Evolution (Stephen Baxter book)
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| Evolution | |
 First edition cover |
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| Author | Stephen Baxter |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Orion Publishing Group |
| Publication 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) |
Evolution is a collection of short stories that work together to form a 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.
[edit] Plot introduction
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 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.
"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
[edit] Story titles
- Part One - Ancestors
- Prologue
- Dinosaur Dreams
- The Hunters of Pangaea (the sapient dinosaurs)
- The Devil's Tail (the dinosaur extinction)
- The Empty Forest
- The Time of Long Shadows
- The Crossing (in which primates cross the Atlantic)
- The Last Burrow (Antarctica)
- Fragments (North African Coast)
- Part Two - Humans
- Interlude
- The Walkers
- The Crowded Land
- Mother's People (the birth of human culture and religion)
- Raft Continent
- Last Contact (the last wild Neanderthal)
- The Swarming People
- The Dying Light (Romans)
- An Entangled Bank
- Part Three - Descendants
- A Long Shadow (the people who wander around after a thousand years in cold sleep)
- The Kingdom of the Rats (the mole people)
- A Far Distant Futurity (Mars-like Earth)
- Epilogue
[edit] 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
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