House of Bones is a unique time-travel story that imbues a deep sense of satisfaction on nearly every level. It is a modest tale, recounting the unfortunate fate of the world's first and perhaps last time traveler. After a misguided test run, he's become trapped 20,000 years in the past. Unequipped for survival, his future is uncertain. What's worse, he's surrounded by people so primitive they don't even have a written language. So primitive they take in his unworthy and skill-less self and accept him into their society. This glimpse of what life might have been like for Cro-Magnon man in the late Pleistocene epoch shows us precisely why we can't judge a society by its lack of tool based technology.
Silverberg skillfully extrapolates a fascinating working culture out of what little modern archaeologists and paleoanthropologists know of these people - our ancestors - and creates in the process something to think about when using words like primitive. House of Bones is a sort of mirror image of Isaac Asimov's The Ugly Little Boy.
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"I read this as a novella in a compilation in 1989. It was a reflection of humanity in what you would think would be a primitive form, but it ends up with modern man being more primitive in their thinking than Paeleolithic man. Brilliant work from Silverberg as usual."
—
Joel (5 out of 5 stars)