Evolution

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: 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...