Stephen Baxter, EVOLUTION
When telling the stories of individuals and peoples, there are three questions the story must deal with: 1) Where did we come from? 2) Where are we going? and 3) What will become of us? In Evolution, Stephen Baxter tells the story of humankind itelf, ranging from humanity's raw beginnings in Purga the Purgatorius, dancing around the feet of dinosaurs and just barely surviving the comet-strike on the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago; to paleontologist Joan Usub, on her way to participate in a conference of scientists with the hope that the results of that conference will save the world, in 2031 AD; to the life and death of Ultimate, Purga's last descendant, on a dying Earth half a billion years uin our future; with a side-trip to the ornitholestes Listener, a technologically sophisticated and intellectually gifted bipedal dinosaur, 145 years ago, in the depths of the Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era of Earthly life. Throughout he describes the likely and possible evolution of consciousness, intellectual capacities, and cultural creativity of the primate line leading to us and beyond us into an unknowable future.
As Baxter himself says in the Afterword to the novel, here he has tried to dramatize the story of human evolution, not define it. Hoping that his story is plausible, he nevertheless cautions that it should not be read as a textbook. He bases much of it on reconstructions of the past by experts in various fields, choosing what seemed to him the most plausible or exciting idea among competing scientific proposals. But, as he says, much of the story is based simply on his own speculations.
The resulting story is a vivid, sometimes heart-wrenching, often dazzling complexity and poetic depth. No, it shouldn't be read as a textbook -- but read alongside the textbooks on paleontology, paleobiology, paleoecology, and astrobiology I've been studying over the years, it adds a profound depth and almost musical richness to the story not only of humanity, but of life itself that illuminates the textbook studies with a blazing, vividlly colored brilliance and beauty that places the reader him- or herself in the midst of the story of life, letting us identify with the various life-forms described in our studies and thereby come to know that we are truly one with all life on Earth, and always will be. A glorious literary feast, indeed.