Fire On The Mountain

(Paperback)

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Description

Its 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet and a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown in Harriet Tubman's guerrilla army. Long unavailable in English, this bold novel tells the tale of what might have happened if John Brown's raid on Harper's ferry had succeeded - and the Civil War had been started by the abolitionists, not the slave owners.

Reviews

"History revisioned, turned inside out... Bisson's wild and wonderful imagination has taken some strange turns to arrive at such a destination."
--Madison Smartt Bell, Anisfield-Wolf Award winner and author of Devil's Dream

"You don't forget Bisson's characters, even well after you've finished his books. His Fire on the Mountain does for the Civil War what Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle did for World War Two."
George Alec Effinger, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards for Shrdinger's Kitten, and author of the Mard Audran trilogy.

"A talent for evoking the joyful, vertiginous experiences of a world at fundamental turning points."
--Publishers Weekly

"Few works have moved me as deeply, as thoroughly, as Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain... With this single poignant story, Bisson molds a world as sweet as banana cream pies, and as briny as hot tears."
--Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row prisoner and author of Live From Death Row, from the Introduction.

Author Bio

Terry Bisson is the host of SF in SF, a popular science-fiction reading-series. He is the author of several books, including The Cat's Pajamas, Greetings & Other Stories, and Numbers Don't Lie. He lives in San Francisco.