Evolution

Amazon.com

Following up his cosmic Manifold series, Stephen Baxter peers back on a more prosaic history in the worthy yet uneven Evolution . The book is nothing less than a novelization of human evolution, a mega-Michener treatment of 65 million years starring a host of smart, furry primates representing Homo sapiens 's ancestry. Each stage of our ancestry is represented by a character of progressively increasing intelligence, empathy, and brain size, who must survive predation and other perils long enough to keep the natural-selection ball rolling. While Baxter carefully follows some widely accepted theories of evolution--punctuated equilibrium, for instance--he also strays from the known in postulating air whales and sentient, tool-wielding dinosaurs. And why not? There's nothing in the fossil record to contradict his musings about those things, or about the first instances of mammalian altruism and deception, which he also lets us observe. From little Purga, a shrewlike mammal scurrying under the feet of ankylosaurs, all the way through Ultimate, the last human descendant, Baxter adds drama and a strong story arc to our past and future. But he spends too much time on details of the various prehumans' lives, which can become repetitive: fight, mate, die, ad infinitum. And readers eager for a science-fictional adventure will only find satisfaction in the posthuman chapters at the end. Despite these flaws, Evolution grips the attention with an epoch-spanning tale of the random changes that rule our genetic heritage. Recommended. --Therese Littleton

Format

Broché

Nombre de pages

768

ISBN

0575074094

Editeur

Gollancz

Date de publication

2003-08-14

Amazon.co.uk

In Evolution , Stephen Baxter explores deep time to dramatise the story of Earth's evolving primates--from tiny shrew-like creatures dodging reptilian predators in the Cretaceous era, to humans of the 21st century and beyond. The long drama starts with a bang: the Chicxlub meteor impact 65 million years ago--the dinosaur killer--bringing a holocaust of extinctions. Baxter describes that apocalyptic strike and aftermath in lurid, compelling detail. By now the crater was a glowing bowl of shining, boiling impact melt, wide enough to have engulfed the Los Angeles area from Santa Barbara to Long Beach. And its depth was four times the height of Everest, its lip further above its floor than the tracks of supersonic planes above Earth's surface. This book's hero is evolution itself, shaping surviving pre-humans into tree dwellers, remoulding a group that drifts from Africa to a (then closer) New World on a raft of debris, confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down on Antarctica. Elsewhere the river of DNA runs on, and ape-like creatures in North Africa are forced out of dwindling forests to stumble across grasslands where their distant descendants will joyously run. Although the episodes resonate with one another, each is a separate triumph or tragedy whose early protagonists are uncomprehending animals ("He knew on a deep cellular level that..."). Darwin's imperatives force their successors to grapple with self-awareness, consciousness, memory, abstract thought. Tools emerge, and art, and language. One troubled genius of 60, 000 years ago is seen inventing a theory of magic in hope of understanding and controlling the environment--and her contemporaries. Her reward is to become "the first person in all human history to have a name." The story continues, and the apparent framing narrative--about a last-ditch global conference hoping to solve the ecological nightmares of 2031--is not the end. Baxter's final snapshot is 500 million years in our future.... Enormously ambitious in scope, Evolution shows the whole sweep and precariousness of pre-human and human development. We are so lucky to be here--although, as Baxter makes it clear, the luck may be running out. -- David Langford

Auteur

Stephen Baxter