Sex and Death

[andrewducker]

I finished Stephen Baxter's Evolution, which spidermonster recommended to me a while back. It didn't tell me an awful lot I didn't already know, but it did have quite an emotional impact.

It's not really a novel - what 'plot' there is is largely a framing device for massive infodumps about the various ages of mammals. There's a short opening framing sequence set in the near-future before we jump back 65 million years. We then move forward in jumps to take in the evolution of mankind.

The first section opens shortly before a big comet takes out most of the dinosaurs, watching the 'action' largely from the viewpoint of Purga, a small mammal (although obviously she herself has no concept of what a name is). Her various 'adventures' bring her into contact with a variety of different dinosaurs and environments, allowing the author to showcase his dino-knowledge nicely before killing them all off. Purga eventually dies, but her children live on, thereby ensuring that eventually mankind will come into existence.

This cycle then repeats 4 or 5 times, covering the major periods mammals move through until monkeys start to appear. At this point things slow down slightly and we observe the rise of the pre-sapient primates as they slowly pick social habits, up a word or two, agriculture, etc. Eventually we hit ancient Rome, then back to the modern day and finally a look forward at a possible future, leading up to the end of life on earth.

If you like social bases to your plots then you won't like the opening third of the book - the animals are largely loners. It's only later on that there is much society at all, and just when things are starting to look good for people agriculture causes complex heirarchical societies to evolve and people's lives get more miserable again.

The whole book, in fact, highlighted the futility of life to me - each one a scramble for survival while producing a successor so that something of you outlasts the fleeting moments of your existence. It's a fascinating book, and one I can highly recommend. Just don't expect to find it uplifting.

Comments

[jerrykaufman.livejournal.com]

I had something of the same reaction to Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life about the fossils of the Burgess Shale and what they implied about evolution. Not only is it all random, but it doesn't necessarily tend to create "more highly evolved" creatures. Intelligence is just as random a result of evolution as any other adaptive strategy or formation.

I found this remarkably depressing.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, Evolution is pretty explicit about that too. Over the course of the novel creatures gain and lose various attributes. I'd say more, but I don't want to give spoilers.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Woo. My reccomendation rocks your world :-)

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I really like Evolution. My (two-year-old, hyperbolic) review is here. I think the best way to understand it is actually as a collection of short stories. Some of them work better than others--there's much more variation than you normally find in a novel. But when it works, damn. It works. :)

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I like your lj username..

;-)

Or is not a direct reference to Stephen Baxter?

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Rumbled!

You got me: I'm a Baxter fanboy. So much of one that I knew the title of an upcoming book and used it as an lj username six months before the book actually appeared in print...

(Luckily I quite liked it. :)

[andrewducker]

I disagree that you should skip bits or that the repetition is bad - I thought that the repetition was making somewhat of a point - that until we hit our complex social patterns we were largely going through the same patterns repeatedly. And that even when we overlayed our social level on top of it, these same needs for reproduction and dominance played a large part in our lives.

But other than that, yeah :->

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Not uplifting? What on eather is the point of reading a book that's not uplifting?!

(She says, going back to PvP :->

[andrewducker]

Quite the opposite of uplifting.

Somewhat, in fact, like going through the Total Perspective Vortex.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Was it saint and Tony who hired Schindlers List, and realised before watching, that they'd need something uplifting afterwards. So they hired The Shawshank Redemption because they'd heard that it was uplifting. ;-)

[andrewducker]

Saint and (female) George. I've passed that one on on many occasions.