Later, lesser-known experimental Brunner novel, that for ten of its twelve chapters is like a David MItchell novel, decades before the likes of Cloud Atlas. The chapters simultaneously move forward one month at a time, and backwards decades or centuries. In each chapter, Gene/Evgenos who is black, and Stacey/Anastasia, who is Greek, live a hard life in a cave on a small Greek island with a sphinx-shaped cliff. Stacey's pregnancy develops chapter by chapter time. An object in each chapter is a historical remnant from the next chapter. Each chapter ends with Stacey or Gene talking about fate of a person they don't know personally. Wonderful stuff.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly for the 1980s, all of this is eventually mostly explained at the end in a long muddled two-chapter info dump. DO NOT READ the dust jacket copy if you have the Science Book Club edition. It opens with massive spoilers. This may be true of the paperback cover copy.

Despite the disappointing final chapters, still recommended. ( )

Brunner's excursion into the dimiension of time has unexpected poetic elements, but it lacks some of the piercing seriousness of his earlier writings. The conclusion was almost understandable. A truly wonderful idea is present, but it is obscured by excessive complexity, repetitious chapters, and a slow pace of plot development. More questions than answers were raised by the conclusion. excursion ( )

Decent ( )

Good old-fashioned science-fiction, mixing adventure, history, fables and humanistic worries. Organized in short chapters with similar structure, it is a very entertaining reading.

And surprisingly, all the confusion planted through the book finds an explanation at the end. ( )

A young mixed race couple, fleeing mysterious pursuers, makes camp on a small Greek island and proceeds to start regressing through various episodes in the history of Mankind. I wanted to like this short and ambitious novel, but Brunner can't quite pull off a concept that initially seems to offer intriguing possibilities. The ending is an unmitigated dud. Definitely a new wave sensibility despite the 1984 publication date. ( )