the subtle frissons typical of more earthbound fantasy, his focus remains on the engagement of characters with ethical quandaries any reader might encounter in his or her daily life.
Acknowledged as one of the genre's finest and most meticulous short-story writers, Bishop boasts six collections to date that function as treasure troves of both science fiction and fantasy.