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. ( )

An ok book which took me a while to read - could not get into it. ( )

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 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). ( )

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. ( )

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 and reality, science and myth, family and belonging. ( )