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It’s hard to know where to begin in dissecting this out-of-print Nebula winner. It’s another time travel story, and as we’ve already established with historical fiction and alternate histories, using such a device allows the author carte blanche when constructing a plot around their unique timeline. No Enemy but Time uses this latitude to create a novel that rewrites our understanding of our distant past. Whether this journey 2,000,000 years into Earth’s past is successful enough for the reader is up for debate.

No Enemy but Time is really two stories about one character told in a twined narrative as the author moves forward through Joshua Kampa’s past being raised by his foster parents, and his future, where he travels backwards in time to Plieistocene Africa in the the fictional country of Zarakal. He goes because he has been dreaming of living there, in this same far-distant time period, his whole life, and somehow the time travel technology in this novel revolves around the vivid dreams Kampa has had since he was a small child. Only one who has “spirit traveled” can actually go back in time using the time travel device, White Sphinx. Kampa qualifies, and so he is sent back in time to observe the fictionalized proto-humans, Homo zarakalenis (referred to as Minids). The rest of this time travel part of the story focuses on Kampa’s adventures with the tribe of proto-humans he eventually becomes a part of. An intriguing premise, No Enemy but Time fails to reach the heights worthy of a Nebula.

The plot of No Enemy but Time is hard to summarize intelligently, as may be apparent from the first two paragraphs of this review. The book is long and winding, and while its two stories are connected through the shared character of Joshua Kampa, it’s hard to pin down why the story of his childhood and maturation is necessary, even if these chapters are the best written of the book. But what is most frustrating and banal is the way Bishop treats Kampa’s time in the past. The book reads like an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel without the excitement, and with a black protagonist. As Kampa successfully joins the Minids band, he becomes the all-powerful outsider, just as good, if not better, at practicing the tasks of hunting and gathering that his Minid companions are both evolutionarily and experientially more suitable for.

Even more problematic is the nature of gender and sexuality in this book. The Minid society is divided along gender lines, with the men doing the hunting and protecting and the females doing the gathering and the nurturing. They also pair bond monogamously along gender lines, implying that heteronormative standards reigned supreme in humans’ distant ancestors. That is, of course, until Kampa falls in love with one of the female Minids that he names Helen, a loner, physically larger than the other woman, who most often acts like a male of the tribe. But this is an uneasy role – Helen is shunned by the females and often takes to stealing other animals’ children in an attempt to play mother. In Bishop’s Pleistocene era, the key to true acceptance in society for a woman is still tied closely to her reproductive capabilities and her role in a heteronormative couple.

That’s right. If you haven’t guessed it by now, Kampa and Helen pair bond, have sex, and produce a child. Putting aside the possible scientific impossibility of this procreation (it is a novel about time travel based on dreaming, after all), I was quite put off by the sexualization of Helen, who I read to be basically an animal in comparison to Kampa. Their love scene read like lurid bestiality, and though I could see the relationship coming from miles away, that didn’t lead me to be any more disappointed in the author. The love scene and sexual bond between Kampa and Helen served no purpose in the plot other than to situate both Kampa and Helen in a monogamous, heteronormative relationship.

This book was published in 1982, during the rise of the New Right with a backlash against the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. It’s hard to know if Bishop’s interest in pair bonding Kampa and Helen related to this backlash, but one of the most striking features of this novel is that Joshua Kampa is black. Further, he encounters prejudice and discrimination based on his skin color in scenes that are convincing enough such that they are uncomfortable to read. If Bishop was unwilling to relinquish heternormative relationships, he did explore the color barrier.

Also, the novel is set in Africa, an Africa that Bishop envisions as forward thinking scientifically, and that in the end gets its own space program. It is not a simple backdrop for a story about time travel, but instead is a character in its own right, as are the African politicians who play and support Kampa along the way.

As I said at the beginning of the review, this novel has an extremely interesting premise, I just wish it had been executed better. Kampa’s sexual relationship with Helen was a disturbing plot point that I couldn’t move beyond, and it was hard to feel immersed in the minutiae of the Minids society when most of their time was spent looking for food – realistic perhaps, but it didn’t make for riveting reading. Then Bishop glossed over one of the most interesting parts of the story – his return to the present with his hybrid daughter. Perhaps unwilling to imagine the prejudice she might face, or the mental handicaps she might have to overcome, she appears as perfectly normal in the final chapter, absconding to chase her own dreams of the future.

No Enemy but Time is lean on material where it should be thick, and dwells too much on seemingly mundane episodes. Further, it is hard not to feel disturbed by the eroticization of an animal. Poor females are always sex objects, even if they’re almost of a different species. This book is a romance novel for men disguised as a technical manual for wilderness survival disguised as a coming of age story. Follow your dreams, Bishop extorts his reader, they will lead your on wilder and more inappropriate adventures than you ever imagined.

This cover is notoriously bad.

Let me preface this review by stating that I am a historian. I’ve always loved storytelling and being transported to faraway worlds, which is why I love science fiction. By the time I’d reached college I knew I loved history as well, passionately, both because it is a mirror of time that reflects back on ourselves, and because it transports us to faraway places both familiar and fantastical, all of which have the benefit of being real. I think many science fiction authors are lovers of history, if not consciously then latently – how can you write about the future without at least being enamored of the past? It makes perfect sense to me that an author might therefore combine a love of science fiction with a love for history in order to use the conventions of one genre to explore the meaning of the human past. That being said, I have no idea why Doomsday Book won a Hugo.

Doomsday Book actually received the Hugo as a co-winner, along with Vernor Vinge’s masterful far future, deep space adventure, A Fire Upon the Deep. Co-nominated with such a transcendent competitor, Doomsday Books’ win seems even more of a mystery. Clocking in at 578 pages long (Bantam revised edition, 1994), the novel, set in the near future, is a tedious, drawn out tale of historical fiction with the convention of time travel thrown in to predicate the action on a sci-fi premise.

Kivrin, a Medieval history student studying at Oxford, has the privilege (or luck) of being a historian after time travel has been discovered. This allows historians to travel back in time to observe events as they unfolded and, more importantly, to see how people truly lived. Obviously, Connie Willis is a fan of social history. It may not be the dream of every historian to time travel back to our chosen time periods, but I’d be lying if I said that thought hadn’t crossed my mind more than once. Not that this doesn’t raise a myriad of questions about methodology and subjectivity, but the nature of the historical profession is not being examined in this novel, nor shall it be in this review. Here, going back in time is the authoritative way to find out about history and Kivrin is going to do it. The only problem is that her chosen time period, 14^th century Europe, is rated a “ten,” or one of the most dangerous centuries, and is therefore off limits to time travel.

Doomsday Book is not 578 pages of Kivrin trying to get to the Middle Ages. In fact, she transports away rather quickly, too quickly, in fact, for her mentor, Mr. Dunworthy, a historian of the 20^th century who inexplicably knows more about the Middle Ages than any of the actual Medieval historians. In fact, thanks to the almost sinister bumbling of Mr. Gilchrist, Dunworthy’s rival, Kivrin is sent to the 1348 instead of 1320, right in the middle of the Black Plague. Oops. Luckily for our heroine, she has been inoculated against the disease in preparation for such a mishap, but she finds herself stuck in the past for a variety of reasons, one being that she has no idea how to find her way back to the rendezvous point (or “drop”) meant to teleport her back to her time, and the other being that as soon as she leaves, present-day Oxford begins to experience a deadly epidemic of the influenza virus that leaves everyone capable of bringing her back from the past incapacitated or dead.

What follows is a duel narrative tracing Dunworthy’s struggle to reach Kivrin admist the epidemic and Kivrin’s frantic attempts to find the drop point, unaware both of the crisis going on in her own century and of the oncoming bubonic plague. Having insinuated herself in the household of a minor noble family, she is forced to watch with horror as the grotesque disease rips through the population of the house and village adjoining it. Meanwhile, Dunworthy runs endlessly between his office and the hospital, spending most of his time making phone calls that don’t get through and trying to pry information out of the deathly ill technician who may be the only one that can save Kivrin from being trapped in the past.

To my eyes, this book reads more like a work of historical fiction than a work of science fiction worth holding a candle to A Fire Upon the Deep. As I said, most of the plot is extremely detailed historical fiction, though Willis’s description of 14^th century England is very conveniently predicated upon the fact that she can change things at will. Remember, Kivrin is experiencing history as it “really” was, not as it was written about. This gives the author carte blanche to fill in gaps or alter details however she desires. Unfortunately, Willis does not use this self-made latitude to create any multidimensional or human characters. Instead of exploring gender roles, for example, Willis creates stock female characters capable of one emotion that limply advance the plot and little else (shrewish mother-in-laws, petulant brides-to-be, etc.), and men cut to fit the mold of disgusting, elder suitor and longing white knight. All the characters seem to have rather modern attitudes about very ancient things. A true historian explores the subjectivity of the lived experience of the historical agent, but in Willis’s past what we expect to find is exactly what we get. What’s the point of time travel, then? It’s easy to be trapped by Willis’s unimaginative tropes because they are familiar to us – so familiar that they’re as worn out as they are enticing in their familiarity. Continuing to harp on well-worn themes, Willis spends an inordinate amount of time making sure to describe the appearance and effects of the black plague in gruesome detail. If this book has a point, more than anything else it seems to be that the black death was really gross and really DID suck for all those involved, though again, I’m not sure we needed time travel and 578 pages to prove that to us. Luckily, the influenza virus in present times is nowhere near as graphic in its manifestations.

Other flaws abound. The characters in this novel are, for the most part, poorly drawn and two dimensional. The villains are so cookie-cutter evil that it is almost insulting to the reader, Dunworthy has no characteristics other than constant anxiety over Kivrin’s whereabouts, and even the unhappy betrothal between a too-young bride and her fat suitor comes right out of the most cliché of storybooks, though how she is saved from an unhappy marriage presents a bit of a twist.

Better, I guess.

If Willis does move toward anything like interesting commentary beyond gore and the pain of losing a loved one, it is in her brief exploration at the end of the novel as to how people find meaning in the midst of a crisis such as a plague. For Willis this manifests in the character of Father Roche, the village priest who believes Kivrin is an angel sent to save them, and Lady Imeyne, the unbearable mother-in-law who rules over the house Kivrin stays in, who is obsessed with status and religion, and believes Kivrin is a sinful witch (because she is a single lady) who has brought the plague upon them. Kivrin, educated in science, knows that the plague is caused by an infectious disease, not a curse sent from God, nor can it be cured by prayer. But, as she struggles to save those she loves from a truly gruesome death, she finds herself confronting the God she so strongly believes, has to believe, isn’t punishing the wicked. Is this kind of death senseless, or does it serve a purpose? Where are those who promised to protect us from such things? In a way, the entire novel takes on our fear of being lost and alone, facing impossible odds. Facing our dooms.

This kind of nuanced questioning brings a level of meaning to Doomsday Book, but it takes 578 pages to get there and is overwhelmed by all the other truly petty concerns that Willis dwells on for most of the book. The interlacing story arcs are so repetitive that surely some of the running back and forth waiting for the phone to ring could have been cut out, as could Kivrin’s waiting by the window for a guide to the drop and her “journal entries,” which in many cases merely summarize events that have already occurred. Doomsday Book is a story with a lot of content with little substance. Unveiling the ending to the mystery Willis builds may have its riveting qualities, but there’s not much else here that bears any remarking upon.