Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids came to me quite well recommended by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
framlingem, and only today, after I resolved to finally read it, did I realize that it actually won the Hugo in 2003. So yeah, book with a high pedigree, this. I myself am somewhat ambivalent to it; while I think it's got a really fun premise (i.e., parallel world where the Neanderthals became the dominant species rather than Homo Sapiens, world intersects with ours, cue the WTFery on both sides), there are also aspects of it that irritate me immensely. I can't get into that without spoilers, so let me cover the more general reactions first.
There are side-by-side plot threads, one in our world, one in the Neanderthal world, and the latter is infinitely more interesting. I have very limited exposure to current understanding and theories about how the Neanderthals may have lived, but it seems like Sawyer has taken a lot of those details and rolled them into an interesting society. He also puts little touches on it that helped make it feel real to me, such as red being their indicator color for things being good, since red is the color of blood and health. Plus, honestly, the Neanderthal characters felt more fleshed out to me than the ones in our world did. However, I have to balance this against how, especially when the main Neanderthal character Ponter is interacting with people in our world, Sawyer hammers the reader over the head again and again and again and again with how Neanderthal culture is so much better than our own: they have almost no violent crime, no war, no religion, no prohibitions on gender in sexual pairings, no pollution of the environment, no mass extinction of species, etc., etc. Sure, as any reader of my journal knows, I lean pretty hard to the left--and even so, I got really tired really fast of the blatant social commentary.
But really, what irritated me about the book the most is this.
( Spoilers... )
All in all I'm not sorry I read this, since it did have some nice ideas, but I really wish the execution had been better. Two stars.
framlingem, and only today, after I resolved to finally read it, did I realize that it actually won the Hugo in 2003. So yeah, book with a high pedigree, this. I myself am somewhat ambivalent to it; while I think it's got a really fun premise (i.e., parallel world where the Neanderthals became the dominant species rather than Homo Sapiens, world intersects with ours, cue the WTFery on both sides), there are also aspects of it that irritate me immensely. I can't get into that without spoilers, so let me cover the more general reactions first.There are side-by-side plot threads, one in our world, one in the Neanderthal world, and the latter is infinitely more interesting. I have very limited exposure to current understanding and theories about how the Neanderthals may have lived, but it seems like Sawyer has taken a lot of those details and rolled them into an interesting society. He also puts little touches on it that helped make it feel real to me, such as red being their indicator color for things being good, since red is the color of blood and health. Plus, honestly, the Neanderthal characters felt more fleshed out to me than the ones in our world did. However, I have to balance this against how, especially when the main Neanderthal character Ponter is interacting with people in our world, Sawyer hammers the reader over the head again and again and again and again with how Neanderthal culture is so much better than our own: they have almost no violent crime, no war, no religion, no prohibitions on gender in sexual pairings, no pollution of the environment, no mass extinction of species, etc., etc. Sure, as any reader of my journal knows, I lean pretty hard to the left--and even so, I got really tired really fast of the blatant social commentary.
But really, what irritated me about the book the most is this.
( Spoilers... )
All in all I'm not sorry I read this, since it did have some nice ideas, but I really wish the execution had been better. Two stars.
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