The first in a trilogy called “The Neanderthal Parallax” Hominids is a book that uses various debates and discussions in paleo-anthropology, evolutionary psychology and socio-biology to posit a world in which Neanderthals rather than Sapiens are the highest evolved intelligent life form (more on that later). Through an accident that occurs while working on a quantum computer, a Neanderthal physicist is dropped into our (parallel universe) world – where Neanderthals died out tens of thousands of years ago (or according to another theory were bred out of existence) and homo sapiens became the dominant species. The Neanderthal spends the next few days learning about and debating various features of our social world with various humans. Like Voltaire’s Candide, or Usbek in The Persian Letters he is an outsider who reveals the flaws, follies and contradictions that are part and parcel of our world, including sexual mores, the institution of the family, notions of privacy and liberty, ecological destruction, religion, racial discrimination and capitalism.
What first drew me (and I suspect will draw many others) to this book was the fact that it won the Hugo Award for best Science Fiction Novel in 2003. Despite the Hugo Award having been awarded to some real clunkers in the recent past (Forever Peace anyone?) this is why I decided to give the book a chance, though I thought I would read it before forking out any cash on any of the rest of the trilogy. My qualms were due, to a large extent, to the many negative reader reviews I came across on amazon.com, accusing the book of being too didactic in tone, or too thin on plot, or even playing too fast and loose with science, or, predictably enough, too harsh on the finest achievements of human civilization. After reading the book through its only the accusation of dodgy science that seems to have merit.
Hominids is a throw back to the golden age social science fiction of the 50s and early 60s. Many of its tropes are similar, many of its themes have already been explored in one way or another by several stalwarts of the sf canon. Despite this, it stands on its own feet as a exemplar of the genre and a fine synthesis of these themes with modern scientific ideas. The science is subordinated to the needs of the story and Sawyer’s deft, uncomplicated prose makes for a smooth read. If you’re like me, and not overly credulous of many of the claims made by either evolutionary psychology or socio-biology, you may raise an eyebrow at how Sawyer believes the biological differences between homo sapiens and homo neanderthalis would have been the basis of a radically different society, but this is a minor point and doesn't have any bearing on the enjoyment of the book. As an example he posits that the Neanderthals' heavy reliance on a meat diet and significantly greater musculature would have meant that they would not take to agriculture or domesticate animals for labour which would have set lower limits to how much their population could grow, which in turn would affect the ecological impact of their society. At the same time, Sawyer posits that their impressive tool making abilities and the fact that their brains were 12% larger than that of homo sapiens would have meant that they would have been able to develop technologically. Also particularly interesting is how he feels gender relationships would develop differently based on the Neanderthals highly developed sense of smell.
This is all fair enough, but there is some dodgy use of science later in the book, where Sawyer tries to marry concepts of quantum entanglement, the notion of parallel universes and the rise of human consciousness. God as a unified network of human consciousness is not a new idea (the anime Serial Experiment Lain touched on this idea), and the notion of a "divine" observer that pegs each quantum event one to another in a chain that essentially creates reality (or verifies one reality over all possible others) has also been explored before in fiction (Dan Simmons’ The Hollow Man was one example). Both are intriguing concepts in their own ways. My problem is that the theory put forward by one of Sawyer’s characters puts Man, i.e. human beings (whether homo sapiens or homo neanderthalis), very much at the centre of the universe. The idea is far too anthropocentric, even for a non-gaian like me. And claiming that consciousness exists only in humans, and that too in humans only from 40,000 years ago (when we have the first significant evidence of art, religion and “sophisticated” tool making) seems to be tough to swallow.
Still, be that as it may, the science in the book never eclipses the narrative and I for one, unlike some readers, never felt that it was being rammed down my throat. Some fans of hard-sf are very exacting in their demands of the science of a sf book, but like I had said earlier, this is primarily a work of social science fiction and not hard sf. The science is necessitated by the narrative and not the other way round. The book’s greatest asset is that it is well written, has engaging characters, a swift-flowing narrative and much food for thought. Its these elements that drew me into the book, so much so that before I was finished, I had gone out and bought the next two in the series, Humans and Hybrds.
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