I received an email today from Robert Sawyer (www.sfwriter.com), perhaps the best known and most-accomplished Canadian science fiction writer. I had written to praise his recent trilogy The Neanderthal Parallax...and also to point out a little boo-boo I found in the third book. More on that later.
The Neanderthal Parallax is on my "this book really ought to be required reading for everyone" list. (More on that later, too.) Sawyer posits an alternate Earth wherein Homo sapiens died out and Homo neanderthalensis went on to found a civilization. Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, breaks through into our universe (right into the heavy water tank at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, in fact). Rescued, he is confronted with his first sight of Gliksins, a variety of humans that had been extinct in his world for thousands of years.
He's then confronted with our society, which is radically different from his own. Sawyer has done a masterful job at world-building here. The Neanderthal society is plausible and its differences from ours provoke thought.
Just to give one example, in Neanderthal society, everyone is implanted with 'Companions' that function as super-intelligent Palm Pilots (it's through Ponter's Companion that he learns English). The Companions also transmit everything you're seeing and doing to an 'alibi archive'--viewable by you at any time, viewable by the court system only if you are accused of a crime. The first order result of this system is that crime is almost nonexistent.
Ponter meets and eventually falls in love with a geneticist from our world, and subsequent books see each come to terms with the other's world. There are striking thoughts about religion, human nature, and politics scattered liberally throughout. The book and its sequels, Humans and Hybrids, are an absolute joy to read.
One of the things I enjoy most about Sawyer is that he is unabashedly Canadian. His characters watch CTV and CP24, listen to CJMX-FM in Sudbury, read the Globe and Mail, and stop in at Tim Horton's. I find it almost intoxicating to stumble across intersections and towns I know well.
(The boo-boo I found in the third book was, in fact, an error in geography. Two characters are driving from Toronto to Sudbury. They've passed Parry Sound on Highway 69, and one character is looking past the driver, out at Georgian Bay. I don't know that stretch of road quite as well as my father does--he's patrolled it for a goodly portion of his life--but I do know there's only one place you can see Georgian Bay from the highway, and it's well to the south of Parry Sound. Sawyer's response? "Oops". )
Anyway, read this book. You'll be glad you did.
MY "WHY HAVEN'T YOU READ THIS BOOK?" BOOKLIST:
Aztec, Gary Jennings
Spangle, Gary Jennings
The Truth Machine, James Halperin
the Callahan series, Spider Robinson
The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
Tomorrow's God, Neale Donald Walsch
Beach Music, Pat Conroy
To Sail Beyond The Sunset, Robert Heinlein
The Sarantine Mosaic, Guy Gavriel Kay
The Neanderthal Parallax, Robert Sawyer
If you actually sit down and read these books, you'll notice a common theme. Most of them concern a world different from the one we live in here on Earth in the year 200-. Some of them are historical fiction, and some are speculative fiction, and two--Tomorrow's God and the Callahan books--concern our world as it could be, if only we were a little more human. For that matter, Sawyer's work falls into that third category even though (or perhaps because) he is a superlative writer of science fiction.
The exceptions on the list (The Robber Bride and Beach Music) are simply--to my mind, anyway--the best examples of Canadian and American writing I've come across in a very long time. Your mileage may vary, of course. But these are books I return to again and again, learning new things and seeing the world a new way with each successive reading.
Caveat lector: some of these novels are not for the prurient or faint of heart. Gary Jennings in particular brings his subject world alive as few writers ever have, and that world contains sex, some of it deviant, and violence, some of it graphic.
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