No Enemy But Time

Joshua Kampa travels back in time, first in his dreams, then in a kind of reality, where his dreaming visions allow him to access a kind of perfect simulacra of the past, all the way back in Pleistocene Africa, where he befriends a small group of Homo habilis, studying them in an unprecedented exercise in field palaeoanthropology, learning their ways, finding a home for himself after a lifetime of not belonging, finding unexpected love, hardship, bliss and heartbreak, and something else he never could have imagined.

Beautifully imagined and magically evoked with Joshua's voice of repressed poetry and self-taught knowledge alternating with chapters about how his life lead him to this unlikely place, No Enemy But Time is a novel of dreams show more and reality, science and myth, family and belonging. show less

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A pretty memorable book. Joshua Kampa hs these odd dreams about the Pleistocene; an African government teams up with the US military to send him back in time two million years. The time-travel adventure bit of the story is the kind of thing I generally enjoy unquestioningly, but in this case there's a lot in there about family relationships and communicating; Kampa's biological mother cannot speak, neither can his prehistoric companions, and he voluntarily cuts off all contact with his adoptive mother. (Overlaid a little with the difficulties of cultural communication between the West and traditional Africa, though this was not much developed.) So I found more than I had expected to like about this show more book. Recommended. show less

Joshua Kampa es reclutado para un experimento: viajar al Pleistoceno del África oriental, dos millones de años atrás en el tiempo, para conocer de primera mano al Homo habilis y verificar la existencia del Homo zarakalensis. Joshua es el idóneo para esta misión, para convertirse en crononauta, porque desde que tiene memoria ha tenido unos sueños muy vívidos en los que visitaba el Pleistoceno, una especia de viajes astrales en los que era un mero observador, sin posibilidad de intervenir.

La historia transcurre en dos líneas argumentales: por un lado sabremos cómo le va a Joshua con los Homo habilis, sin duda la mejor parte, y por otra, conoceremos más cosas sobre la vida de Joshua, antes John, hasta su llegada al proyecto show more Esfinge Blanca, como se ha dado en llamar el experimento del viaje en el tiempo.

LO MEJOR: la mezcla entre paleontología, antropología, misticismo y ciencia ficción, algo poco habitual en el género, y que le valió el Premio Nebula en 1982 a Michael Bishop. También son de reseñar las magníficas descripciones que hace Bishop de este África prehistórica.

LO PEOR: el personaje no termina de cuajar, no consigue que te sientas atraído por lo que le sucede casi en ningún momento. La estructura de la novela no es muy acertada, porque cuanto más interesado estás por lo que sucede en África, va Bishop y te corta la trama para volver a la antigua vida del protagonista. La parte del viaje en el tiempo encuentro que está muy desaprovechada; se nos da a conocer muy poco sobre cómo eran los viajes del Joshua niño, así como los viajes de otro de los protagonistas a la Alemania nazi, o de la descripción de la máquina del tiempo. Tampoco me ha gustado mucho la manera de escribir que tiene Bishop, efectiva sin más.

Resumiendo, la novela no pasa de ser una historia curiosa sobre viajes en el tiempo que apenas llega al aprobado, y que te deja con la sensación de que podría haber dado para mucho más. show less

Well, it's interesting. Like the premise, the characters, and the plot, but the ending didn't work for me, just kind of fell flat. YMMV.

Nowadays I tend to re-read a lot of older SF, which conforms to my generally senescent fiction diet. Perhaps because a lot of the things I read in the different genres - mystery, horror, SF – originally appeared in magazines, I tend to have a preference for shorter works: stories, novellas or short novels.

Last week I re-read a novel from 1982, Michael Bishop’s “No Enemy But Time”, where the main SF trope is a time-travel / prehistoric fiction story in which the protagonist joins a band of early humans in Pleistocene Africa. The prehistoric story, which I found only moderately interesting, took up only half the book; every alternate chapter was given over to a mostly realistic Bildungsroman of the time traveler leading up to his show more involvement with the organization researching time travel. That narrative concerned itself mainly with describing the protagonist’s character development and his relationship with his family, the kinds of themes I associate more with literary fiction than with SF.

This time around, I didn’t care much for the sections developing the character and his relationships. Perhaps it’s just because Bishop wasn’t too skilled at this sort of writing, but I tend to avoid generic works with significant realistic “mainstream” elements. I don’t want to read a mystery that devotes lengthy sections to the detective’s rocky relationship with his girlfriend or a horror story that spends a lot of time on the divorced protagonist’s efforts to relate to his son (unless these somehow are essential to the development or resolution of the generic plot). show less

BESTIALITY was definitely not what I expected when I picked up my first SF Masterworks book. Frankly, it is very light, science-fiction and might altogether belong in another genre. Either way, the book is extremely well written and interesting, especially the taboo romance.

Interesting and quite satirical at times, the best parts were set in the Pleistocene while the contemporary setting could tend to drag somewhat.