A scout retrieving artifacts from an ancient species on a distant planet sets out on a search for his missing mentor.

BIRD DEITY
by John Morrissey
Text Publishing Australia, August 2026

BIRD DEITY is a science-fiction novel set in a colony on a distant planet. The protagonist, David, is a young man who works as a ‘scout’, retrieving artifacts made by a now-vanished species called the parasapes. These artifacts encode the memories of the parasapes from a time before their civilisation was destroyed by a mysterious catastrophe.

After ten years, David is due to return to Earth. But he is worried about leaving. His mentor, Tom, has recently gone missing on a plateau where the parasapes used to live. Is he dead? Tom’s girlfriend, Eliza, thinks so and is trying to organise passage home for herself and her baby.

Just before he is due to depart, David is approached by a newly arrived anthropologist named Sarah, who has been sponsored by a trillionaire philanthropist to study the lost culture of the parasapes. David agrees to take her to the plateau in exchange for a massive fee.

But when they get there, David’s story begins to overlap with the story of a parasape astronomer in the months before his civilisation was destroyed. Searching for Tom, David finds himself drawn back into his childhood until he is ultimately confronted by the horrifying Bird Deity.

John Morrissey is a multi-award-winning Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. His work has been published in Overland, Voiceworks, Meanjin and the anthology This All Come Back Now. He was the winner of the 2020 Boundless Mentorship, the runner-up for the 2018 Nakata Brophy Prize and named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Novelists of 2024. His debut short story collection, Firelight, was published in 2023 and won Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards 2023 as well as the Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection in the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards.