Ordinary Day

Sawyer's extrapolations of what Neanderthal culture would be like are easily the best part of the novel and are why I didn't just bail on the book right after the rape scene. He does postulate that they had higher base intelligence, and they do domesticate wolves, but not herd animals since they remain a hunter-gatherer society; he's also got them using living trees as homes, so the aspect of working with the ecosystem is in there. And since they're still a hunter-gatherer society, he's got 'em working harder to control their own population.

There are other aspects that are more thought-provoking, such as how he's got 'em sterilizing not only persons who commit crimes but also any relatives that share at least fifty percent of their genetic material--offspring and siblings. And, all persons in their society have computerized implants that record their actions constantly, so it's a lot harder to commit a crime in general in their society... but then again, nobody has any privacy whatsoever, either. There are interesting gray areas here, lots of potential ramifications, and that's another disappointment for me in this book... that rather than dealing with all of these interesting ramifications, mostly, the story just hammers on the idea that because of these things, The Neanderthals Have No Crime So Aren't They Great? The only time the possible downside of this is explored is that there's a character who's pissed off that her mate got sterilized only because he was the brother of someone who had committed a crime--he hadn't done a damn thing himself--and at that point I was thinking, "OKAY! Now that's interesting!"

Mostly, though, the potential of this stuff was not explored at all. :(