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Evolution

3.86 of 5 stars 3.86 · rating details · 1,203 ratings · 104 reviews

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...more

Paperback, 646 pages

Published February 3rd 2004 by Del Rey (first published November 2002)

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Oct 20, 2011 Suna rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: scotland, science-fiction

*** I keep adding lurdle to this review because this book, well, bugs me.

This book and I have a strange on-off relationship so far: I'm having trouble picking it up after I've put it down.

The second I pick it up again I'm kicking myself for forgetting how utterly absorbing it really is.
Then I put it down after having read a chunk and the exact same thing happens again.
It's occurred about five times now and I can't quite put my finger on why this keeps happening.

Is it that the scope of the narrat...more

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Jul 03, 2010 Bryan added it · review of another edition

Worthwhile: 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...more

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Oct 17, 2011 Navi rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: did-not-finish, not-my-cup-of-tea, sci-fi

Dear people in charge of putting together the blurb at the back of the book,

What I read was most certainly not "Magisterial and uplifting..." In fact, it was probably the most depressing thing I've attempted to read in a while!

You see, I was going to try and finish this, then I saw that I still had a good three hundred or so pages to read. I'm a patient reader, usually; I read both the War of the Ancients trilogy and Snow-Walker. They're both about the same length as Evolution, yet there's a pri...more Dear people in charge of putting together the blurb at the back of the book,

What I read was most certainly not "Magisterial and uplifting..." In fact, it was probably the most depressing thing I've attempted to read in a while!

You see, I was going to try and finish this, then I saw that I still had a good three hundred or so pages to read. I'm a patient reader, usually; I read both the War of the Ancients trilogy and Snow-Walker. They're both about the same length as Evolution, yet there's a prime difference between them.

Evolution is literally the most mind-numbing, depressing, and just the longest read I've had in a while. If someone hadn't told me to check it out, I probably would have laughed and put it back on the shelf.

There is good, mind you, in this novel. The first chapters detailing Purga, her life, her children, etc. were quite good. I found the beginning to be the most interesting part, sans the weird whip-and-spear-wielding dinosaurs that managed to squeeze into a random, unrelated chapter. Purga was interesting for what she was, and the fact that she lived through the end of the dinosaurs was pretty cool, really.

Then it got to the actual humans. I'm pretty sure Baxter has no faith in humanity, from what I've read through reviews and spoilers. I figured out that I was done once the human-basing began. And then I find out that humans (view spoiler) I swear that not all humans are evil Saturday morning cartoon villains who twirl their mustaches and tie women to railroad tracks. Nor are they villains from Captain Planet, determined only to destroy the environment.

All in all, this book had a total "four legs good, two legs bad" mentality around it, at least of what I read. I'm sure others would like it better than I did, mostly because there are people interested in depressing reads and everything else this book talks about.

Just not me.(less)

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Aug 31, 2011 Tom rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Nasty, brutish, long.

The story of human evolution from 65my in the past to 500my in the future.

First, it's poorly written. Frequently I found myself stopping and editing sentences and whole paragraphs as I went along, immersion breaking to say the least and it turns reading into a chore.

Like many sf writers Baxter's best work is in his short stories - Vaccuum Diagrams is excelent 'hard' sci-fi - the format forces an economy of expression. 'Evolution' is bloated. Everything is explicitly told to...more

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Jan 12, 2011 Lis Carey rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: f-sf

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. In the musical 1776, Col. Thomas McKean says of General Washington's reports from the field, reporting everything that's gone wrong since the last report, "That man could depress a hyena." This seems to be a fair comment on many of Baxter's books, and Evolution is no exception.

Spoilers ahead.

The frame story concerns Joan Useb, a paleontologist who, in 2031, has organized a major interdisciplinary conference with the covert goal of sparking a movement to do something effective about saving the bi...more

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Mar 25, 2011 Kate rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: (Cautious) palaeo buffs, science fans

First up, I have to confess that I didn't actually finish this book. I ran out of enthuasiam at about page 350. While I did enjoy the read, I found it hard to keep coming back witht the constant change of characters and places. The start of the book is also quite graphic - very "nature red in tooth and claw". It's a constant barrage of things being eaten, maimed, abducted and killed. When he starts writing the hominid sections it calms down a bit.

From a science perspective the book is pretty dan...more

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Jun 16, 2009 blake rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: scifi-fantasy-horror

In a word, depressing. Baxter evidently has no faith in life of any kind, as he depicts all sentient beings as immediately impacting their environment in the most destructive manner possible. He doesn´t consider that there were ever communities (human or otherwise) that were able to exist sustainably with the environment. Or maybe he just ignores them since they don´t fit into his altogether pessimistic worldview. The encounters with predator after predator became absurd after awhile, and were t...more In a word, depressing. Baxter evidently has no faith in life of any kind, as he depicts all sentient beings as immediately impacting their environment in the most destructive manner possible. He doesn´t consider that there were ever communities (human or otherwise) that were able to exist sustainably with the environment. Or maybe he just ignores them since they don´t fit into his altogether pessimistic worldview. The encounters with predator after predator became absurd after awhile, and were tiresome before that. There was one episode spanning about 3 pages where a post-human escaped her homicidal "cousins" in the trees, ran into a giant rat-beast on the forest floor, and escaped into the tree-tops only to be plucked by a giant finch. I get the point Mr. Baxter: animal existence is perilous.

The problem with a book that only considers humanity from a species perspective is that you don´t take into account perhaps life´s most incredible achievement: individuality. Baxter´s unconvincing proposal that perhaps it´s not too bad to lose our intellect and become enslaved to giant rats or killer trees (afterall, they protect our survival as a species) completely disregards everything important about human nature. A purely biological view of evolution misses the possibility that the mind is the true launchpad for the next evolutionary step.

The "afterword" which explains that most of the book may not even be based on fact would have been useful as a foreword. It was difficult to tell how much of his book Baxter intended to be taken as fact, a confusion which I imagine was intentional. That makes it all the stranger when you have him inventing things like air whales and whip-wielding dinosaurs. He seems to want to have his book be two different things at the same time, but ends up de-legitimizing the fact and shafting the fiction. Ultimately, as a human being, the most interesting parts for me were the stories about all of the pre- and immediately post-humans, stories which only occupied about 200 of the 600 pages. The rest of the stories of primates and rats and mole-people just got kind of boring. Imaginative to be sure, but repetitive.

Last but by no means least annoying was Baxter´s bizarre fixation on excrement, especially feces. What began as an interesting documentation of animal behavior became downright strange when he moved into the human societies and people were still excreting all over the place, every few pages. I feel bad for him, because in the world Baxter apparently inhabits, every living person and animal he knows shits and pisses themselves when frightened, hurt, or dying. It must be a stinky existence he leads.(less)

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Apr 20, 2013 Rommel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Anyone who wants to have an overview of the evolutionary process of humans in a fiction format would do well to read this book. Baxter telling the story from the perspective of humanity's ancestors can enlighten the reader as to the reasons why humans are the way they are. He also provides a possible future evolution for humanity based on the different 'cultures' or 'attitudes' (implied), although it may not be a future that we want for ourselves. Based on that, we as humans may want to change a...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Patrick rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had put off reading this book for years because, while I've enjoyed many of Stephen Baxter's novels, the idea of wading through 750 pages of the story of human evolution narrated by anthropomorphised primates really didn't appeal. The ape-creatures in the last and weakest part of his Time/Space/Origin trilogy had put me off.

My bad. This is really nothing less than a story of how we became human, of nature red in tooth and claw. It's a story of short and brutal lives, of disease, murder, rape a...more I had put off reading this book for years because, while I've enjoyed many of Stephen Baxter's novels, the idea of wading through 750 pages of the story of human evolution narrated by anthropomorphised primates really didn't appeal. The ape-creatures in the last and weakest part of his Time/Space/Origin trilogy had put me off.

My bad. This is really nothing less than a story of how we became human, of nature red in tooth and claw. It's a story of short and brutal lives, of disease, murder, rape and war, and yet at the same time, for me at least (and I can understand how this would not be a universal reaction) it was curiously uplifting. Beginning 65 million years ago with a small rat-like primate through whose eyes we see the aftermath of the asteroid impact which (in Baxter's universe at least) wiped out the dinosaurs, the book moves us slowly towards the present day. Even the bits which ought not to have worked – the flights of fancy in which Baxter speculates about dinosaurs surviving in the Antarctic until 10 million years BCE and the enormous pterosaurs with the 100 metre wingspans, I thought actually worked well, not least in driving home how incomplete the fossil record is, and how much we do not and cannot ever know (though one has to read carefully to be sure what he is making up and what is based on sound science – passing references to animals that left no traces being the only clues in places).

Other highlights? The woman who runs away from the hunter-gatherer community in which she grew up to escape the inevitable forced infanticide of her child, stumbling into one of humanity's earliest towns, the story of the monkeys that somehow survived a crossing of the Atlantic on a fallen tree and populating South America, the tale of an encounter between two human children and one of the very last surviving Neanderthals and the three characters hunting for fossil bones amidst the crumbling ruins of the late Roman Empire.

Another move I was sceptical about until I read it was the decision to extend the story into the future. Baxter does deep time about as well as any author I've read and for all that it moves the story from scientifically grounded narrative to speculation, it helps to emphasise that we are merely one small part of a much longer and bigger story, not the culmination of some great master-plan. That millions of years from now, our distant descendants might easily be as different from us as we are from our dinosaur-age ancestors and that rather than being impossibly advanced hyper-intelligent beings colonising the galaxy, they might revert to a simpler way of life. Even his explanation of how human civilisation ends emphasises that we are prey to powerful forces that we cannot control. What does for humanity is not nuclear war, global warming or a deadly virus grown in a laboratory, but an enormous super-volcano that disrupts the planet's weather systems enough to cause civilisation to collapse. A big book, and one stuffed with enough ideas to fill several novels.(less)

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Mar 21, 2008 Peter Pier rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

THIS is LIFE. Anybody interested in the WHY at all should read this book. Baxter excells himself by describing the roots of humanity, and the hardship of our ancestors on the way obtaining self-awareness.
I haven´t seen anything better regarding the origins of intelligence. You will recognize the chapter(s).
Absolutely recommended!

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May 20, 2013 Wildjane rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

I really enjoy SF litterature, and I'm willing to try anything, with in mind always the same basic wish : I want to be be entertained, I want to be surprised, and I want the book to make me think. I find that very few books are able to do these three things but this book is one of them, and this is why I liked it so much.

I know writing a review for a book is very personnal, and I actually understand most criticism about style, which indeed isn't particularly stricking, but I want to highlight ju...more

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Nov 10, 2007 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, science-fiction

This is kind of different. It doesn't have a plot. It's essentially a series of short stories about the lives of various creatures on the evolutionary path to modern humans and beyond. Said that way, it doesn't sound very interesting but it kept my attention through all 800+ pages.

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Sep 09, 2012 Elisabeth Cole rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was incredible! It started out right when the dinosaurs died out, following the life of a female mammal. It hops forward from there several million years at a time, chronicling a short period of time of different mammals up until and beyond humans. It ends with one of the last mammals on a dying Earth. You wouldn't think this storyline could be interesting but Stephen Baxter writes with so much feeling and depth you really feel like you're looking through the eyes of each one of these...more

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Apr 04, 2013 Helen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-f-sf-a-z-title

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. It's an interesting piece of speculative fiction and definitely not what I expected.

It's a novel that reads like a collection of short stories, each placed in different point in past and, eventually, a possible future, with the story of Joan Useb's attempt to save the dying world via science as framing device. The main focus is on primates.

The storngest part are the stories of the past, particularly those before we enter the history we are more familiar with. Now, Baxter admits in the afterword...more It's an interesting piece of speculative fiction and definitely not what I expected.

It's a novel that reads like a collection of short stories, each placed in different point in past and, eventually, a possible future, with the story of Joan Useb's attempt to save the dying world via science as framing device. The main focus is on primates.

The storngest part are the stories of the past, particularly those before we enter the history we are more familiar with. Now, Baxter admits in the afterword that not everything is based on hard facts, and it shows; still, most of his speculations are based on mostly solid foundations. Furthermore, he has to make allowances for narrative techniques, giving "protagonists" names even when they would not be familiar with the concept, or showing the example of how speech and grammar rules were formed via English even when it would not have been developed for centuries.

I'm not that fond of the latter part; it is by no means a work of rabid "we are ruining everything" eco-activist, but it leans close towards the end, starting with murder of one of earliest paleontologists and destruction of fossil and then going on into the world breaking down with combination of geological activity and terrorism sparked by globalization, which in their turn caused war. How did the war come to be, however, is not explained well, and the timely eruption feels like a bit of deus ex machina. (Actually, it stars with hunting via forest fire, but it doesn't become that obvious until later on.) The idea that in the end human race will regress and machines that evolved from what we sent into space will be what inherits the universe, while SF-y, is not explained and consequently seems silly when placed next to the fact-based speculations about the past. Likewise, chromosomes are nowhere near purified of junk; junk still makes up more than 70% of it, and even if there has been less and less of it with every step, it seems unlikely it would come to the point of lessening variation because there is less material that will be variable anytime before an organism so far apart from humsn as human is from an earthworm. Mutation can happen as long as there is a gene to mutate. As a matter of fact, mutation in junk does not effect anything until the junk gene becomes active. Don't get me wrong, overpopulation and depletion of resources is a problem; and yes, there were animals have dies out via ruining of the ecosystems. But there is a reason why evolution moved from strength to intelligence; and I'd like to think that when the inevitable death of Earth comes, life from Earth has found the means of living outside it. After all, after conquering the entirety of home planet, moving on to the universe seems like the next step to take.

But the bulk of the story is still in the history, and even the shift from science-backed tales of the past into fantastic visions of the future at the end wasn't enough to spoil it.(less)

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Jan 23, 2009 Sue rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Big topic. Evolution in this case refers to the evolution of mankind. The book starts with a very old ancestor--the first type of primate, which in this book seems rodentlike. It's on all fours, a burrower It lives underground and eats bugs. Through the unconnected stories of characers that represent the various evolutionary stops on the way to man and beyond, the bigger picture of human evolution is depicted. We see the move from the ground to the trees and then from the trees to the savannah....more Big topic. Evolution in this case refers to the evolution of mankind. The book starts with a very old ancestor--the first type of primate, which in this book seems rodentlike. It's on all fours, a burrower It lives underground and eats bugs. Through the unconnected stories of characers that represent the various evolutionary stops on the way to man and beyond, the bigger picture of human evolution is depicted. We see the move from the ground to the trees and then from the trees to the savannah. We see the evolution to and through Neanderthal-like humans. And then we see modern humans and we think the story is done, but it is not. We move on once the modern humans destructively change the climate. Humanity evolves further into what eventually becomes a childlike symbiote with a tree. Sad but strangely beautiful at the same time.

Every major step in the evolution is pushed by some traumatic chanage in climate: the asteroid, the glaciations, the volcanic eruptions. There is stillalways death of lesser individuals accompanying each step as well, illustrating classic evolutionary theory and doing Darwin proud.

It's a unique way to tell a story and illustrate the point that evolution does not necessarily mean progress to a more sophisticated and organized end. In the case of the book, the more organized the organism got, the more destructive it became, begging the question: do we really need all this tech? In the end, humanity is barely alive, but not because that's the ultimate goal of evolution but because the sun is ending its current sequence and just about to enter the red giant stage. It's hot and plate tectonics is over. There's just one big flat land mass. It's boring, but life is not so bad. You curl up each night in your little pouch in the life tree, hook up to nutrient drip, and sleep the night away. There are no males anymore and you wonder are we even still mammals? The answer is yes, live birth still occurs. It actually looks a bit marsupialish with the pouch and the nutrient cord, but that's for the biologists of the future to split hairs over.

Most of the characters throughout the book are female. The important ones anyway, the ones that are the links between the various stages of evolution. The main male characters seem to be there for cultural baggage only. Certainly cultural baggage has in the past determined certain evolutionary choices, but it is always done through and to the female. And cultural baggage is only a small part of the equation. The major changes seem to be influenced by climate mostly, which is maybe why there are many tool using species but only one that has developed higher reasoning and global book reading clubs.(less)

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Feb 18, 2013 J. Andre rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was like all Baxter's work - thought provoking. It seems that you can count on an epiphany or two in every novel he writes. Sometimes it's an obvious thing - like the fact that in its infancy Life had over 100 families of creatures wandering around or rooted in the earth, and that only about 30 remain - but this time he pointed out that in all the billions of years since Life appeared not a single *new* family has come into being. Many have died off, but none have came about to replace...more

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Aug 05, 2012 Julia rated it 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book! LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE this book! It is amazing! I have to say I did not quite enjoy the human bits as much, but overall it was incredible! The texture of the writing was perfect for this unique narrative! I sunk deep into the way Baxter described the psychology and mental wiring behind every stage of evolution - my mind was blown by the realistic quality to every primate. When I got into the future, the tone was just as certain, scientific, and realistic. I was totally conv...more

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May 01, 2012 Robert rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: _ownhardcopy, _reviewed

To Purga the dinosaurs were a force of nature, as beyond her control as the weather. In this huge, dangerous world, the burrow was home.

Fantastic, thought provoking, incredibly detailed and utterly absorbing. Evolution is an epic journal tracing the rise of mind and human culture from 65 million years in the past, to the present and beyond. Stephen Baxter does a superb job of bridging the gaps in our understanding with thoughtful and conscise speculation. The engaging stories do well in bringing...more

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May 22, 2013 Fx Smeets rated it 4 of 5 stars

Be them laudatory or acerbic, most reviews of Evolution insist on the same two aspects of the novel: the huge importance of the scientific discourse (indispensable textbook for the former, totally inaccurate for the latter) and Baxter’s pessimism as to the nature and future of the human race. These points will seem obvious to the casual reader. However the irrelevance of the first one is easily demonstrated. As for the accusation of pessimism, a closer examination of the novel reveals it as inac...more

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Sep 24, 2012 Hager rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: علوم-بحته_عام, نظريات-التطور-وما-يتعلق-بها

ستيفن باكستر مهندس متمرس حاصل على درجات علمية من جامعة كيمبريدج (في الرياضيات)، وجامعة ساوثهامبتون (دكتوراه في أبحاث هندسة الطيران). فاز باكستر بالجائزة البريطانية للخيال العلمي وجائزة لوكاس، ورشح للفوز بجائزة آرثر سي كلارك أخيرًا عن روايته Manifold: Time. فازت روايته Voyage بجائزة سايدوايز لأفضل رواية في التاريخ البديل، ونال جائزتي جون دابليو كامبل وفيليب كيه دك عن روايته The Time Ships. اشترك مع آرثر سي كلارك في كتابة رواية Time’s Eye، وهي أولى روايتين في أدب الخيال العلمي ترتبطان بسلسلة روايا...more ستيفن باكستر مهندس متمرس حاصل على درجات علمية من جامعة كيمبريدج (في الرياضيات)، وجامعة ساوثهامبتون (دكتوراه في أبحاث هندسة الطيران). فاز باكستر بالجائزة البريطانية للخيال العلمي وجائزة لوكاس، ورشح للفوز بجائزة آرثر سي كلارك أخيرًا عن روايته Manifold: Time. فازت روايته Voyage بجائزة سايدوايز لأفضل رواية في التاريخ البديل، ونال جائزتي جون دابليو كامبل وفيليب كيه دك عن روايته The Time Ships. اشترك مع آرثر سي كلارك في كتابة رواية Time’s Eye، وهي أولى روايتين في أدب الخيال العلمي ترتبطان بسلسلة روايات «ملحمة الفضاء» لآرثر كلارك التي حققت أعلى المبيعات.

في هذا الكتاب، يقدم باكستر Baxter واحدًا من أهم المواضيع التي ينبغي أن يسعى الجميع لفهمها واستيعابها، ألا وهو أصل الإنسان. فقد نجح باكستر في تقديم قصة التطور البشري في صياغة روائية رائعة ومشوقة، بعكس أغلب الكتب العلمية التقليدية التي تتناول الموضوع بأسلوب جاف، أكاديمي، غير جذاب. لقد استخدم باكستر أسلوبه الرشيق وكلماته المنمقة في تعقب ماضينا كثدييات، حيث بدأ بواحد من صغار الرئيسيات (وهي إحدى رتب الثدييات وتشمل القرود والسعادين، بالإضافة للإنسان)، أطلق عليه باكستر اسم برجا Purga والذي عاش في عصر الديناصورات. ويتتبع باكستر مسار حياته حتى وقتنا الحاضر، كما يرسم صورة لمستقبله المتوقع كذلك.

إن كل فصل من فصول هذا الكتاب هو قصة حياة أحد (أو بعض) الحيوانات، والاتجاه الذي سار فيه تطوره وكيفية تفاعله مع البيئة المحيطة به بما فيها من كائنات أخرى. والقصص كلها رائعة بحق، بل إن شئت فقل إنها بمثابة لمحات خاطفة من ماضينا كثدييات، والأسلوب الذي تطورنا به وتشكلنا حتى وصلنا إلى ما نحن عليه الآن من خلال عملية الانتخاب الطبيعي المستمرة. وتدور أحداث القصص في الفترة التي أعقبت أحداث الانقراض الكبرى لبعض الأنواع والتي تسببت فيها كارثة طبيعية (هي على الأرجح اصطدام أحد المذنبات بكوكب الأرض) وذلك منذ نحو ٦٥ مليون عام مضت. وكل فصل يقدم قصة تطور حيوان ما أو مجموعة من الحيوانات خلال تلك الفترة وصولا إلى الهيئة البشرية الحالية.
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Oct 27, 2009 Cv Rick rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

This was an easy book to set down. Quite frankly, fictionalizing vignettes of our evolutionary forefathers is a mixture of giving protagonist voice along with human motivations to animals (which, unless done very well, is annoying) and scattering plotless segments of dubious credibility. I would rather read National Geographic, or any other nonfiction reporting on evolution than this. I felt the whole time as if I was reading a book crafted toward winning an award, rather than a book crafted to...more

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Apr 04, 2008 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone who uses 'natural' as a synonym for 'good'

Shelves: fiction

This is a series of episodes illustrating critical (if imagined) chapters in primate evolution. It begins with a story about a primordial primate living underfoot while dinosaurs are stomping around, works its way up to a brief episode about modern humans, and then immediately wipes out the human race and moves forward.

The pre-human episodes are meant to conform very closely to the fossil record. Indeed, when indulging in more extreme flights of fancy, Baxter provides explanatory bits as to wh...more

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Jan 21, 2008 Ethan rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: sci-fi fans, biologists, anyone interested in evolution

Having read Baxter's Manifold: Time, I wasn't expecting much characterization or plot (as is the case in much "hard sci-fi"). Strangely, some of the non-human characters of Evolution were a lot more real than some of the human ones (If you liked the squid in Manifold:Time, you'll probably like Evolution). The book is longer than it had to be, but the 15 or so stories were mostly worthwhile. At times the "genes working to survive" theme was too explicit and overdone (let the reader's intelligence...more

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Oct 21, 2007 Nicholas Whyte added it · review of another edition

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/evolution.htm[return][return]Clocking in at 584 pages, this novel takes us from the age of the dinosaurs to the Earth's far future through around twenty vignettes of life on our planet. Crammed with detail, huge in vision, it will certainly appeal to the thoughtful New Scientist reader and to the millions who have enjoyed the recent BBC series about dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures.[return][return]However well-researched and detailed, I confess i...more http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/evolution.htm[return][return]Clocking in at 584 pages, this novel takes us from the age of the dinosaurs to the Earth's far future through around twenty vignettes of life on our planet. Crammed with detail, huge in vision, it will certainly appeal to the thoughtful New Scientist reader and to the millions who have enjoyed the recent BBC series about dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures.[return][return]However well-researched and detailed, I confess it didn't leave me completely satisfied. The supposed link between the individual chapters is that this is the story of one single strand of DNA, which at one point is encoded in the cells of the palaeontologist Joan Useb in the framing narrative, set in 2031. Well, it clearly isn't so. There's no way she could be descended from Jurassic tool-using dinosaurs, from the first New World monkeys, or from the exotic Antarctic fauna of the Pleistocene; and while she could well be descended from several of the human era characters, there are pretty strong indications that she is not an ancestor of the post-humans in the later chapters.[return][return]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. I would also have liked some maps of the drifting continents, and indeed some pictures of the various creatures; my visual imagination is not strong enough to reconstruct them to my own satisfaction from the author's description, especially when some chapters, particularly those set in the unfashionable Cenozoic Era, seemed to have a dozen new species in the first few pages. The cover image combining globe with outline hominid skull is striking, beautiful even, but uninformative.[return][return]The first section of the book, beginning with the cometary impact that killed the dinosaurs, faces the problem that, without anthropomorphising inappropriately, it is difficult to get readers to identify with non-human and non-intelligent characters. Instead the protagonists are subjected to ecological disasters of various natures which they survive, or don't as the case may be. Rather too often we get editorialising on the lines of "little did they know how significant this would be..." A lot of the "viewpoint" characters are female, but it seems that only the males have orgasms, a trend that continues throughout the book.[return][return]The central set of chapters, set in the human era, links a diverse set of stories of the development of culture and technology through a supposed common biological lineage demonstrated by the names Ja-ahn, Ejan, Jana, Jo-on, Jahna, Juna and presumably also Joan Useb over a period of tens of thousands of years. Apart from the geographical improbability of a single line of descent through all the chapters, I have a somewhat technical linguistic gripe: the sound often spelt "J" in English is one of the most mutable of phonemes, and I'd be surprised to learn of any examples of a language where we know it to have been stable even over a single millennium.[return][return]Apart from that, the human chapters are the best-written. Baxter's vision of the future post-2031 is pessimistic and bleak, with one superbly grim episode where a British military cell emerges after a hibernation which they thought would be only for a few decades to find the world changed beyond recognition. In the end, rather than our biological descendants, the real heirs of humanity seem to be robotic interplanetary explorers, and I'd have liked to read a bit more about them.[return][return]Evolution aims to be a darker version of a history of the world a la Wells, Shaw, Stapledon, and so on. This kind of thing has been done much better before, including by Baxter himself in The Time Ships, his superb homage to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. The value added here is Baxter's extensive research into current biology which basically gives the book its interest. But, as with much hard sf, I am left dubious about whether the book's scientific accuracy contributes anything to its value as a work of literature.(less)

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Feb 16, 2013 David rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A fascinating speculative novel looking at the story of human evolution. Following various stages in the development of the mammals that would eventually become mammals, from the extinction of the dinosaurs up to the development of farming, intercut with a narrative in the near future where humanity finds itself at a turning point. It eventually goes beyond this though to speculate where evolution might eventually take humanity. This serves as a warning that if we don't figure out a way to best...more

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Feb 22, 2010 Cobalt rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is the clearest understanding I have ever had on the eons-long process of evolution, told in a fascinating novel from each creature's point of view from millions of years ago. I couldn't put this book down! The amazing settings bring each geologic age to life again, as it was when it happened. This author must have a prodigious science background and great imagination. This book is perfect for anyone with an interest in ancient and pre-historic history, geology, geography and sociology...more

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Oct 22, 2012 David Wells rated it 3 of 5 stars

somewhat of a painfully long and depressing read, Baxter's faith in humanity seems somewhat lacking. while many parts of the book seem to run along a very logical process of reasoning, based on science, there are some completely bizarre things going on throughout the book.
the way it is written its imaginative, but somewhat unsuccessful in my opinion. it early seemed like it was taking forever to read this thing no matter how much time I spent reading it. just kept going on and on and on .....

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Jan 14, 2010 Don rated it 4 of 5 stars

Overall, this was a good book. It was very slow at times and I put it down for periods of a couple weeks a few times while reading it. Apparently Baxter is not known for the quality of his characterization or his compelling plots but there were some real gems within the many stories that were contained in the book.

The author clearly states in his closing words that the book is not 100% scientifically accurate. Although it was vetted by some scientists in the field, he chose to make some decision...more

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Jan 12, 2010 Michaelbert Humperdink rated it 2 of 5 stars

I just can't get into this book. While extremely well-written and researched, the total lack of characters for most of the book really grates on me. Non-sentients--perhaps this could be a working definition of sentience itself?--just do not have anything interesting to say. Once proto-humans do come along, Baxter finds time to speculate on the origins and political uses of religious psychosis. Sadly, this was the most interesting part of the book.

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Dec 13, 2010 Rich Mulvey rated it 1 of 5 stars

I almost never abandon a book before the end. For this one, I'm making an exception. It's essentially a series of vignettes about particular animals over the course of the last 100 million years. The author goes to great lengths to flesh out the lives of the fauna at various stages of evolution.

Unfortunately, he's managed to take a fascinating subject and make it as dry and unengaging as humanly possible. It's likely that the sun will enter its red giant phase before I could force myself to fini...more

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About Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge (mathematics) and Southampton Universities (doctorate in aeroengineering research). Baxter is the winner of the British Science Fiction Award and the Locus Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award, most recently for Manifold: Time. His novel Voyage won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel of the...more

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