Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 322 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Michael Bishop.

He's the author of over a dozen novels, including brittle innings, unicorn mountain, Philip

K Dick is dead alas, and no enemy but time.

And numerous short story collections, including Blotted on Aracny,

and the Door Gunner and other perilous flights of Fancy.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his recent short story collections,

The Sasserodal Owl on three other long tales,

and other arms reach out to me, Georgia's stories.

And now here's her interview with Michael Bishop.

All right, so we're here with Michael Bishop. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

Okay, so your new book is called The Sastradotal Owl and Three Other Long Tales.

So how did this book come about?

Well, it came about over a long period of time. If you look at the acknowledgement page, you'll

see that these four stories were written over a considerable period.

The Sasser D'Low is one of the newer ones, for me at least.

It appeared in the early aught in 2002, or 2003 rather.

But the oldest story here goes all the way back to 1976.

It was the second book I published as a matter of fact and it stood on its own. It was a short novel published by Harper and Row and I was extremely excited to have that particular book come out because it was my first hard cover for one thing.

I had previously been published by Balantyne with a novel called The Funeral for the

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