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| AUTHOR: | Michael Bishop |
| CATEGORY: | Book |
| MANUFACTURER: | Timescape |
| ISBN: | 0671449737 |
| TYPE: | Africa, American Science Fiction And Fantasy, Fiction, Prehistoric peoples, Science Fiction |
| MEDIA: | Hardcover |
| # OF MEDIA: | 1 |
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Customer Reviews of No Enemy but Time: A Novel
This book creeps into my dreams often For anyone who dreams about ancient times and our ancestors this book is for you. I envy Joshua the chance to go back in time to visit our pre Homo sapien kin. I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in prehistoric fiction. It deals with real feelings and real characters. It appeals to the human sense of self within this world.
No Enemy But Style
It is really hard to know what to say about this book, other than that I din't enjoy it, but forced myself to read it until the end, something I rarely have to do.
There is no point in treating this as hard SF, because the central technology is almost entirely ludicrous and pretty much irrelevent to the story. This, instead, is SF on the fringes of magic realism and the fantasy of dreams, usually my favourite kind of reading. Such SF stands or falls on its literary qualities.
'No Enemy But Time' doesn't so much fall as collapse.
The problem with Bishop's writing is that it appears oh-so-self-consciously literary in a kind of know-it-all university English Literature graduate way. In describing Joshua Kampa's adventures in the Pleistocene, the narration attempts to be jaunty and witty and light in the manner of the classic picaresque - think Cervantes here - but this not only jars horribly with the character of Joshua (or John-John) as established in the parrallel, and much more engaging, story of his difficult earlier life, but also appears almost entirely inappropriate to the events described and the emotional development of the novel. It is the kind of SF praised by mainstream critics who claim not to like SF, and is exactly the kind of thing that the Cyberpunk movement - which appeared on the scene not long after this was published - understandably aimed to eradicate. It also compares very badly with other 'is it time-travel or is it a dream?' novels, in particular Marge Piercy's moving 'Woman on the Edge of Time'.
Style is at least partly a matter of personal taste, so in giving a book such a poor review almost entirely based on style - although the story is pretty weak too - I do not want to put others off reading 'No Enemy But Time'. But don't say I didn't warn you.
A Classic from Michael Bishop
No Enemy But Time demonstrates why Michael Bishop is one of the best writers--not just best science fiction writers--around. This book manages to challenge our ideas about what the future might bring and what the past might be like at the same time. And, especially since the book is out of print except for a hard-to-get and expensive collector's edition, ElectricStory has done readers a great service by bringing it out in electronic format. Don't pass up this classic novel from a master writer.