About this item
James Morrows Galpagos Regained centers on the fictional Chloe Bathurst, an unemployed Victorian actress who finds work on Charles Darwins estate, nurturing the strange birds, exotic lizards, and giant tortoises he brought back from his trip around the world. When Chloe gets wind of the Great God Contest, sponsored by the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society--10,000 to the first petitioner who can prove or disprove the existence of a Supreme Being--she decides that Mr. Darwins materialist theory of speciation might just turn the trick. If Nature gave God nothing to do, maybe He was never around in the first place. Before she knows it, her ambitions send her off on a wild adventure--a voyage by brigantine to Brazil, a steamboat trip up the Amazon, a hot-air balloon flight across the Andes--bound for the Galpagos archipelago, where she intends to collect the live specimens through which she might demonstrate evolutionary theory to the contest judges.
About the Author
Born in 1947, James Morrow has been writing fiction ever since, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, he 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, Morrow 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 full-time fiction writer, Morrow makes his home in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, his son, an enigmatic sheepdog, and a loopy beagle.
