Evolution

Evolution

Stephen Baxter

Pages: 760, Category: Fiction

Publisher: Gollancz

Stephen Baxter is a well known science fiction writer and presents the history of the world in this novel. The story line extends 565 million years and might be the longest novel in chronological extent. It interestingly brings out how life forms evolved out from humble beginnings, the extinction of dinosaurs by a comet collision and resulting rise of mammalian population, story of hominids, rise of civilization, and the end in which humans mindlessly destroyed the environment and the ‘fall of man’ due to the Rabaul volcanic explosion and consequent wars for resources. But the story does not end there. Some humans was saved from the catastrophe, but they gradually lost speech, language and civilization. Over geological time, they degenerated into animals again, losing intelligence itself and speciated. Some of them were being farmed by predators who traced ancestry from rodents. In the end, the earth is being destroyed by the cataclysmic events of the sun. But, before that, due to comet and asteroid collisions, some bacterial spores escape to space and begins the journey of life again at some other plant system in the universe where evolution begins again.

The novel starts and ends with quotations from Darwin.

“Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity”

“There is grandeur in this view of life…that…from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

Two quotations from the book.

1. “Well, maybe there is still room for a God. But what kind of God would intervene the whole time? And isn’t the story wonderful enough on its own?”
2. “Males were occasionally useful, obviously necessary, rarely troublesome”

Overall rating: 3 Star