Happy New Year! Another one to add to the billions that have already occurred to life on this planet. And I kick start the year with a book about how we came to be, 'Evolution' by Stephen Baxter, which is about the evolution of our species from the age of the dinosaurs to life five hundred million years into the future.
It is a novel and speculates on what it must have been like to live sixty-five million years ago as one of our shrew-like ancestors who survived the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. This novel is fraught with near death experiences as much is about survival in a harsh world, full of danger and doing the best you can to see another day.
This book can be seen as a conceptual series of short stories that are linked by theme. It is hard sci-fi so if you love your science then you will get a lot out of this book but it is no text book, it is a work of fiction despite it being so heavily influenced by current day science. It does not pretend to be accurate.
As someone who found Darwin's 'Origin of Species' to be quite dry I am glad that there is an emotional piece of work about the theory of evolution. This gives me a better understanding of how evolution works, how small changes in one ancestor can have an effect over the whole lineage of beings that come after it.
It's not just about the past but it goes far into the future seeing what a post-human age would look like and I found that to be utterly fascinating. There will be more co-operation, more symbiotic relationships and the human civilisation would have disappeared completely. There would be things created by NASA would make an appearance in this new world in their search for answers.
It's a stark look, and a bold sweep, over the whole arc of human evolution that gives us keener insights to our lives on this ever circling planet of ours.
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