Bulky assemblage-it's a stretch to call this a novel-of animated
dioramas endeavoring to illustrate the story of primate evolution.
The token frame here concerns the journey of two friends,
paleontologist Joan Useb and primatologist Alyce Sigurdardottir, to
attend a conference in Darwin, Australia, in 2031. The planet's
ecology and climate are threatened, the huge volcano on nearby
Rabaul is close to exploding-and to cap it all, terrorists attack
the conference. Meanwhile, robots on Mars succeed in replicating
themselves. Baxter (Icebones, 2002, etc.) intersperses this with
dramatic paleontological reconstructions and speculations.
Proto-primates beat the competition in the Cretaceous. Brainy
dinosaurs, unknown in the fossil record, become extinct in the
Jurassic. Primates evolve and adapt swiftly during the Tertiary.
Monkeys arrive in the New World. Dinosaurs survive on Antarctica
until ten million years ago. Five million years later, apes descend
from the trees. Hand axes become popular about 1.5 million years
ago. Politics, murder, and beer are invented before 10,000 b.c.
Fifth-century Rome seethes with treachery. Finally, in 2031, the
volcano explodes, devastating Earth. Mars, meanwhile, is eaten up
by the replicating machines, which go on to colonize the galaxy. A
millennium after the volcano, a group of British servicemen awaken
from cryonic suspension to find that primitive post-humans have
already lost the power of speech. Devolution, thereafter, continues
rapidly. The last primates, half a billion years hence, subside
with barely a gasp. Infotainment: glum, dyspeptic, and depressing.
(Kirkus Reviews)
From their beginnings foraging at the feet of the dinosaurs,
through the apocalypse of an asteroid strike, through countless
years of the day to day life and death dramas of survival of the
fittest, to the rise and fall of mankind and the final destruction
of earth by the expanding sun, the primates have survived. This is
their story. EVOLUTION follows the ebb and flow of the fortunes of
one group of creatures as they change and adapt to their world
somewhere on the horn of Africa. It turns the story of Darwinian
evolution into a constant drama, a daily life and death struggle, a
heroic story of life?s endurance. It is a story that transcends
generations, species, mankind and, in the end, the Earth itself. In
the tradition of Olaf Stapledon and HG Wells.
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