Evolution (GOLLANCZ S.F.) - Softcover

Baxter, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0575074094 ISBN 13: 9780575074095

Publisher: Gollancz, 2003

Synopsis

From their beginnings foraging at the feet of the dinosaurs, through the apocalypse of an asteroid strike, through countless years of the day to day life and death dramas of survival of the fittest, to the rise and fall of mankind and the final destruction of earth by the expanding sun, the primates have survived. This is their story.

EVOLUTION follows the ebb and flow of the fortunes of one group of creatures as they change and adapt to their world somewhere on the horn of Africa. It turns the story of Darwinian evolution into a constant drama, a daily life and death struggle, a heroic story of life¿s endurance. It is a story that transcends generations, species, mankind and, in the end, the Earth itself. In the tradition of Olaf Stapledon and HG Wells.

About this title

Review

In Evolution, Stephen Baxter explores deep time to dramatise the story of Earth's evolving primates--from tiny shrew-like creatures dodging reptilian predators in the Cretaceous era, to humans of the 21st century and beyond.

The long drama starts with a bang: the Chicxlub meteor impact 65 million years ago--the dinosaur killer--bringing a holocaust of extinctions. Baxter describes that apocalyptic strike and aftermath in lurid, compelling detail.

By now the crater was a glowing bowl of shining, boiling impact melt, wide enough to have engulfed the Los Angeles area from Santa Barbara to Long Beach. And its depth was four times the height of Everest, its lip further above its floor than the tracks of supersonic planes above Earth's surface.

This book's hero is evolution itself, shaping surviving pre-humans into tree dwellers, remoulding a group that drifts from Africa to a (then closer) New World on a raft of debris, confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down on Antarctica. Elsewhere the river of DNA runs on, and ape-like creatures in North Africa are forced out of dwindling forests to stumble across grasslands where their distant descendants will joyously run.

Although the episodes resonate with one another, each is a separate triumph or tragedy whose early protagonists are uncomprehending animals ("He knew on a deep cellular level that..."). Darwin's imperatives force their successors to grapple with self-awareness, consciousness, memory, abstract thought. Tools emerge, and art, and language. One troubled genius of 60,000 years ago is seen inventing a theory of magic in hope of understanding and controlling the environment--and her contemporaries. Her reward is to become "the first person in all human history to have a name."

The story continues, and the apparent framing narrative--about a last-ditch global conference hoping to solve the ecological nightmares of 2031--is not the end. Baxter's final snapshot is 500 million years in our future....

Enormously ambitious in scope, Evolution shows the whole sweep and precariousness of pre-human and human development. We are so lucky to be here--although, as Baxter makes it clear, the luck may be running out. --David Langford

Review

"Spectacular . . . What is astonishing is how . . . entertaining as well as informative this book--an episodic novel with evolution as its protagonist--manages to be."
--The New York Times Book Review

"MAGISTERIAL AND UPLIFTING . . . A brilliant, grand-scale sampling of sixty-five million years of human evolution . . . It shows the sweep and grandeur of life in its unrelenting course."
--The Denver Post

"Strong imagination, a capacity for awe, and the ability to think rigorously about vast and final things abound in the work of Stephen Baxter. . . . [Evolution] leaves the reader with a haunting portrayal of the distant future."
--Times Literary Supplement

"A BREATH OF FRESH AIR . . . The miracle of Evolution is that it makes the triumph of life, which is its story, sound like the real story."
--The Washington Post Book World

"A work of outrageous ambition. Baxter's goal is nothing less than to dramatize the grand sweep of primate development. . . . Evolution is a cautionary tale, warning of the dire consequences to contemporary humans if we persist in behavior that threatens the survival of our ecosystem."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Baxter's depictions are brilliant, with some inspired conjectures to spice up events. . . . I highly recommend Evolution. . . . [It] provide[s] food for thought, confronts our notions of what it means to be human, and gives warning that nothing can be taken for granted in the ongoing struggle for survival."
--scifi dimensions

"Baxter chronicles the epic survival of the mammalian family that ultimately ended up with us. . . . The sheer timescale makes a great story that is panoramic in extent. I felt I was watching Walking with Beasts rolled into The Human Journey. Baxter's ability to turn science into exciting and readable fiction makes him one of the most accessible SF writers around."
--The Times (London)

"The overall narrative [is] a big, thick, geophysical stick upside the head to remind us all that things can change, at any moment, for any reason."
--The San Diego Union-Tribune

"I recommend this novel to anyone who appreciates novels that take chances. . . . Baxter is not shy about painting big pictures about big ideas. . . . [He] painstakingly moves us from the shrewlike creatures that coexisted with the dinosaurs through the walking, tool-using hominids of Africa, through Neanderthals, through humans, to an entirely speculative future that is beyond brief description."
--sfrevu.com

"A powerful fusion of science and imagination . . . Baxter makes an impressive job of putting flesh on to the bones of the scientific theory and in its imaginative vision Evolution deserves comparison with SF epics such as Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men or Alfred Doblin's Mountains, Seas, and Giants. Baxter leaves you with a memorable yet unsettling sense of our insignificance in the scheme of things. In the story of evolution, as in all good thrillers, an extinction event is always lurking just around the corner."
--The Guardian (London)

"A tour-de-force . . . A sprawling, ambitious chronicle spanning millennia . . . The account of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction and the rise of mammals as the dominant life-form is particularly fascinating. . . . Similarly well crafted is Baxter's projection of a posthuman future."
--Booklist

"Taking a page from SF saga writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and Brian Stableford, British author Baxter portrays humanity's origins, growth, and ultimate disappearance in a loose-knit series of brutal vignettes spanning millions of years of evolution. . . . The book rises above its fragmented narrative . . . to reach a grim and stoic grandeur, which 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."
--Publishers Weekly

"Highly recommended . . . Spanning more than sixty-five million years and encompassing the entire planet, Baxter's ambitious saga provides both an exercise in painless paleontology and superb storytelling."
--Library Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Gollancz
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0575074094
• ISBN 13: 9780575074095
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 768