Evolution by Stephen Baxter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Be them laudatory or acerbic, most reviews of Evolution insist on the same two aspects of the novel: the huge importance of the scientific discourse (indispensable textbook for the former, totally inaccurate for the latter) and Baxter’s pessimism as to the nature and future of the human race. These points will seem obvious to the casual reader. However the irrelevance of the first one is easily demonstrated. As for the accusation of pessimism, a closer examination of the novel reveals it as inaccurate, if not erroneous.
Anyone who values Evolution by the accuracy of its scientific contents chooses to ignore Baxter’s warning in his forewords: despite all the efforts he has put into it, his novel is not a textbook. More than any science, paleontology is built on a trickle of fragile clues. Any of its theories is subject to great discussions and debates. A fiction based on it can only reflect the views of part of the scientific community at a given moment in time. More than any other science-fiction sub-genre, pre-historical fiction exposes the nature of the relationship between the novel and its supporting science. Raising the argument of the scientific accuracy of Baxter’s novel is simply missing its point. Evolution is a fiction. It is a story, not a history. It needs a point, not accurate facts. Being fictional, it is biased in essence. It is an artistic proposition based on the state of the paleontological knowledge at the beginning of the twenty-first century. No less, no more.
The second point cannot be as easily dismissed: Baxter’s views on humanity are depressing. Our race is almost always represented under disastrous lights: we exhaust our resources, we exploit anything of benefit to us. We are unable to overcome our animal urge to destroy anything we do not know or understand. The dynamic of Evolution is fueled by these sad truths; selfishness and xenophobia are its mankind’s modus operandi.
However, and this needs to be stressed, all of Evolution life forms behave the same way. In Baxter’s novel humanity might be in the spotlight, but its logic is that of life on Earth itself.
In such novels as Quest for Fire or The Inheritors, the Earth of our first ancestors (the Earth from Before Adam, as Jack London puts it), looks to our modern eyes like some sort of paradise –tough and rough as it may be, more innocent for Rosny than for Golding or London, where the human snake is already creeping)-. In comparison, Evolution’s young Earth is a ferocious battlefield. In none of his stories does Baxter show a central character capable of appreciating the beauty and grandeur of its environment. The descriptions are not entirely deprived of poetry, however this poetry is limited to some of Baxter’s most far-fetched creations: the air whale, the symbiotic tree, the invisible salamander. Out of these three examples only the air whale has been created for its own sake. Apart from it even the craziest flares or Baxter’s imagination stress the same point: any life form is a prey or a predator. Life is a relentless struggle for daily survival. We are far from the Robinson’s dream of the first pre-historical fictions. Earth is not an empty world to conquer. Here the stories goals are terribly down to earth: find food, breed, escape death.
Evolution is structured like a catalogue of scenes depicting the slow and fragile rising of primates on Earth. Each story shows us a species which survival hangs by a thread, to which Nature is a constant menace. More than once, the main character fails. Quite often, death is a relief. But one story makes exception. In A Long Shadow nature initially appears as the pre-Adam paradise we see in Rosny’s novels. Here the technology is at its peak and Earth is almost empty of humans. This story stands alone by many aspects and would deserve a separate examination. Its subtitle, “place and time unknown”, is enough to set it apart. Apart from A Long Shadow, all stories in Evolution start with an indication of place and time. Here all we know here is that we are on Earth, in the future. More telling even, we are after the fall. Thus having set the premises of a fairy tale, Baxter inverts all its codes The comparison with Robinson Crusoe is fascinating: far from being the new beginning of Defoe’s island, A Long Shadow’s virginal Earth is immediately soiled by human presence. The entire story relies on the necessity to breed and the immediate and unbearable tension arising from its simple and tragic arithmetic: of all five human survivors there is only one female. It is all to Baxter’s credit to have created a situation where sexual tension is a starting element of the story. It does not develop: it is here as a result of the initial set-up.
This leaves us with this paradoxical world: a paradise where mankind has already fallen; a starting point where the weight of the original sin is overpowering. Even though the story starts before the crime, from the opening pages the strongest and sharpest character, Sidewise, understands what for the others is still a vague feeling on a confused horizon: in this green, fresh, empty world where nothing seems to be of any real threat to mankind, mankind is already doomed.
The symbolic implications of this set-up are rich and obvious. It is worth noting that, though the crime is committed inside the fictional time, it is not told - it is merely accounted for shortly after it happens. This crime is consubstantial to the human life form. A Long Shadow starts as the retelling of the desert island tale –to turn almost instantly into a perfect post oedipal story. At the end what emerges (and this is a major blow to the view that the whole of Baxter Evolution is a demolition of mankind) is a humanity whose nature is a devil which can only be partially contained through the development of its civilization and, with it, of its understanding of the world. The price it has to pay for this development proves fatal.
This of course is a very protestant conception. Among all the stories of the novel, A Long Shadow might stand out by its nature, but not by its ideological standpoints. Its fairy tale structure and its reduced cast of characters expose these points better than anywhere else. However the same hypotheses are staged throughout Evolution. In the vast panorama Baxter builds, for all the damages they cause men are redeemed by their ability to share and transfer their knowledge. This point is particularly apparent in the story of the Martian robots. These machines were designed with the ability to learn and programmed to replicate themselves. Too successful, they soon become horrific monsters who, to fulfill their program, consume entire planets in their search for heavy metals. But ultimately these caricatures of ourselves are all that remains of Earth. They are man’s true children, brought to life by his capacity to transfer knowledge. This ability, Baxter explains, relies on what sets primates apart: empathy. With it comes the powerful counterpoint to the novel patent pessimism: what brings success is not the capacity to kill one’s enemies. It is the capacity to share. “Sharing was as old as life itself” Baxter says in his final story (p.727). “The survivors won through by cooperating” (ibid). Survival of the fittest does not define the fittest as the ultimate killer. It defines it as the species which learned to adapt to changing conditions by sharing resources and knowledge. Sharing is easily done when the will to share exists –this will, Baxter says, receives a phenomenal boost with the emergence of empathy. Empathy is what made a specific branch of primates - ours - successful. When empathy disappears, so do these primates and Baxter’s story finds an end.
Empathy is not only at the core of Evolution. It is also the component on which Baxter bases his strategy as a storyteller. Throughout the novel the reader's empathy is put to the test. From the story of Purga to that of Ultimate, empathy is what sustains our interest for characters so foreign to our lives. Nevertheless, we feel for Purga, a tiny, mouse-like mammal from the dinosaur era, as she struggles mercilessly to breed and preserve its cubs from the cataclysmic aftermath of the Mexican comet. Our hearts bleed as we walk along with Ultimate, the last of the descendants of human beings, on her way back to her symbiotic tree, in what Baxter describes as the last human travel on Earth. “This parched, dead beach had been the furthest point of all. The children of humanity had done with exploring.” (p.746).
But what about the Martian robots? After all they are the product of mankind, albeit not through gene transmission. They have not done with exploring. They will survive our planet itself, continuing the story of mankind’s descendants! For Baxter however, these unnatural creatures are beyond the reach of human empathy. They are the point where Baxter resigns himself to letting go of his story. In one of the final scenes a Martian robot lands on New Pangea, sent here by the robots community in a quest for their origin. A survey of the dry, empty continent reveals the absence of any organised intelligence. Finally, “With an equivalent of a sigh, [it] leapt to the stars” (p.743).
The Martian machines might be our children; they might be the future of evolution. In spite of it, and this is Baxter’s way of setting a limit to the unmatched span of his story, they have “nothing to do with mankind”. By doing so Baxter is leaning towards this cliche of most North-American schools of creative writing: that any fiction finds its readership among people who can relate to the main characters. This cliche is too generic to have any real meaning and knows too many exceptions to hold any real truth. Baxter himself has proven it wrong in several of his works.
So now I can only hope that one day, Baxter will allow us to read the story of the Martian Robots.
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