Rating: 
Summary: Great book. Not for light readers.
Review: This book starts slowly and is a bit repetitive at first but it gets better and better. Baxter is a great writer and I look forward to reading more of his work. He really makes his readers think. If you enjoy this book read the Manifold series and Light Of Other Days.
Rating:
Summary: The Big Picture
Review: This book takes the reader on a nearly billion year journey accross time on planet earth. The book offers the reader a sense of mortality that is not just for oneself but for all of life as it forces the reader to witness early life, the Earths likely end and everything in-between. A work of fiction merged with fact that will have you doing research to learn more. This is what good science fiction is about.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible visions of human evolution
Review: This book was a moving series of vignettes of life on earth from 65 million years ago into 500,000 million years into the future. I felt for the simians he explored, the lives they led alongside the dinosaurs, in the aftermath of the great mass extinction of 65 mya, in the forests and tundra in competition with other primates. I was blown away. In the end, I felt an incredible loneliness. And when a book takes me on these emotional rollercoasters, it's got to be great. There is a subplot of these replicator robots sent to Mars by humans; they reemerge later in the book in typical Baxter-esque understatement. Excellent stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: Like to think? Here's a book for you!
Review: This could be a Very Important Book. With a bit of promotion, pundits could be kicking the ideas presented here around for years to come. There are enough concepts, theories, and SWAGs (Scientific Wild-Arsed Guesses) to keep the talk show guests riled up for quite a while. Despite the author's insistence in the Afterword that this should not be regarded as a textbook, it reads very much like an advanced Anthropology text, and that is all to the good. I cannot guarantee its scientific veracity, but I am certainly impressed by how closely it matches the facts as I know them.Some might be off-put by the idea that it might read like a textbook, but no textbook I've read has the light touch this novel has. Rather than pontificating, or presenting fourteen different mutually exclusive theories, the author seems to have picked the most likely, most believable, or most thought-provoking path, and woven them through his narrative. The author works well with the language, presenting complex ideas simply enough that they can be considered and absorbed, without speaking down to the reader. Be prepared to think. Be prepared to be challenged. If you cut your teeth on romance novels, this is not going to be your cup of tea. If, on the other hand, you were raised to think for yourself and ponder ideas that may not match your preconceptions, you'll probably love this book. It roams from deep prehistory (including the concept of tool-using, self-aware dinosaurs!) to the far-flung future, when the works of Man are mere scars on the planet of his birth. This, of course, brings up other issues. If you like happy endings, this may not be your book. It gets a bit preachy in spots (the sky is *not* falling, meteors notwithstanding). Some may not like the way it deals with religion (not that the devout would care for the subject matter in any case), and others may detest how it deals with Man's role in the wider scheme of things. For me, this is all to the better. The book doesn't try to be all things to all people, and holds well to its own internal truth. In short, I liked it, and you probably will too. It made me think, it kept my attention, and tells a thumping good story. I especially liked the part about the fate of the planet Mars. Give it a try, and see what you think.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty good
Review: This is Baxter's attempt to shrink 100 million years of human evolution into 500 pages, and he does a pretty good job. The book is interesting and very well researched, which makes it fun to read. However, Baxter does spend a tad too much time describing the lives of the pre-humans. It does get a little dull after a while. But the content far out weighs the pacing problems. But pace problems aside, Evolution is a great book and a joy to read.
Rating:
Summary: Wow...
Review: This is the first Stephen Baxter novel I've read and I was really impressed. Very accurate, based on hard scientific evidence. I especially like how he got into the minds of animals, and described what it very well may be like to not be self-aware. At the places where we don't have enough evidence, Baxter does a superb job of creating plausible scenarios for the evolution of things like speech, religion, and agriculture. His speculation on the origin of the New world monkeys was also superb. I also like how Baxter added his own creations, creatures that we don't have any evidence of having existed, but absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. He puts in weird imaginary but plausible creatures like 300-foot, hollow-boned, plankton-feeding pterodactyls, and late surviving dinosaurs in Antarctica.
And yes, the talking dinosaurs were cool...
Rating:
Summary: I Wanted 500 More Pages
Review: Though the novel is long and descriptions are in-depth, I could have read 500 more pages. I thought it was a facinating take on evolution, and enabled me to visualize prehistoric worlds and the daily struggle of life. I wanted more, especially in the evolutin of mankind.
Rating: 
Summary: Coprolite stars in this book
Review: Well, I made it through the first 24 pages before I fell asleep. I just couldn't face another 534 pages. Its not good fiction and it sure as heck isn't good science. Boring, boring, boring. A 65 million-year-old mammal called Purga? It might as well have been a fish called Wanda. Now that at least was funny. He had his all star cast though, headed up by a savior woman from Africa. All he was missing was a gay Asian doctor, a white Texan cowboy overseer, an Inuit paleoanthropologist, and a lesbian Hispanic pilot.
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