No Enemy But Time
by Michael Bishop
Summary
John Monegal is born in Spain to a deaf mute Spanish prostitute, abandoned, and adopted by an American air force couple. From childhood he dreams the Pleistocene: not vaguely, but in continuous, consistent detail, a specific African landscape two million years back that he can describe and that a palaeontologist eventually recognises.
That gift makes him useful. A government project has built something that can move a person backward, but only to a period the traveller can already reach mentally, and John is the only candidate. He renames himself Joshua Kampa and goes.
What he finds is a band of habilines, Homo habilis, small, hairy, socially complex people who accept him after a long and awkward negotiation involving food and patience. He lives with them for two years. He is given a name. He falls in love with a woman he calls Helen, who is not human by any definition an anthropologist would accept and who is unmistakably a person, and they have a child.
Bishop alternates chapters between the Pleistocene and John's American childhood, so the two stories of a boy who does not belong anywhere run side by side.
Around four hundred pages, unhurried, tender and strange, and much more interested in the daily texture of a habiline camp than in the time machine.
The habilines are the achievement. They have factions, favourites, jokes the reader can almost follow, and a way of grieving, and Bishop gives them all of it without a word of dialogue.
Best for readers who want prehistory written as ethnography rather than as spectacle, and a novel about belonging nowhere that earns its ending.
Historical Context & Significance
No Enemy But Time won the 1982 Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. David Pringle later included it in Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels.
Michael Bishop wrote from Georgia, mostly outside the field's social centre, and produced a body of work more interested in anthropology, religion and the American South than in technology. He won a Locus Award for the novella Her Habiline Husband, drawn from the same material.
The habilines are built on the palaeoanthropology of the late 1970s, when Homo habilis was still argued about as a species and the Leakey excavations at Olduvai and Koobi Fora were reshaping the field annually. Bishop's decision to make them fully realised people with politics, humour and grief, rather than either brutes or noble savages, was the least obvious available choice at the time.