Michael Bishop Books

Easton Press Michael Bishop books:
No Enemy But Time - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 1991

 

No Enemy But Time
Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to question the understanding of eminent palaeontologists. As a result, Joshua is invited to join a most unusual time travel project and is transported millions of years into the past of his dreams.

In early Pleistocene Africa, living among the prehuman species Homo habilis, experiencing the same hardships and the same intense pleasures, Joshua finds, for the first time in his troubled life, not only contentment but real love a love that transcends almost everything.

Intelligent, thoughtful and deeply moving, No Enemy But Time brilliantly evokes the remote past and, at the same time, presents a powerful and convincing portrayal of a relationship surmounting even the most daunting barriers. It is a challenging and highly original novel exploring the nature and origins of humankind.

Joshua Kampa is torn between two worlds - the Early Pleistocene Africa of his dreams and the 20th-century reality of his waking life. These worlds are transposed when a government experiment sends him over a million years back in time. Here, John builds a new life as part of a tribe of protohumans. But the reality of early Africa is much more challenging than his fantasies. With the landscape, the species, and John himself evolving, he reaches a temporal crossroads where he must decide whether the past or the future will be his present.