In 2004 Houghton Mifflin hired James Morrow and his wife Kathryn to create a curriculum for secondary school teachers interested in using The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in their classrooms.
When Dimension House issued its slipcased deluxe edition of The Godhead Trilogy in 2004, James Morrow and his editor, Shane Staley, decided to include a chapbook of three one-act satires ostensibly written by the character Cassie Fowler. Two of Cassie’s works have appeared in Morrow’s collections, The Cat’s Pajamas (in which “God Without Tears” became “Director’s Cut”) and Bible Stories for Adults (in which “The Rematch” became “The Soap Opera”). Here is the third play from the chapbook, “Moon Over Gethsemane,” which dramatizes certain uncanny events on the night before the crucifixion.
This is James Morrow’s contribution to the Amazon Shorts program. In the author’s words, “The plot turns on Omar, a cyborg tortoise dispatched via time machine from a high-tech future to the Galápagos Islands of September 10, 1835. His audacious mission: to alter the local fauna so radically that, when Charles Darwin arrives seven days hence, he will never become inspired to father the theory of natural selection.”
In March of 2004 — while The Last Witchfinder was still gestating — noted scholar, critic, and author Fiona Kelleghan taped a long interview with James Morrow at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Fort Lauderdale. The results were ultimately published in Science Fiction Studies as “The War of the Worldviews: A Conversation with James Morrow.”
ParaDoxa Volume 5, Number 12 was a special issue devoted to the fiction of James Morrow. Contributors include Samuel R. Delany, Michael Swanwick, F. Brett Cox, Michael Bishop, and Elisabeth Vonarburg.
