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Title: Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer ISBN: 0-312-87690-4 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (16 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Thoughtful, moving, joyous
Comment: I am amazed at some of the silly readings people have made of this book. There's a complex, subtle vision at work here, not some simplistic message. Although it's true that the NEANDERTHAL PARALLAX series examines the role of male violence, we see during the course of these three books a number of good men (even Mary's ex-husband gets a very sympathetic on-screen portrayal in this volume). The message of HYBRIDS is very clearly that it is evil and wrong to blame all men for the bad acts of some. Indeed -- mild spoiler here -- Sawyer brilliantly contrives a situation in which we think for a time that his main character Mary Vaughan, who has good reason to be very angry with at least one man who has raped her, has come to this simplistic conclusion. But that's not what Mary is thinking AT ALL, as Sawyer makes clear in a very satisfying reversal.
Like the Hugo Award winning HOMINIDS and the equally deserving HUMANS before it, HYBRIDS is a story of big ideas and all-too-human and fallible characters. If you're used to sci-fi about gleaming heroes ... the kind of stuff Baen publishes ... you may indeed find the complex, error-prone, conflicted people populating this book unfamiliar ... except when you take your nose out of a book and look around at REAL HUMAN BEINGS, which is what Sawyer excels at writing about.
The plot here involves multiple levels of hybridization: cultural and personal. There's a quest for the best of both worlds, a mid-ground between the harshness of the Neanderthal system (yes, harshness -- I'm astonished that so many people seem to gloss over the flaws that Sawyer so clearly paints in the Neanderthal system) and our own. And there's a quest for Ponter and Mary to have a child, despite their differing chromosome counts. And, for those who (wrongly) think Sawyer has been unfair to Americans, the president of the US, who delivers a long speech broken up into small sections at the beginnings of each chapter, comes off as thoughtful, humane, and visionary -- just the sort of person we often indeed have had in the White House.
Sawyer has written a thriller combined with a love story combined with a philosophical speculation of the first water. This whole series is excellent, but this final volume is the best of the three, mostly because of the surprising twists and turns and the way Sawyer draws everything together in ways that aren't at all obvious. Read it; you won't be disappointed.
Rating: 4
Summary: Satisfying Trilogy
Comment: HYBRIDS is somewhat of a disappointment as the concluding novel of Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy.
HOMINIDS, the first novel in the trilogy, was a very well done novel about the accidental opening of a portal to an alternative universe where Neanderthal's became the dominant hominid. It explores the Neanderthal society and the various differences between the two cultures, human and Neanderthal. There is also very good character development in HOMINIDS, which really drives the rest of the trilogy.
HUMANS in some ways has the weakness of a second novel in a trilogy because there really is not a lot of plot development. But it is an absolutely hilarious social satire on human society, with digs at the United States' culture from a Canadian point of view. HUMANS is the novel I enjoyed the most of the three.
HYBRIDS is a good novel and conclusion to the trilogy but somewhat of a let down. Sawyer presents some really terrifying situations for both Neanderthals and humans but the emotional punch just isn't there. It's like watching a disaster with complete emotional detachment. The build up and mystery needed to evoke the kind of emotions to drive the story is missing.
Nevertheless, this is a good trilogy and recommended.
Rating: 2
Summary: Ham-handed social diatribe instead of hard SF novels
Comment: Just read this trilogy in the last few days. Gotta say, I'm disappointed.
The premise is somewhat interesting - a Neanderthal physicist is experimenting with quantum computers and accidentally opens a portal between his earth where Neanderthals rules to the possible earth where homo sapiens dominate the planet (our world) (Sawyer never did answer my geek question - did the large possibly prime number he was trying to factor uniquely address our world, or was it due to other factors?).
The Neanderthal comes over to our world, and wackiness ensues. We actually see quite a bit less wackiness than I would expect to see, and this is another place where the books fail as "hard" science fiction - the reactions of the human institutions don't seem plausible, there's far too little security and oversight in what goes on with the "alien" visitors and the gateway.
The thousand+ page trilogy would have made a far better short story or novella, there just aren't that many ideas in the whole thing and the writing is not particularly engaging.
As "hard" science fiction, there are basically two strong somewhat novel ideas in the books. One is the quantum computer gateway, the other is that religion is an artifact of the interaction of the homo sapien parietal lobe with magnetic fields. The first is kinda interesting, the second is just loopy. He handwaves away the environments where humans do interact with strong varying magnetic fields and then he introduces a surge in the Earth's magnetic field (on New Year's eve when our characters are in Times Square, of course) and everybody on the planet has a religious experience. Whee.
The other aspect of the book is more "social" science fiction. Using the alien as a contrast to explore human society is as old as science fiction is. Such explorations, when coming from the deft hands as one such as C J Cherryh, can be both intriguing and entertaining. If the alien is 3-dimension and has both strengths and weakness that are used to contrast with humanity's strengths and weaknesses
In the hands of someone less adept, this can become a cliche where the author merely catalogs the failings of humanity and simplifies the issues to blame one or two factors.
Unfortunately, Sawyer does the second. Humans, especially male humans, *especially* especially white male humans, **especially** *especially* especially white American male humans (except when castrated), are bad. Oh yes, and where testosterone isn't to blame, religion is - but that's just a mutated part of the parietal lobe acting out.
Neanderthals are good - and where there's bad in Neanderthals, it's because testerone was involved and the Neanderthal's eugenics program was only nearly perfect instead of completely perfect.
There's a hint of a grudging nod given to homo sapiens' accomplishments, but it's lackluster and is only a few words out of a thousand+ pages. It feels like an editor said, "show some balance" and Sawyer tacked it on.
Sawyer doesn't even bother to do more than handwave how homo sapiens disappeared in the Neanderthal's world, but spends a lot of time on homo sapiens' genocides.
Anyway, I was disappointed. The books were vaguely entertaining but the ham-handed "social" aspects were far too simple-minded and comprised too many pages to be anything other than tedious and annoying. I've enjoy others of Sawyers' books, but I'm going to be wary of him now.
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Title: Humans by Robert J. Sawyer ISBN: 0765346753 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 15 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer ISBN: 0765345005 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 17 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: End of An Era by Robert J. Sawyer ISBN: 0312876939 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 19 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer ISBN: 0812580354 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 15 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer ISBN: 0812580346 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 15 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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