"James Morrow is best known for his magnum opus, the Godhead Trilogy. The first installment, Towing Jehovah, winner of the World Fantasy Award, recounts the efforts of a supertanker captain to entomb the corpse of God in an Arctic glacier. The sequel, Blameless in Abaddon, tells of a small-town judge who prosecutes the Corpus Dei before the World Court. In The Eternal Footman, God's skull goes into geosynchronous orbit above Times Square, causing a plague of despair. Morrow's long-awaited postmodern historical epic, The Last Witchfinder, will appear from William Morrow in March of 2006. His newest collection is The Cat's Pajamas and Other Stories, published last summer by Tachyon Books. Delirium Books has recently issued the Godhead Trilogy in a deluxe slipcased edition, including a chapbook of one-act plays on the theme of the Deus Absconditus. The author's other novels include This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), a Nebula finalist, and Only Begotten Daughter (1990), winner of the World Fantasy Award. His early short fiction is collected in Bible Stories for Adults, including the Nebula Award-winning fable, ""The Deluge."" His 1991 novella City of Truth also received a Nebula Award. Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Morrow spent his adolescent years making short 8mm fantasy films with his friends, including adaptations of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ""The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"" and Edgar Allan Poe's ""The Tell-Tale Heart."" His affection for satiric and philosophical fiction comes largely from the novels he studied in his high school World Literature course. He currently lives in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Kathryn, his seventeen-year-old son, Christopher, and two dogs: Pooka, an ASPCA Border collie, and Amtrak, a Doberman that Jim and Kathy found in an Orlando train station. "

I wrote this satiric fable in hopes of adding a new and phantasmagorical wrinkle to the Darwin Wars, the ongoing conflict between religious conservatives and evolutionary thinkers over the source of our planet's biological diversity. 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.