Evolution [Mass Market Paperback]

Stephen Baxter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2004

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?

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey (February 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345457838
• ISBN-13: 978-0345457837
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.1 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (80 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #403,719 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evolution does not mean that everything improves with time, April 21, 2005

By 

isala "Isabel and Lars" (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Evolution (Hardcover)

This is a pretty mature look at evolution, its driving forces, and its ultimate results.
We start at the time of the Chixculub meteorite with a small primate of the species Purgatorium and continue until far far into the future. Readers of Stapleton's Last and First Men will recognize the scope. The style is somewhat, suspiciously so actually, reminicent of the BBC television series' Walking With Dinosaurs, Beasts, and Cavemen. Professor Jack Cohen, well-known and respected, in SF circles, has helped checking the facts. The science is up to 2002 standards. The only recent thing I see missing is the connection between development of language and our loss of thick body hair (this meant that kids could no longer cling on to their mothers, and they had to develop a new way of keeping track of each other).
The rise and fall of humankind is presented in a few snapshots of more or less important moments in our development.
The author makes it clear that it is fiction by adding some highly speculative accounts of tool-using dinosaurs and giant-giant flying dinosaurs.
Baxter has some interesting ideas, like that the advent of true language (subject-verb-object) went hand in hand with the discovery of reasoning and deduction, and, incidentally, with mysticism/religion.
The book is not a brainless praise of development. The theme of the book is one of ultimate doom: when we became truly human (=discovering analysis) we also sowed the seeds of our own destruction. Baxter feels that we reached our apex during the last glaciation, when we still lived in a certain harmony with our surroundings. With the advent of agriculture the book takes on a distinctively more gloomy note. The post-apocalyptic world he describes is truly nightmarish, but, unfortunately, extremely believeable. He gives a nice touch of doom when he lets the Monolith of "2001" fame appear towards the *end* of the book.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evolution on the Beach, March 18, 2004

By 

Barry Floyd "Secular Humanist" (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Evolution (Mass Market Paperback)

At over 640 pages, Evolution-by award winning author Stephen Baxter, a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge and South-Ampton Universities-may not be exactly the sort of light reading one may think to bring to the beach this summer; however, its underling warning for the Human species may be a reminder of that other book concerning beaches.

Evolution is perhaps the most interesting novel I have come across concerning the fate of humanity if we stay on our current course. But, rather than offer the reader the usual, overblown apocalyptic Sci Fi novel, or beating us over the head with a righteous morality play, Evolution takes the scientific route toward offering a subtle but very effective message.

That message: We'd better begin to learn to cooperate as well as we compete or we Homo-Sapiens have already passed our prime.

Evolution begins 65 Million Years ago when the comet which ended the reign of the dinosaurs on Earth was as bright in the sky as the sun. Baxter shows us the "lifestyle" of some of the late Cretaceous reptiles & birds from the "point of view" of the first primates-mousy little fur balls which hid from the thunder lizards by burrowing underground in the forests. Baxter names each animal we encounter-again, as the primates would see them-to give us a sense of the primates' existence and "state of mind"-as simple as some of those early minds were. This interesting technique allows the reader to partly identify with what occurs to these creatures on their road to modernity. We experience what it means to be human by what it meant to be each of these creatures in an ever changing environment.

In essence, Evolution is a story of existence, adaptation, survival and extinction. By the time we get to what we may call modern humanity-around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire-we see how humanity's potential to become more than "just another animal fighting for survival" lies in our ability to cooperate and inhibit our more competitive, territorial and destructive natures. As humans fill the ecosystem like swarms of insects-something Baxter points out drove us away from our primate origins and into a much too complex existence-there needs to be created a new way of living, for the ways of old have depleted the earth's resources, severely altered the atmosphere, polluted the land and water, and sent to their extinction hundreds and thousands of species of animal.

Evolution does what no other such novel has done; it lets you view humanity from the inside. It lets one see from where we came, and spends most of its pages in the deep past so that one has a resonating feel for our biological history. Baxter spends very little time in the present and near future, a time when Earth finally fights back against the human "virus" and humanity collapses upon, and in spite of itself.

The concluding chapters take us 50 to 500 million years into the future to where we learn what life post-humanity might be like. Humans themselves, that is the descendents of the few survivors of the 21st Century, have de-evolved as survival becomes more important than the Big Brained lofty goals and achievements of their ancestors. Indeed, post-humanity primates live in a much healthier ecosystem.

Evolution serves two major purposes, in my opinion. One, it allows the ordinary novel reader (as opposed to readers of scientific journals or books), a chance to learn about both evolutionary theory, and what it means to be human, in a way they may never have otherwise. Also, it serves as a warning. All species live only for so long, and then become extinct; it often depends on how well they can adapt to Earth. If not for the Asteroid of 65 Million years ago, the Dinosaurs might still be around today. But mammals inherited the Earth, and in particular, one unique primate. How long can we survive? That depends on how well we adapt to Earth. So far, we have tried to make the Earth adapt to us, and we are failing miserably; we need to change our strategy.

And Baxter offers a way.

The lead character in the chapters dealing in the near future-Joan Useb-says at a conference of international scientists, that human culture, which had once been so profoundly adaptive, had become maladaptive. The solution she explains is within us already.. it is a primate solution.

(Useb) "Life isn't just about competition ... it's also about cooperation, interdependence. Our global society is becoming so highly structured that it is becoming something akin to a holan: a single composite entity. We have to learn to think of ourselves in that way. We have to build on the other half of our primate natures-the part that isn't about competition and xenophobia. Human interdependence comes from our deepest history. Now, without anybody planning it, we have engulfed the biosphere ... And we have to learn to manage it together."

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worthwhile, February 21, 2007

By 

Gareth Power - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evolution (Mass Market Paperback)

I received this book as a gift and did not have high expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Baxter manages to novelise very effectively the course of evolution through billions of years, which is no mean achievement. The book is fact-based, though of necessity it does spin some extravagant speculation from those facts, and in a few places those speculations are less than convincing, such as the prehistoric Neanderthal shanty town outside the Homo Sapiens village.

Baxter writes about science in a very eloquent and engaging way. Where he consistently shows weakness is when he is writing dialogue. This led me to skip through the stilted Roman chapter.

That said, the later chapter about the British soldiers in an empty future England was quite haunting, and I really liked the way he consistently found low-key but satisfying conclusions to the various evolutionary vignettes.

A book that geniunely throws fresh perspective on the evolution of life. I'm glad I read it.