A satirical SF caper of evolution, gangsters, Darwin’s brain, and the Golden Age of Hollywood from the Nebula and World Fantasy Award–winning author.
When Sonya Orlova, a successful 1930s horror-film actress, crosses paths with a gorilla whose brain has been swapped for the frozen cerebrum of the late Charles Darwin, the two are inspired to write and produce evolution-themed monster movies—with Sonya in her greatest role, Korgora the Ape Woman!
As this offbeat and controversial Hollywood series finds a devoted cult audience, Sonia’s relationship with her strange simian collaborator acquires an intensity neither could have imagined. Then disaster strikes, as zealous opponents to Darwin’s ideas contrive to put the Ape Woman out of business.
By turns satiric and romantic, madcap, and thoughtful, Behold the Ape is at once an outré love story, a tribute to classic monster movies, and a science-fictional celebration of that beleaguered institution we call public education.Born in 1947, James Morrow has been writing fiction ever since he, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. This three-page, six-chapter fantasy is still in the author’s private archives. Upon reaching adulthood, Jim produced nine novels of speculative fiction, including the critically acclaimed Godhead Trilogy. He has won the World Fantasy Award (for Only Begotten Daughter and Towing Jehovah), the Nebula Award (for “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge” and the novella City of Truth), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the novella Shambling Towards Hiroshima). A fulltime fiction writer, Jim makes his home in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, his son, an enigmatic sheepdog, and a loopy beagle. He is hard at work on a novel about Darwinism and its discontents.