THE POPE OF THE CHIMPS Although I have from time to time amused my friends by telling them of my desire to be elected Pope, this story has no Vatican connections whatever. I wrote it in June of 1981, quickly and with great passion and conviction, in response to a request from anthology editor Alan Ryan to do a story for a book of science-fiction stories on religious themes, called PERPETUAL LIGHT. The story, which I think digs as deeply into human and nonhuman emotions as I’ve ever been able to do in short-story form, was nominated for a Hugo award, but because it had appeared only in a book instead of in one of the widely distributed science-fiction magazines, relatively few of the voters had read it and the award went elsewhere. But in later years it has frequently been reprinted in anthologies.