Introduction
IN THE LAND OF AN
EXPANDED DREAM
Doug Davis
Michael Bishop’s No Enemy but Time, originally published in 1982, is a novel about one man’s dreams. Throughout his childhood during the Cold War, Joshua Kampa’s Air Force family moves from one Strategic Air Command base to the next, even though his dreams always take him to the same place: humanity’s prehistoric African past. His dreams are so cinematic that he regards his spirit as actually present amongst the protohumans and megafauna he sees nightly on the African savanna of two million years ago. Because of his special dreaming ability, Joshua eventually gets to travel back through time in a machine. Finding himself stranded in the Pleistocene, he finally lives his dreams, joining a small band of protohumans from the Homo habilis genus of humanity.
Forty years after its initial publication, Bishop’s revelations about humanity in No Enemy but Time still surprise me. His protohuman characters remain especially memorable because of how human his time traveler discovers them to be. Unlike many past works of literature and film exploring similar territory, Bishop’s narrative still feels refreshingly diverse and inclusive, and Joshua’s dreams still feel big and important. In fact, they are precisely the kind of dreams we must share today.
Joshua perceives his dreams of the past as if he were shooting a movie. “I dolly in and out like a movie camera,” he says. “I’m nothing but two free-floating eyes.” Just like Joshua, I see cinema in Bishop’s settings. The African savanna is a naturally cinematic place. So too are the twentieth-century Spanish cities and Strategic Air Command base towns Joshua lives in. Filmmakers must use machines such as cameras and projectors to turn their dreams into reality. Bishop’s unique take on the time machine turns dreams into reality too. His time machine sends individual dreamers to the places they dream of, turning their cinematic dreams into reality. When Joshua visits the past, cinema becomes his reality, and he finds himself living “In the land of an objectified dream.”
When I read a story, I tend to imagine each scene cinematically, envisioning the movie it could become. In my own dream-cinema version of No Enemy but Time, I see a movie that looks a lot like the first seventeen minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which in spite of its title is not set in space or the future but on the African savanna during the Pleistocene. Kubrick follows the everyday behavior of a small band of protohumans much like the band that Joshua joins. All is relatively peaceful in Kubrick’s film until a monolithic alien artifact pops up and magically teaches a protohuman how to fight with weapons. Protohumanity immediately goes on a killing spree against both the animal kingdom and itself. Kubrick titled this section of his film “The Dawn of Man.”
But that is Kubrick’s version of Pleistocene African humanity, not Bishop’s. Kubrick made 2001 during the Vietnam War, and he sees warfare in his cinematic dreams of humanity’s past. Joshua grows up during the Vietnam War too, but amazingly he sees his home in his cinematic dreams of that past. Viewed today, Kubrick’s dream feels constrained by the mid-twentieth-century culture of non-stop warfare from which it arose. Joshua inhabits the expanded land of a much better dream. Of the two, Joshua’s dream is the one that still feels important today, the one that still challenges us to expand the territory of our own dreams.
My imaginary movie version of No Enemy but Time may look a lot like Kubrick’s film, but the novel’s themes—being cast away in the wild, traveling deep into the African continent, time travel—remind me not of the history of cinema but of three foundational works in the history of the English novel: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). These three works set the template for thousands of tales that came after them in both film and literature, Bishop’s included. All still inspire our dreams. Robinson Crusoe is one of the first English-language novels. It established the paradigms for how English-language authors write not only about castaways but also, much more significantly, about modern individuality itself. The Time Machine is both the first novel about a machine deliberately created to navigate time and the world’s first example of the scientific romance, the popular genre Wells invented that is a clear precursor of today’s science fiction. Heart of Darkness stands not only as a foundational work of English literary Modernism but also as arguably the English canon’s most famous tale about a modern character travelling into the African wild. All three have been re-told in countless ways in literature and film.
Defoe, Wells, and Conrad are brilliant authors who forged powerful templates that determined the shape, content, and course of many realist and speculative narratives to come. Their dreams, however, also feel increasingly constrained by their times. All three authors take readers on adventures through space and time similar to the one found in these pages. Each of their protagonists discovers something essential about humanity along the way. None, however, finds real human beings during their journeys in the way Joshua does. Bishop creates characters and explores human connections the likes of which those literary titans, trapped in their eras’ ideas of empire, racial identity, and evolution, never dreamed of. Joshua’s dreams loom bigger and better than theirs.
When English-language novelists from past eras of literary history take their characters on adventures to faraway places and times, these characters usually feel a great difference between the new people and strange places they happen upon and the familiar ones they left behind. Defoe could not imagine that his modern protagonist would ever want to make his primitive island his permanent home. The shipwrecked slave-trader Robinson Crusoe finds only savages and more slaves on his island, not equals with whom he could foresee a future. Wells’ more open-minded Time Traveler can consider a home in the future, but the people he finds there seem lesser beings than he. In fact, they are not properly human beings at all, but grotesquely devolved descendants of Homo sapiens. Conrad’s narrator Charles Marlow, for his part, pities the Africans he sees suffering exploitation by their colonizers and calls out the abuses of imperialism. But he never, ever, conceives of calling any place in Africa his home. Only savages survive in Conrad’s version of Africa, whether Black or White.
Joshua is not struck by the differences between himself and the people he meets in the distant African past. Instead, he regards the protohuman Africans he meets as his true people and the Pleistocene African wild as his true home.
I want to develop the comparison between No Enemy but Time and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness further because the two stories bear telling similarities in terms of setting, plot, and even character motivation. Only eighty-three years, a single healthy modern lifetime, separate their original publication dates, but over those eight decades, the novel’s capacity to represent race, place, and humanity evolved remarkably. Like Bishop’s novel, Conrad’s novella focuses on a modern man who adventures deep into the heart of Africa where he encounters a precivilized form of humanity. The two adventures, however, are set in changed times, have wholly different narrators, and accordingly reach radically different ends.
Read today, Heart of Darkness is a brilliant but deeply conflicted story. Conrad’s examples of how European colonizers utterly fail to understand the continent they purport to master, and of how they exploit African workers to death, remain powerful indictments of imperialism and racism, but his depictions of Africans themselves are dehumanizing caricatures that reproduce the offensive racial stereotypes often found in the Victorian era’s adventure fiction.
The most important differences between Conrad’s tale and Bishop’s are the races and historical eras of their respective narrators. Conrad’s White Victorian-era narrator Marlow is heedless of the demeaning racist elements in the story he tells; indeed, those offensive elements ultimately serve his larger point about the true nature of humanity. Bishop’s Black Cold War-era narrator Joshua has lived with racism his whole life. He is of Spanish and African-American descent, and his adoptive parents are White and Mexican-American. The sense of place he feels living amongst African protohumans is the reverse of that felt by Conrad’s protagonist. Joshua doesn’t find savages living in the Pleistocene African wild. He finds people who emerge as friends and family.
Bishop corrects the stereotypes plaguing the history of the novel by foregrounding the humanity of his protohuman African characters. There are horrors in No Enemy but Time, the horrors not only of nature red in tooth and claw, but also of a much more recent era of superpower imperialism: the horrors of the Cold War nuclear threat, of strategic bombing, and of midcentury American racism. None of the novel’s horrors stem from its narrator’s biases. Indeed, Bishop’s narrator must avoid all sorts of stereotypical thinking both to scientifically study and to successfully live amongst his band of protohumans.
Joshua also reminds me of Conrad’s mysterious Mr. Kurtz, the White ivory-trader-gone-native whom Marlow has been sent up the Congo River to rescue. Both Kurtz and Joshua choose to live in Africa rather than return to their modern lives. Joshua stays because he has fallen in love. I believe Kurtz wants to stay in Africa for the same reason. Unfortunately, Conrad does not let him; indeed, the author punishes his character with madness for his transgressive desires. Kurtz, a Great White Savior sent to Africa to bear the “White Man’s Burden” of civilizing Africans, sets himself up as the king of the Africans who collect ivory for him. He lives in a chieftain’s hut surrounded by the severed heads of his enemies. The text even implies that he has married an African, a “barbarous and superb woman” who Marlow tells us “stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the somber and glittering river” as the sick and raving Kurtz is borne away from her on Marlow’s boat. Kurtz is driven mad by the conflict between his love for an African woman, his desire for an African home, and his identity as a Great White Savior. The point of Marlow’s tale about Kurtz seems clear: if the magnificent Kurtz can become “barbarous” while living in the heart of Africa, then so can any of us.
We are all savages at heart.
Where Kurtz is destroyed by the love and family he tried to make in Africa, Joshua is saved and made whole by the love and family he finds there. Prehistoric Africa is far more welcoming to him than Cold War America ever was. For that matter, so too is twentieth-century Africa.
Unburdened by Whiteness, Joshua never presumes to act as the chief of the protohumans. He does not try to make them work as his subjects or slaves. He does not rally them to war. He does not consider them savages. He does not need to save them. He wants their friendship and through them finds a home and a family. Eventually, he earns a kind of love from them and shares a kind of intimacy with them that Conrad, despite his best efforts eight decades earlier, could describe only as horrific. We can use a far better word to describe Joshua’s immediate and unwavering sense that protohumans are people too and that Pleistocene Africa is his home: wondrous.
I am glad that Bishop did not whitewash his language and take the edge off his book’s depictions of Cold War American racism for this newly revised edition. I am also glad that Bishop did not change the timeframe for his narrative but preserved its Cold War setting. Fittingly, No Enemy but Time also remains a product of its time. The most significant revisions I find in the new text are decidedly Modernist stylistic interventions, specifically removing punctuation marks and adding italics. Bishop has removed several commas from many of his complex sentences, italicizing the clauses between them instead. Even more noticeably, he has deleted all the quotation marks from around his dialog. Removing the commas speeds up the reading experience, certainly. But these revisions, and especially the removal of quotation marks, transform the book’s reading experience more significantly, blurring the distinction between Joshua’s and the other characters’ thoughts and utterances.
Punctuation marks are part of the civilized artifice of literacy. Without them, narrative becomes a little more oral and prehistoric. The missing quotes and commas in Bishop’s text sometimes have the effect of subsuming all voices into the narrator’s, turning occasional passages into streams of consciousness that feel more heard than read. In turn, the removal of dialogic quotation marks brings readers closer to our protohuman Africans, who do most of their communication not with their voices but with their eyes and faces through non-verbal cues. Joshua, the reader, and the protohumans are now on a more equal footing. Bishop has also deleted the quotes from the dialog in the twentieth-century sections of his tale. Now everyone reading No Enemy but Time must approach modernity more like a protohuman.
No Enemy but Time shows how the capacity of our collective imagination, viewed over the centuries-long sweep of the history of the novel, has expanded in positive ways. Joshua can dream bigger, more welcoming dreams than travelers before him. Bishop’s novel itself is part of an exciting and important new era of literary history that began in the twentieth century and continues today, an era marked by the efforts of Afrofuturist, realist, fantasy, and science fiction authors alike to free the novel from base stereotypes and make it more inclusive, diverse, and representative of humanity.
A hundred years from now, a daring artist will no doubt dream even bigger, more welcoming dreams about humanity than Joshua’s: dreams unimaginable today, dreams so big, diverse, and inclusive that today they would seem absurd, shocking, even horrific. Joshua’s dreams will then feel constrained by their time too. They do not feel constrained now. No Enemy but Time is as big, daring, and inclusive an adventure now as it was forty years ago. Bishop’s novel continues to push its storytelling traditions forward in much-needed ways, expanding our senses of who human beings are, who novels are about, and who will enjoy reading them.
Doug Davis is Professor of English at Gordon State College in Barnesville, Georgia, and past editor of the Science Fiction Research Association Review. He has published essays and criticism in such venues as Science Fiction Studies, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Configurations, Social Text, Southern Quarterly, and the Flannery O’Connor Review. He is co-editor of Science Fiction 101, a pedagogical collection, and co-author of the American literature textbook Writing the Nation.