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Robert J. Sawyer is, according to MacLean's: Canada's Weekly Newsmagazine, "among the most successful Canadian authors ever." Hominids is the first volume of a trilogy.
Robert J. Sawyer is, according to MacLean’s: Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine, “among the most successful Canadian authors ever.” His previous novels Frameshift, Factoring Humanity and Calculating God were all Hugo finalists, Starplex was a Hugo and Nebula finalist, and The Terminal Experiment won the 1995 Nebula award. Sawyer was briefly president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and is regularly interviewed as a pundit by Canadian television. His novel Hominids is the first volume of the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. A technician is working in a Neutrino Observatory deep beneath Northern Canada, when an alarm sounds, and the container holding a vast quantity of heavy water bursts open, revealing a Neanderthal inside. Ponter Boddit has come from a parallel world where Homo Sapiens, rather than Homo Neanderthal, became extinct. Researching into quantum computers, Ponter has left his partner behind. With no trace of the missing Ponter, and a grief-stricken family demanding explanations, Adikor Huld finds himself charged with murder, and all but unable to defend himself – who, after all, will believe that a man can disappear into thin air, especially when Adikor is forbidden to visit the ‘crime’ scene lest he tampers with the evidence. In our world, a traumatized Ponter is taken to a hospital, while DNA from his swabs is examined by geneticist Mary Vaughan, an expert on Neanderthals. Mary is attempting to come to terms with being raped, and initially studies Ponter as a distraction, but is soon captivated by his intelligence, even as she is terrified by his masculinity. Sawyer’s depiction of an alternative society based on Neanderthal physiology is fascinating and compelling. SF writer Charles Stross once cited agriculture as the most devastating weapon of mass destruction ever devised, in that it has allowed human society to expand to fill the entire planet; Sawyer speculates that with a gluten intolerance, Neanderthals might have never embraced intensive farming, but instead evolved a hunter-gatherer civilization which in turn – to avoid hunting the world’s megafauna to extinction -- would have plateau-ed the population at below two hundred billion, in stark contrast to our six billion plus. This is an idealized world, but it isn’t sanitized. Ponter’s accuser is prompted partly by grief arising from the effects of the Neanderthal’s supposedly perfect judicial system. While Hominids is the first volume of a trilogy, Sawyer manages to retain an emotional and thematic self-containment to it so that it stands entirely in its own right. It deservedly won the 2003 Hugo Award as the best SF novel of the year.
The copyright of the article Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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