Evolution (novel)

infobox Book |
name = Evolution
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image_caption = First edition cover
author = Stephen Baxter
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country = United Kingdom
language = English
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genre = Science fiction novel
publisher = Orion Publishing Group
release_date = November 30, 2002
media_type = Print (Paperback & Hardback)
pages = 592 pp (DelRey Hardcover ed.)
isbn = ISBN 0-575-07342-X (first edition, paperback) & ISBN 0-575-07341-1 (hardback edition)
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"Evolution" is a collection of short stories that work together to form an episodic science fiction novel by author Stephen Baxter. It follows 565 million years of human evolution, from shrewlike mammals 65 million years in the past to the ultimate fate of humanity (and its descendants, both biological and non-biological) 500 million years in the future.

Plot summary

The primary protagonist in "Evolution" is evolution itself (although primates as a group constitute another protagonist). The book follows the hero's course as it shapes surviving pre-humans into tree dwellers, remoulds a group that drifts from Africa to a (then much closer) New World on a raft formed out of debris, and confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down on Antarctica.

The stream of DNA runs on elsewhere, where ape-like creatures in North Africa are forced out of their diminishing forests to come across grasslands where their distant descendants will later run joyously. At one point, hominids become sapient, and go on to develop technology, including a universal constructor machine that goes to Mars and multiplies, and in an act of global ecophagy consumes Mars by converting the planet into its descendants. Human extinction (or the extinction of human culture) also occurs in the book, as well as the end of planet Earth and the rebirth of life on another planet. (The extinction-level event that causes the human extinction is, indirectly, an eruption of the volcano Rabaul, coupled with various actions of humans themselves, some of which are only vaguely referred to.) Also to be found in "Evolution" are ponderous Romans, sapient dinosaurs, the last of the wild Neanderthals, a primate who witnesses the extinction of the dinosaurs, symbiotic primate-tree relationships, mole people, and primates who live on a Mars-like Earth.

Reception

Pater Cannon reviewing for Publishers Weekly said that "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."cite journal|last=Cannon|first=Peter|date=January 20, 2003|title=EVOLUTION (Book)|journal=Publishers Weekly|volume=Vol. 250|issue=Issue 3|pages=p61|issn=0000-0019] Kirkus Reviews called this novel "glum, dyspeptic, and depressing."cite journal|date=November 15, 2002|title=EVOLUTION (Book)|journal=Kirkus Reviews|volume=Vol. 70|issue=Issue 22,|pages=p1662|issn=00426598] Jackie Cassada siad in her review for Library Journal that "spanning more than 165 million years and encompassing the entire planet, Baxter's ambitious saga provides both an exercise in painless paleontology and superb storytelling."cite journal|last=Cassada|first=Jackie |date=February 15, 2003|title=Evolution (Book)|journal=Library Journal|volume=Vol. 128|issue=Issue 3|pages=p172]

"Shorn of its central conceit, the book becomes mostly a series of speculative essays about the past or future. The author says firmly that this novel is "not intended to be a textbook" -- it might have been better if it were, as we would have some basis for judging which of the many authorial asides are daring speculation as opposed to conventional wisdom."--infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/evolution.htm

References

External links

*Lengthy review at http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74240
*The Evolution page at the Manifold site: http://www.themanifold.co.uk/book.php?bookid=20