A rollicking and audacious collection of stories featuring Martian invaders, time travel, voodoo queens, giant Hollywood monsters, Dr. Moreau–like mad scientists, and more
In The Cat’s Pajamas, James Morrow—called “the most provocative satiric voice in science fiction” by the Washington Post—takes the reader on thirteen wild and gleeful rides, each exploring a demented, dystopian, or provisionally desirable world.
A tyrannical church wields terrifying power over people’s sex lives in the name of protecting “the rights of the unconceived.” The dead, raised by Caribbean magic, are put to benevolent use in a New Jersey suburb. A racist Supreme Court justice gets his karmic comeuppance. Columbus “discovers” a contemporary New York City. The island of Manhattan becomes a battlefield on which two alien races thrash out their philosophical disagreements. And in the remarkable title offering, a deranged doctor blesses his mutant creatures with ethical superiority, a simple matter of injecting them with a serum derived from the disembodied brain of the story’s living—and understandably bewildered—protagonist.
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.