Product Description

The natural heir to Arthur C. Clarke dramatises the epic story of evolution. A novel that tells the story of life on Earth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #136121 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-16
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

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 the primate, 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 the Author
Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent SF writer of his generation. Published around the world he has also won major awards in the UK, US, Germany, and Japan. Born in 1957 he has degrees from Cambridge and Southampton. He lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife.

Customer Reviews

Excellent
In this book Baxter tells the tale of the rise and fall of human kind as a series of snapshots into the lives of various members of the human evolutionary lineage. From Purga, first of the primates, scurrying between the legs of dinosaurs shortly before the Chicxulub impact through to Ultimate, the last, scratching out an existence on a neo-pangea, 500 million years hence.

I found this a thoroughly entertaining read, if not a terribly uplifiting one (there are no happy endings here), and is one of the best books I have come across in a long while. If I were forced to level criticism I might suggest that it is in places overly anthropomorphic. Also, that some of the themes, from the first half of the book in particular, are slightly repetitive, but I guess one could argue that the fundamentals of life generally boil down to a handful of criteria; eat, don't be eaten, reproduce etc...

Overall though I would thoroughly recommend this. Great storytelling from a great storyteller.

Interesting concept but a bit repetitive
I had high hopes for this one but unfortunatly my expectations were not met.
Although the concept is interesting I actually found it repetitive and boring. It was a struggle to finish this book and the only thing that kept me going was the hope that there would be some exciting climax.Although the underlying principles of evolution in reality don't "work" towards a climax, this doesn't mean that the story can't.
On a positive note it seems the author has a firm grasp of evolution and uses his knowledge well to imagine creatures that once were and maybe one day will be.
So to summarise : an interesting concept but repetitive and a bit boring. However this is very subjective and if you're interested in evolution, by all means give it a try.

Great book, minor flaws
As the other reviewers have explained, this book tells the story of humanity, starting 65 million years in the past and moving on into a distant future. We see the change through several vignettes, most following a predecessor of modern humans, providing a snapshot of a chaotic world and the slow transformation from small shrew-like creatures into...well, you and me. Some chapters also show the dead ends that mankind could have fallen into--one chapter posits that a species of dinosaur began to grope their way towards civilisation in the Jurassic, but lost their chance through nothing more than bad luck. Another follows the slow and painful extinctions of creatures trapped on Antarctica as the world cools. Yet another shows proto-humans who never had any incentive to invest in brainpower, and were lost with their habitat. The adventures of the 'protagonists' can get repetitive, but the real star in the early stories is the world in which they live.

A problem with the book, ironically, is the modern human characters, who came off to me as being either talking heads or weak stereotypes. I found that the narration was better when the exposition on what is going on was in the third person. Also, the pivotal part of the book, the total collapse of modern civilisation seemed less than convincing--all of humanity reverts to a feral state within a thousand years, somehow abandoning even basic concepts such as fire, the wheel, agriculture and language. Such a radical change really needed a chapter to itself to make it convincing.

That aside, this book has some parts that honestly qualify as mind-blowing. The presentation of the comet impact that (supposedly) wiped out the dinosaurs is presented in a way worthy of any disaster movie, conveying perfectly the global nature of the catacylsm, to a day in the life of the last human ever to exist, half a billion years from now.

It's not a comforting book--it ends with the extinction of humanity, though the humans do leave successors after a fashion. It steers clear of nihilism, though, and if it has a 'moral', it is that our actions now can influence the world more than any other time before.

Overall, a great read with some minor flaws, that works as a scholarly introduction to how humankind got here, an entertaining read that makes you want to see what happens next, and a philosophical examination of the meaning of life in a world that so often snuffs it out. Worth a look.