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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780765345004
ISBN number: 0765345005
Label: Tor Science Fiction
Manufacturer: Tor Science Fiction
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 448
Printing Date: February 17, 2003
Publishing house: Tor Science Fiction
Sale Popularity Level: 40360
Studio: Tor Science Fiction
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Product Description:
Hominids examines two unique species of people. We are one of those species; the other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world where they became the dominant intelligence. The Neanderthal civilization has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own, but with radically different history, society and philosophy.
Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally pierces the barrier between worlds and is transferred to our universe. Almost immediately recognized as a Neanderthal, but only much later as a scientist, he is quarantined and studied, alone and bewildered, a stranger in a strange land. But Ponter is also befriended—by a doctor and a physicist who share his questing intelligence, and especially by Canadian geneticist Mary Vaughan, a woman with whom he develops a special rapport.
Ponter’s partner, Adikor Huld, finds himself with a messy lab, a missing body, suspicious people all around and an explosive murder trial. How can he possibly prove his innocence when he has no idea what actually happened to Ponter?
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Rated by buyers 
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Among the many mysteries of human evolution, Neanderthals are one of the most intriguing. Once depicted as brutes, now many scientists consider them a different, advanced species of hominids not ancestral to ours. And what if in an alternate realities Neanderthals had prevailed? Through an improbable but not implausible accident, a member of a Neanderthal civilization evolved in a parallel Universe finds himself in ours. I think Baxter's a most interesting speculation, full of intelligent and insightful notation on human's nature.I find it comparable to Harry Harrison's Yilanè series for the inventiveness in devising an alternate evolution pattern. Compare also with Asimov's story "The Ugly little Boy", and Lester Del Rey's poignant story "The day is done".Here we see Neanderthals not as inevitably doomed victims, but as a potential alternative human species at par with self-glamorized "Sapiens".Highly recommended!
Rated by buyers -
Robert Sawyer is one of my favorite authors, and as an avid fan, Hominids (Part 1 of the Neanderthal Parallax) did not disappoint. This is one of the few books of which I not only own a signed copy, but also the audio book. When reading (or listening to) this novel, is very apparent why it won the 2003 World Science Fiction Society's acclaimed Hugo Award. It is perfect story telling. The words come alive on the page, and the reader is soon engulfed into both the story and the world as viewed by the protagonist Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthals from a parallel universe. As in most of the author's stories the focus is not on the hard science of "how this happened" but more of the possibility "what if this happened." The audio version is a masterpiece, the narrator, Jonathan Davis, is one of the best I have heard. He effortlessly goes from one character's voice to the subsequent with ease and a distinction that clearly let's the listener knows that someone else is talking. The only disappointment was the book coming to a close, however that was soon to be forgotten because there are two more novels in this trilogy, Humans and Hybrids.
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Robert J. Sawyer's tenth novel, Hugo award-winning "Hominids" jump-starts a thoughtful and imaginative trilogy, "The Neanderthal Parallax", which explores an alternate evolutionary stream where Neanderthals became the dominant intelligent species on the planet. Sawyer makes up for his somewhat less than vivid prose with well-researched paleoanthropological information and theoretical physics played out by charming untraditional characters from two parallel universes.
This SF trilogy published by Tor Books consists of "Hominids", "Humans", and the concluding, "Hybrids", released in September, 2003 in hard cover. Hominids won the Hugo award for best SF. The remaining two have also run as Canadian Bestsellers and were nominated for Hugos.
The trilogy explores the lives and cultures of two unique species of people, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis, through the premise of existing parallel universes and what might happen if they "collided". During a quantum-computing experiment, Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidently pierces the barrier separating his universe from ours, plunging him into a land both familiar and strange. Having left behind his family, a mystery, and his colleague -- accused of murder -- Ponter's search for home forces him to navigate his way among the curious and suspicious "Gliksins" who have in his world been extinct for 40,000 years. In our universe it is his kind who have been extinct for so long.
All three books move at a ponderous pace before finally accelerating into high gear. In "Humans" this only happens by chapter 17 (about a hundred pages into the book).
Certainly Sawyer's characters radiate warmth and evoke our sympathy, but they remain avatars to the main driver of the trilogy, Sawyer's imaginative ideas in science and social paradigms. While there is nothing new about the idea of parallel universes, Sawyer uses it ingeniously to launch his premise, of an alternate evolution where Neanderthals inherited the "big leap forward" into higher-consciousness, in order to explore an alternate zeitgiest and to comment on our own. The world of the Neanderthals unfurls before us through the counterpoint intrigue of their universe and our own. Sawyer's alternative societal choices, illustrated through Neanderthal culture show us by example the foolishness of some of our own paradigms, social taboos and prejudices as he explores concepts of morality, gender, faith and love. Author David Brin says: "The biggest job of science fiction is to portray the Other. To help us imagine the strange and see the familiar in eerie new ways. Nobody explores this territory more boldly than Robert Sawyer." One of Sawyer's most ingenius concepts is a society wherein females live together with their same-sex mate apart from males who live with their same-sex mate and then get together with their opposite-sex mate only part of each month at the right time to conceive (or not). Of course this is feasible because when women live together for any length of time, it has been shown that they develop synchronus menstral cycles. I found Sawyer's treatment of this bisexual life-style sensitively and insightfully portrayed.
The writing in Neanderthal Parallax contains a fair bit of detail, such as the colour of someone's phone or the brand of potato chips. For instance, do I need to know that Mary had "become quite taken with Upstate Dairy's Extreme Chocolate Milk, which, like the Fabulous Heluva Good French Onion Dip, wasn't available in Toronto"? There were also too many references for my taste to vernacular of our subculture, including "Star Trek" scenes. There are much more effective ways to illustrate a character's predelictions than with clutter of this sort. In the second book, "Humans", Sawyer's passing reference to the demise of New York's Trade towers appears dropped in grauitously and, I found, trivialized the tragedy as a result. While this detail was no doubt intended to enrich his created world with a sense of concrete reality (not unlike many mainstream literery works) it also threw me, the reader, out of his "fictive dream" many a time. It detracted from the story's compelling potential and slowed the pace considerably.
There are also times when Sawyer's research overwhelms the story with expository information. For instance, when one of his characters is brutally attacked, permanently changing their physiology and consequently their mental behavior, instead of letting us witness the transformation in the character, we are presented with copious data from the character's own research, as if Sawyer just had to include all the research he'd conducted on the subject. This invariably reads more like a travelog, a topography of life without its depth. Those times when he seamlessly infuses information in story stand out as a result. Two examples include the utterly fascinationg discourse between Louise Benoit and Jock ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Within the theory of parallel universes there is a hypothesis which says that a new universe is created every time a sentient mind makes a choice. It's that crux that Robert Sawyer uses to create a story where two universes meet and civilizations collide. That's what science fiction is all about - taking a big idea and running with it to see what could happen.
The second big idea in this book is the What If Neanderthals had become the dominant species on the planet and us homo sapiens sapiens had gone extinct 40,000 years ago? So the collision between universes transferred one Neanderthal from their world to ours. Not just any Neanderthal, however, this one is Ponter Boddit, a theoretical physicist working on a quantum computer.
At this point I had to stop and say, "Wow!" A Neanderthal physicist accidentally jumps through to our dimension and turns all our knowledge, confidence, religion, and science on its head. Rarely does a book open enough questions to get my own mind spinning with the possibilities.
Then Sawyer goes on to describe a possible Utopian society in the Neanderthal world. This is a place where heterosexuality is restricted to four days a month with homosexuality prevailing the rest of the time. Worldwide population is controlled, religion is unheard of, and the hunter-gatherer diet/lifestyle is still alive and well. In that world human caused extinction doesn't happen. Flocks of passenger pigeons darken the skies while woolly mammoths and bison roam the plains. Human on human violence is so rare as to be unheard of and the legal system is attorney-free. At points the book seems more like a platform for Sawyer's advocacy than a story, but with such a great premise I can forgive a little preaching.
Well done, Mr. Sawyer. Well done.
- CV Rick, March 2008
Rated by buyers 
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Although Sawyer writes competently I gave it 2 stars for failure to live up to possibilities. Two humanoid societies interact after 40,000 or so years of separate development with differing histories, cultures, values, etc. What happens? We obsess about the characters and love lives of Mary (the human) and the Neantherthal (whatsisnameagain, he looks like Arnold without the chin), a couple of boring representatives of their species. "Harlequin" as another reviewer labeled it, sounds right.
I think Sawyer's desire that things turn out right prevents a sense of danger or conflict that might make things work. I kept waiting for the Pentagon to start war-gaming the possibilities (you could send an army over in New Mexico and have it pop up in Beijing for instance), for the Neanderthal vs Human championship(Neanderthals win), but all I got is this unrealistic plot and goody-goody philosophy.
Oh well, back to the Martian Chronicles, Dune, whatever.
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