Robert J. Sawyer
2002
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
In the documentary Wordplay, crossword-puzzle fan Jon Stewart admits that sometimes when he’s in a hotel he will do the USA Today puzzle. But, he says, “I don’t feel good about myself when I do it.”
I
felt the same way about this book. It grabbed my attention right away
and it read very easily and fast, but when it was done I didn’t feel
good about myself for reading it.
Hominids has
all the elements of a blockbuster best-seller: uncomplicated
characters; carefully-paced rising tension; a crisis, pinch, and climax
at precisely the right spots; resolution of conflicts so the good guys
win; and a love story sideline. And it has just enough of a scientific
veneer to qualify as science fiction.
The book is the first in Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy
and sets up the premise for the whole series, which is that there
exists a parallel universe in which Neanderthals became the dominant
intelligent species on earth and homo sapiens was
the species that died out. In the parallel universe, a couple of
Neanderthal physicists conduct an experiment in quantum computing. There
is an accident during the experiment causing one of them to get
transported to our universe, where he lands in the middle of an
experiment being conducted by a human physicist.
The
human physicist spirits the Neanderthal physicist away to a doctor
friend’s remote country house before the government can get its hands on
him. The two humans call in a geneticist to make sure the Neanderthal,
whose name is Ponter, is what they think he is and then the four of them
hole up in the house to keep the press and the feds away while they
figure out where Ponter came from and whether or not they can send him
back home.
One of my major issues with the book is that
the characters are pretty formulaic. Ponter, for example, is
universally beloved in his own universe. He is kind and gentle and
understanding at all times. The three humans who befriend him (the
physicist, the geneticist, and the doctor) are all super-intelligent,
earnest, straightforward, excellent at keeping confidences, and
uniformly good-natured. So, also, are Ponter’s Neanderthal man-mate, his
woman-mate, and his daughter back home.
Any
opportunities for real internal crises are deftly skirted. One of the
most troubling is that one of the key characters (the geneticist) is
raped at the very beginning of the book. She decides to handle it by not
telling anyone and going on as if nothing has happened. And while this
clearly isn’t easy, and the memory of the rape comes up over and over
again in her mind, she essentially all but recovers during the
Neanderthal business (which spans maybe a week) and finds (thank
goodness!) that she’s still attracted to men… or at least to beefy,
well-endowed Neanderthals.
The other main issue I had was with the science. The New York Times is
quoted on the cover of the hardcover first edition of this book saying,
“Sawyer is a writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific
extrapolation.” I would certainly agree with that, if by “scientific
extrapolation” they mean “wild and contrived applications of perfectly
decent theory.”
Many reviewers give the book kudos for
being so thoroughly researched, and there certainly is a long
bibliography at the end. But there’s no anthropologist among the main
characters, and the science about Neanderthals that comes up either
seems too pat and basic or too fanciful and wacky.
For
example, the Neanderthals in the parallel universe have a much more
peaceful and progressive culture than ours. They use solar energy, are
all secular humanists, are practically crime-free, have intimate
relationships with both women and men as a matter of course, never
domesticated plants or animals to any great extent and so have hardly
any pathogens, and are appalled by our wars and man’s inhumanity to man.
It’s definitely a message of “O, what these noble savages could teach
us!” Maybe it’s just my cynical homo sapiens nature
coming out but it’s hard to believe all that would result from their
inherently different biology. It’s also hard to imagine it working on a
large scale with hardly any missteps or conflict.
And
the explanations for the parallel universes, and for how they are
supposedly going to bring Ponter home to the exact right single universe
out of all the infinite possibilities, both just seemed silly. Even for
a blockbuster best-seller.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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