"If all passes but our own brutish natures, what hope do we have?" There is no answer to his question none is needed. "Will we ever walk out of the shadow of the beast?" asks one of Baxter's more memorable characters, trying to comprehend the fall of Rome. At the beginning of the 21st century, after the Holocaust and Hiroshima, our concept of humanity is rather darker. Life would go on, but it would not be your kind of life."įor 19th-century writers such as Tennyson, the idea that we belonged to "Nature, red in tooth and claw" was an assault on our notion of humanity. To die without reproducing means extinction, "a terminus more drastic than death. The savage landscape of the selfish gene was their habitat: "The struggle to exist was relentless." As Baxter's unnamed narrator makes clear with somewhat tedious regularity, producing "viable young" is the only law: the river of your genes must never be dammed. And from that river of genes, widening and modifying as thousands of millennia passed, would one day emerge all of humanity: every human ever born would be descended from the children of Purga."įor Purga and her descendants, such as the squirrel-like Plesiadapid ("Plesi" in Baxter's novel), life was nasty, brutal and short. Despite its rodent-like appearance this creature (Baxter calls her Purga) was a progenitor of primates and thus modern humans: "Through her brief life flowed a molecular river with its source in the deepest past, its destination the sea of the furthest future. The result is a powerful fusion of science and imagination.īaxter begins in the Cretaceous period with a "ratty" creature known to palaeontologists as Purgatorius.
There's no utopia, but his aim is one Wells would heartily endorse: to breathe life into a scientific theory - evolution by natural selection. Stephen Baxter's Evolution also charts the course of human history, but where Wells was content with broad brushstrokes, Baxter gives us a Technicolor panorama of human development, beginning 65 million years ago and ending 500 million years in the future.
0 kommentar(er)
