Evolution

January 20, 2003
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.

February 15, 2003
As a group of scientists gathers in the South Pacific for a conference to save the human race from extinction, their actions represent the culmination of millions of years of struggle by their primate ancestors to survive in an ever-changing world. The author of the Manifold trilogy (Manifold: Time; Manifold: Space; Manifold: Origin) uses a modern-day story as a frame within which he relates a series of vignettes tracing the history of the evolution of intelligent life on Earth, from its mammalian beginnings in the Cretaceous era to the present. 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. Highly recommended for sf as well as general fiction collections.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2002
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)