This one jumped off the shelf and into my hands. I'm a Bishop fan from years back--having read and loved books like Ancient of Days, No Enemy But Time, The Secret Ascension (aka Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas), and Unicorn Mountain--and I hadn't even known that he had a new book coming out.

Not only that, but a book that really piqued my interest. Bishop's doing his own version of Watchmen here--what if a "superhero" really existed in our world. But the operative word on the title page is that this is a comedy. For all his realism, Bishop is actually writing in the tradition of James Branch Cabell and Thorne Smith, warping our reality to actually satirize it.

It has confirmed my expectations. Xavier Thaxton is the Fine Arts editor at the local newspaper--a man who hates popular culture. But slowly he finds that popular culture is what he needs, and what he is becoming. The conclusion is a statement about "art," that most nebulous of terms.

Bishop takes a cast of highly improbably characters who are suspiciously like people you know and tells a wonderfully entertaining and human story about the nature of heroism and duty. Along the way he skewers art, art critics, comic books, journalism, rock/alternative music, teenage angst, and almost anything else that wanders by. It's damned hard to write a satire without turning the characters into caricatures, but Bishop keeps all his people three-dimensional and (mostly) likeable even at their worst. I'm most impressed with what Bishop does with Geiger himself. Geiger starts as a character rich in artistic depth but one- dimensional as a person. He ends up as a one-dimensional comic book character who's much deeper as a person. An impressive inversion, and an impressive work to pull off.

First, a confession: I became a "Dickhead" last year, and ended up reading every single title ever published by Philip K. Dick. Once I finished the last book (including the Selected Letters), I was looking for some form of closure so I could get on with my life and read other authors. I found that closure in "The Secret Ascension."

Obviously written by a fan of PKD's work and personality, Bishop writes a book that is funny and imaginative, while mimicking, in a form of tribute, the style of PKD.

While the actual delivery of the story lacks the power of PKD's writing, there are many funny moments and tidbits of PKD for fans to enjoy. Bishop employs the multiple narrative technique and the breakdown of commonplace reality that fans of PKD expected with each novel.

The ending is quite satisfying, with a respectful nod to PKD's contribution to our "koinos cosmos." A must-read for any true PKD fan.

Here the author set out to write his own Philip K. Dick novel. The characters resemble Philip Dick characters (my favorite is the guy with the obsession for Frank Miller DAREDEVIL comics): the protagonists are alienated misfits, the antagonists are mostly government authorities and wealthy people. The setting involves an oppressive regime in a slightly alternate world that nonetheless strongly resembles the contemporary United States. Paranoia genuinely bubbles out of the plot, and of course weird, metaphysical stuff happens toward the end of the story.

Philip Dick and his novels are subjects of discussion among the characters. PKD himself appears in the story ("Horsy Stout"), as he does in his own novels RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH and VALIS; although here he's more in the background.

Most of the novel retains the eerie, bleak, surreal edge that you can find in many PKD novels. I didn't like the ending quite as much as the first 90% of the story; but I can say that many of the PKD novels tend to disintegrate toward the end as well (e.g., DO ANDROIDS DREAM and PALMER ELDRITCH). But the ending to this one is harder to take seriously. And the whole thing's a bit too long (340 pages), considering that most of the PKD novels run to about 200 pages and never exceed 300 (not his science fiction).

On the whole, it's an entertaining psuedo-Dick novel. I haven't read anything else by Michael Bishop, but he certainly has done competent work with this story, I think.

It is really hard to know what to say about this book, other than that I din't enjoy it, but forced myself to read it until the end, something I rarely have to do.

There is no point in treating this as hard SF, because the central technology is almost entirely ludicrous and pretty much irrelevent to the story. This, instead, is SF on the fringes of magic realism and the fantasy of dreams, usually my favourite kind of reading. Such SF stands or falls on its literary qualities.

'No Enemy But Time' doesn't so much fall as collapse.

The problem with Bishop's writing is that it appears oh-so-self-consciously literary in a kind of know-it-all university English Literature graduate way. In describing Joshua Kampa's adventures in the Pleistocene, the narration attempts to be jaunty and witty and light in the manner of the classic picaresque - think Cervantes here - but this not only jars horribly with the character of Joshua (or John-John) as established in the parrallel, and much more engaging, story of his difficult earlier life, but also appears almost entirely inappropriate to the events described and the emotional development of the novel. It is the kind of SF praised by mainstream critics who claim not to like SF, and is exactly the kind of thing that the Cyberpunk movement - which appeared on the scene not long after this was published - understandably aimed to eradicate. It also compares very badly with other 'is it time-travel or is it a dream?' novels, in particular Marge Piercy's moving 'Woman on the Edge of Time'.

Style is at least partly a matter of personal taste, so in giving a book such a poor review almost entirely based on style - although the story is pretty weak too - I do not want to put others off reading 'No Enemy But Time'. But don't say I didn't warn you.

No Enemy But Time demonstrates why Michael Bishop is one of the best writers--not just best science fiction writers--around. This book manages to challenge our ideas about what the future might bring and what the past might be like at the same time. And, especially since the book is out of print except for a hard-to-get and expensive collector's edition, ElectricStory has done readers a great service by bringing it out in electronic format. Don't pass up this classic novel from a master writer.

No Enemy But Time is a vision quest, exploring the social difficulties that an explorer would encounter whether they were due to Pleistocene ecologies or modern cultural mysteries. Amid a glut of mediocre stories, this one was not only well worth the read, but also worth a second one.

OK, to be fair: I bought this book because I thought it was by a different Michael Bishop. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's made this mistake. Once I got it home and started reading, I realized what a terrible, terrible mistake I had made. Put simply, this book stinks on ice.

I'm not sure if "Checkmate Publishing" is a vanity press, but clearly they don't employ any editors. When a book uses the phrase "for all intentional purposes", and someone is described as having "bloody whelps" on their neck, you know you're in for some trouble. The writing is on a high school level, at best, the story is mundane and fairly uninteresting, and the "shocking" ending is shockingly obvious. The only thing that kept me reading was the slight amusement of finding the next grotesque warping of the English language.

Avoid, avoid, avoid. Horror fans can do MUCH better than this.