Hominids

Robert J Sawyer is claimed to be the most successful Canadian author, with a string of award-winning novels behind him. Hominids is the first in a new trilogy which investigates alternative possibilities in human evolution; that instead of Homo Sapiens becoming the dominant humanoid form, we died out and the Neanderthal form dominated. It is a pleasant conceit, as the author accepts that H. Neanderthalensis might have been an alternative human optimised for colder climates, and not the grunting savage of earlier fiction and Stephen Baxter's otherwise-admirable Space.

Hominids gets much of its SFnal impetus from quantum computing, the idea that complex problems requiring large amounts of computer time could be solved by routing the problem through computers in parallel universes. Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, finds himself catapulted through the gate between worlds in a lab accident, and deposited into a heavy-water sphere beneath the Canadian soil. Fortunately he is rescued by sympathetic H. sapiens who try to keep the world's inquisitive press from him, but back in the homeworld his co-worker and closest friend is on trial for Boddit's apparent murder. The Neanderthal world depicted is one where a small prosperous population has been preferred over a large ever-hungry one. It is also charming and full of warmth, a society that seems to have arrived at its own version of the Slow Cities movement without ever being addicted to speed and growth in the first place.

However, I am not really sure what this novel is about; anthropology, violence and surveillance all contend. Firstly, it's an anthropological story about the possibility of Neanderthal societies, and what the differing physiology might imply: a far greater reliance on scent because of the larger nose, and thus no use of fossil fuel burning, for example. Sawyer postulates a very much smaller world population, which subsists by hunting/gathering. I'm not sure about this. Every human society that has got beyond basic subsistence nomadism has had agriculture. Even if the population remained minuscule they would still want the convenience of having their food supply in a fixed place and delegating certain members of society to produce it.

He also suggests that Neanderthal females were not permanently fertile, and from this postulates males and females living apart except when they come into rut. This may be an attempt to heal a male/female rift in our society, especially as one of the key events of the novel is that, just prior to the discovery of the Neanderthal in the heavy-water sphere, geneticist Mary Vaughan is raped by an assailant in the University grounds; Sawyer's list of further reading for this book includes a title called The Beast Within: why men are violent, and at one point he says, "Everything is down to male violence." It's fairly desperate though, to suggest all that men and women can do is live apart, though many people of both sexes have been tempted by the idea. Equally he bashes Homo Sapiens by suggesting that in our world we wiped out the Neanderthals, with very little countersuggestion that in the Neanderthal world they wiped out H. Sapiens.

Another key feature of the Neanderthal world is its surveillance. When one of the humans hears about this, that everything people do is filmed, her immediate reaction is: 'you mean it's a totalitarian society?'. No, it isn't, because of who owns the information. Everyone is being recorded at all times, but the person recorded owns that recording. Its release can be required by a court of law but that is a long way from permanent CCTV being watched by the police. The Neanderthal world is not entirely paradise, with this kind of surveillance and also the legal sanction of sterilising not only wrongdoers but also close members of their family.

In Factoring Humanity Sawyer came up with a situation where everyone is party to everyone else's thoughts, and this rather creepy situation he seemed to find desirable. Robert Anton Wilson has suggested that faced with increasing surveillance via CCTV and the Internet - You have no privacy. Get used to it - we should proceed as though all information is public. The subjects of surveillance and violence do seem to bulk so largely in this novel that the reader cannot avoid hearing a very large tub being thumped.