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Evolution, by Stephen Baxter
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Stretching from the distant past into the remote future, from primordial Earth to the stars, Evolution is a soaring symphony of struggle, extinction, and survival; a dazzling epic that combines a dozen scientific disciplines and a cast of unforgettable characters to convey the grand drama of evolution in all its awesome majesty and rigorous beauty. Sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there lived a small mammal, a proto-primate of the species Purgatorius. From this humble beginning, Baxter traces the human lineage forward through time. The adventure that unfolds is a gripping odyssey governed by chance and competition, a perilous journey to an uncertain destination along a route beset by sudden and catastrophic upheavals. It is a route that ends, for most species, in stagnation or extinction. Why should humanity escape this fate?
- Sales Rank: #763348 in Books
- Brand: Del Rey
- Published on: 2004-02-03
- Released on: 2004-02-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.92" h x 1.06" w x 4.23" l, .69 pounds
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 656 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.com Review
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
From Publishers Weekly
Taking a page from SF saga writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and Brian Stableford, British author Baxter (the Manifold trilogy) portrays humanity's origins, growth and ultimate disappearance in a loose-knit series of brutal vignettes spanning millions of years of evolution. Beginning with the gritty slice-of-life tale of a small, ratlike proto-primate called Purga (short for species Purgatorius), the story travels from the end of the Cretaceous through the millennia as primates slowly evolve into creatures more and more recognizably human, learning to make and use tools, developing language and the ability to feel empathy-the trait that Baxter selects as definitive of true humanity. Resonating with that theme, the vignettes are linked by a thin near-future frame about scientists meeting in the midst of ecological and political chaos to find a way to save humanity from itself through the "globalization of empathy." More concerned with technical detail than character or plot, the book rises above its fragmented narrative and frequently repetitive violence to reach a grim and stoic grandeur, which (despite a tendency toward preachiness) clearly has humanity's best interests at heart. Here is a rigorously constructed hard SF novel where the question is not whether humanity will reach the stars but how it will survive its own worst tendencies.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Baxter's new novel is a sprawling, ambitious chronicle spanning millennia, from the first rodent-like ancestors of humanity to the strange remnants of life on a dessicated, dying Earth. The most satisfying fragments of it are the most speculative, such as the glimmerings of curiosity in the dinosaur mind and the bizarre symbiosis Baxter projects for the evolutionary descendants of humans. Baxter traces direct lines of descent, at first merely by sequences of birth but later by the progression of names and legends--procedures conducive to an immense perspective. Most of the beings who figure here, even the huge-eyed shrews of the Cretaceous, are humans' ancestors. The account of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction and the rise of mammals as the dominant life-form is particularly fascinating, not least because of Baxter's clever use of human empathy to conjure personality and motivation for animal protagonists. Similarly well crafted is Baxter's projection of a posthuman future, including a great decline of species diversity and life on Earth in general--a tour-de-force prognostication of further strange means for survival. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Recommend for those who love to learn through stories
By David G. Phillips
I have been an ambassador for this book since I first started reading it - I can't tell you how much I enjoyed it, especially the vignette stories that lead up to our species as it exists today. I wanted to share a quote from the book that gives me chills to this day:
"Then he turned back to the savannah. He was bipedal, tool wielding, meat eating, xenophobic, hierarchal, combative, competitive - all of which he had brought from the forest - and yet he was imbued with the best qualities of his ancestors, with Purga's doggedness, Noth's exuberance, Roamer's courage, even Capo's vision. Full of possibilities of the future, laden with the relics of the past, the young male, standing upright, gazed at the open plain." - Stephen Baxter, Evolution (novel)
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating, it inspired me to learn more on the subject
By Norbert Haupt
Evolution is a novel of over 640 pages that was not an easy read, but superbly inspiring and thought-provoking. Reading Evolution was time extremely well spent, I learned immeasurably from it, and I am not yet done learning.
Evolution, while it is termed a novel, is not really a novel. Critics have blasted it as a series of short stories, loosely connected. A novel has a protagonist, a theme, and a plot that creates suspense which keeps the reader turning the pages. This book has none of that. The only motivator that keeps turning the pages of Evolution is an intense interest in the subject of the book. Evolution is not really a novel, but rather speculative natural history fiction.
Some reviewers of one star on Amazon blasted Baxter for this book. They ridiculed his science, the plausibility of the events and the structure and approach of the book. I think they are missing the point. Baxter is fully aware of the fact that he sometimes picked one of several conflicting scientific theories or premises and ran with it. There is a lot of speculation on what might have happened, and what might happen in the future, but it is mostly plausible at a minimum, often surprising or startling, and sometimes outright stunning.
Spoiler warning: I am going to talk about some details that might be considered spoilers, but I don't think they will take away anything from the enjoyment of the book at all, but rather, I think they might help inspire you to pick it up and read it yourself.
The main story starts in the Jurassic period. Baxter describes what the world might have been like during the height of the reign of the dinosaurs 145 million years ago. He describes the interactions of the various species of dinosaurs, those we know something about from the fossil record, and some that he outright made up. One of those made up speculative species is an "air whale", a pterosaur with a wingspan of over 100 feet that spends its entire life gliding and soaring in the stratosphere. Another is related to a type of raptor of about human size that had evolved as a hunter with intelligence advanced enough to make simple tools, like leather belts, leather whips and spears. I thought that was fascinating. There is no reason why such a species could not have become sophisticated enough 145 million years ago to make simple tools. As long as they didn't make stone tools that would last, there would be no fossil trace left today and we'd never know. Had the Yucatan impact 65 million years ago not happened, such a species might have continued on as the dominant intelligence on the planet, and produced advanced technology in the dinosaur realm. We mammals might never have existed.
The main story really begins with the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Some scientists think the extinction took a few thousand years, some think a few years, and Baxter takes the view that it took no more than a few days to wipe out almost all the dinosaurs, making room for a small rat-like mammal called purgatorius. Some scientists speculate that this animal, due to its primate-like teeth may be the most distant ancestor of all monkeys, apes, hominids and yes, eventually humans. The book spends some time following these various animals in their environment, describes their surroundings and their challenges, before turning the clock forward to the next epoch.
In this manner, Baxter leads us closer to humanity one step at a time, up to the present, and then beyond. There were many extinction events in the history of the earth, and one is going on right now, where right now is defined to be the last 15,000 years up to now. Man has edged out many other species of man-like creatures over the past 100,000 years, but also apparently caused the extinction of many types of large mammals wherever man appears, including in the Americas and in Australia.
As Baxter ventures into the future, he does it in increasingly large steps. First he steps forward by a few thousand years. Then 30 million, then 500 million years. What happens to humans in his speculation is surprising. Humans devolve back, losing their intelligence, and they split into many different subspecies again, some giant elephantine creatures, other blind mole-like burrow dwellers, and yet others tree species like our ancestors. While some critics found that part of the book hard to swallow, I must admit I was fascinated by the implications.
Reading through the prehistoric times I found myself sometimes frustrated by descriptions Baxter used to "show" what a purgatorius looked like, and a notharctus, and so on for dozens of now extinct animals. I wished there were illustrations to help with the imagery. Then I realized I could just get the appropriate books. I obtained Ice Age Mammals of North America by Ian M. Lange and National Geographic Prehistoric Mammals by Alan Turner, illustrated by Mauricio Anton. I also picked up The Evidence of Evolution by Alan R. Rogers. While I would never before have looked at these books, now every picture, every description, was eminently interesting. I found myself checking out the various animals, their time periods, and the circumstances of their reigns, and how they became extinct. I know so much more about natural history than I did before, and I have already concluded that it's time for me to go to a few museums of natural history as soon as possible to round out the experience.
All this interest and learning was sparked by a simple novel called Evolution that really is not a novel, but rather a speculation on natural history.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
educational SciFi
By jerknowsall
I read this book on a Kindle. It probably should have been entitled The Thread or The Strand because of the DNA linking the chapters. It was fascinating if a little overly imaginative toward the end. I'm not a fan of fantasy and this ScyFi book seemed to be mostly believable The organization of the book reminded me of Michener's "The Source", which is also a book worth reading.
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