Rating: 
Summary: Rewarding
Review: A fantastic and rewarding conclusion to a very enjoyable series. Character development is great, you really care for these people. We got back into the Neanderthal world here which I had hoped for in the second book. Sorry it had to end. All too short.
Rating: 
Summary: Better than Humans, but that's not saying much
Review: After reading Homonids, the first book in this series, I had high hopes for the series. Because, despite what I thought was too much focus in that book on Mary Vaughn's personal problems, I still really enjoyed the book, and thought the premise was very interesting. However, in the second book, Humans, Sawyer takes the story completely in the wrong direction, focusing almost entirely on the relationship between Mary Vaughn and Ponter Boddit, and ignoring the more interesting story of the comparison and contrast between the two different Earths.While this book was better than Humans, with a little more focus outside of their relationship, it still is way too heavily skewed towards that storyline. While that mediocre story plays out in detail in each chapter, a much more intresting story goes almost undeveloped in little snippets at the beginning of each chapter. I also found myself wondering how the Neanderthal technology would have managed to progress like it had without a population anywhere near that of the Gliksins. It seems that with the limited population and without so much war to drive technology, they would have moved much slower. I will continue to look for more from Sawyer in the future, but nothing else from this series. I think Sawyer could have done a much better job with this story, but he just went down the wrong path. If you read the other two books in the series, you will want to read this one as well, but don't expect anything great.
Rating:
Summary: Better than Humans, but that's not saying much
Review: After reading Homonids, the first book in this series, I had high hopes for the series. Because, despite what I thought was too much focus in that book on Mary Vaughn's personal problems, I still really enjoyed the book, and thought the premise was very interesting. However, in the second book, Humans, Sawyer takes the story completely in the wrong direction, focusing almost entirely on the relationship between Mary Vaughn and Ponter Boddit, and ignoring the more interesting story of the comparison and contrast between the two different Earths. While this book was better than Humans, with a little more focus outside of their relationship, it still is way too heavily skewed towards that storyline. While that mediocre story plays out in detail in each chapter, a much more intresting story goes almost undeveloped in little snippets at the beginning of each chapter. I also found myself wondering how the Neanderthal technology would have managed to progress like it had without a population anywhere near that of the Gliksins. It seems that with the limited population and without so much war to drive technology, they would have moved much slower. I will continue to look for more from Sawyer in the future, but nothing else from this series. I think Sawyer could have done a much better job with this story, but he just went down the wrong path. If you read the other two books in the series, you will want to read this one as well, but don't expect anything great.
Rating:
Summary: Great conclusion to great trilogy
Review: HOMINIDS, the first book in this series, won the HUGO AWARD. The rest of the series is even better. Space isn't the final frontier. In Robert J. Sawyer's remarkable NEANDERTHAL PARALLAX trilogy, the final frontier is right here, but twisted away at an angle: other universes. What if, 40,000 years ago, true consciousness had arisen in Neanderthals, instead of our kind of humanity? What would they have done with this world, this geography, these natural resources, this biosphere? Sawyer's answer is richly detailed, and also winsome ... it makes us wish we could have gone down the same gentler, kindler route. HYBRIDS picks up the story where HUMANS left off (indeed, despite its vast sweep, the whole trilogy only covers just five months of time). The characters we love from the earlier books -- Homo sapiens geneticist Mary N. Vaughan and Neanderthal quantum physicist Ponter Boddit -- are back, and their growing relationship is front and center. Two other characters who had minor (although important) roles in HUMANS also play key parts here, although the new character, a female Neanderthal named Bandra who loves all things Homo sapiens, is one of Sawyer's most engaging creations. The series neatly wraps up the issues of religion versus science raised in the first two books in surprising and gutsy ways. The character live and breathe, and although I felt satisfied at the end, I wouldn't mind at all if the NEANDERTHAL PARALLAX ended up being, like Douglas Adams's HITCH-HIKER series, an increasingly inaccurately named trilogy ...
Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful, moving, joyous
Review: 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:
Summary: Doesn't improve over first two in series
Review: It's been a consistent 3-star series to me. While the main idea for the story is great, I felt the series focused too much the love stories and on demonizing just about everything humans do, especially males. Information trade between the two societies was often mentioned only in passing, and I think that's a shame because it could have been much more interesting. I didn't fully buy into the motivations of the bad guys he created.
Rating: 
Summary: More U.S. Bashing
Review: More U.S. bashing. Everything good is represented by the Neanderthals and everything bad is represented by the Gliskens. Then Sawyer goes onto specifically say that the Gliskens represent the U.S. and the Neanderthals represent the Canadians, as if it wasn't already implied enough.
Everything is "Canada this" and "Canada that". Whenever there is a song on the radio or a c.d. playing in the car it has to be one of their favorite Canadian singers. Whenever someone has read a good book, it has to be by one of their favorite Canadian authors. I can't remember ever wondering if my favorite singers or authors were American or not. It isn't that important to me, but apparently it is to Sawyer who's whole book is Canadian fanfare.
I think it was a Twilight Zone episode in which aliens came to our world and were about to offer us a cure for all diseases, but we killed them off out of fear by accident before they could give us the information. The aliens that then came afterwards said that we were just not ready yet, and perhaps they would try again in several years. It was a great storyline. In this book however Sawyer makes it out like the U.S. is so evil and greedy that even if the Neanderthals did cure all of our diseases and provided us with the greatest advances we've seen in science history, that we would be so ungrateful that we would still want to kill them all off just to take their land. Wow! Why does he hate America so much? I'd say there is some real jealousy here that I could understand, but there is also some real loathing as well.
Finally in this third installment we find out that not all of the Neanderthals are perfect. It was a nice change. (Hey, everybody would even hate Superman if he didn't have a few flaws.) Neanderthals actually suffer some of our own domestic issues and problems. In this book the main character Mary goes to live in the Neanderthal world for a period of time. She is still in love with the main Neanderthal character Ponter, and together they try to find some new technology that will allow them to have a child, even though they are from different species. While Mary is in the Neanderthal world however, she winds up adopting several of their ways. I'm sorry, but I had a problem with this. Okay, I was willing to buy the fact that Mary and Ponter found each other so attracted to each other (even though they are from a completely separate world, and a completely different species), that they fell in love, but then they go and have Mary turn bisexual as well. (I've heard about girls being curious in college, but most of the time they say it is just practicing until they're with a boy. This however is a lot different.) I'm sorry, but I believe people are either gay, or they are not. They don't turn gay, just as gay people don't turn straight.
A few other things that bothered me in this book was that Sawyer appears to be in favor of castration for sexual crimes. He sets it up so that one of the characters in the book who is castrated is supposedly happier now after the castration then he was before it. I'm sorry but I think that would just make him even angrier, regardless of the fact that he would no longer have any testosterone in his body.
You're probably wondering why I even bothered finishing this series if I hated it so much. The reason is that every once in a while Sawyer brings up a nice science fiction theory that is worth contemplating. In this book he throws out the idea that the belief in God or religion might just be an abnormality in the parental lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain. It was fun to think about. The stuff about designing all of the attributes you would like your child to have was very good as well. If Sawyer only could get off his political soapbox and stick more to the science, then I'd have enjoyed this book a lot better.
As a bit of trivia, in the book they mention that one of the main American character studied game theory under John Nash at Princeton. He is the man that the movie "A Beautiful Mind" was based on.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Book but not as good as the first two books.
Review: Not quite as good as the first two books in the series. And you definately need to have read the first two books first to enjoy it. It was pretty good just the same, much better than most sci-fi books on the market.
Mary and Ponter decide to have a baby, the only problem is their chromesome counts do not match making it virtually impossible through conventional methods. They then find out about a banned device in Ponter's world that may make having a baby possible. Unfortunately, the same device becomes a threat to the "Barast" world as it gets into the wrong hands. Since this trilogy started I had been expecting someone to try to wipe out the Neanderthals so the only surprise is that it took to the third book for the threat to occur.
The book also questions the validity of religion. Is there really a G-d or is G-d created by the human brain? Sawyer also goes into more detail about man-man and woman-woman relationships than he had in the first two books.
The book does scream out for a sequel but the series was only billed as a trilogy.
Rating:
Summary: One of Today's Best SciFi Authors
Review: Robert J. Sawyer has an uncanny ability to combine current, cutting-edge science with a fantastical plot and flawed, credible characters to produce science fiction that truly gets you thinking about philosophy, ethics, politics, and religion. Despite the technical mastery of things scientific and the serious themes of his writing, the story always moves quickly and the dialogue is very real, even amusing at times, mixing in the mundane minutae of everyday existence with the search for universal truths. This yields a product that is both accessible and enlightening--something that I strive to do in my own writing. See the amazon listing for Forced Conversion to see what Robert J. Sawyer has to say about that effort.
Rating: 
Summary: An Unrealistic World
Review: Robert J. Sawyer's first book in this series, Hominids, was enjoyable, in spite of the hand-waving explanation of the connection between the universes. The characters, especially Ponter, were interesting and well-drawn.
The second book, Humans, represented the beginning of Sawyer's descent into one-world kumbaya utopian preaching.
This volume, Hybrids, consists of a thin plot grafted onto Sawyer's personal PC worldview.
Everyone in the Neanderthal world is an atheist bisexual environmentalist and their world is just about perfect, cue John Lennon. And let's not forget the obligatory Dan Brown-ish attack on the Catholic Church, can't have a enlightened book these days without that.
Among other ludicrous lines, the sapiens world North Vietnamese government is described as kind. Not as bad as many totalitarian regimes? Sure. Not as corrupt as the South Vietnamese regime? Could well be. Kind? Oh dear lord.
Sawyer quotes Solzhenitsyn's phrase that the line between good and evil runs through each human heart, but very tellingly fails to include the entire statement. I quote from The Gulag Archipelago Two:
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them.
The full context of Solzhenitsyn's quote is precisely contrary to Sawyer's portrayal of an atheistic neo-Marxist Neanderthal paradise.
But my favorite was Sawyer's list (via Mary) of the handful of decent men in the world. The list included Phil Donahue. I laughed because I thought at least Sawyer was showing a bit of wit. Then I realized he was serious.
Never mind the mysteries of how a race which eschews competition could produce a technically advanced culture (especially with less than 1/20th of the population of the sapiens Earth, better breeding for intelligence doesn't explain that). Maybe there is an explanation, but Sawyer doesn't offer one.
Prior to the development of the Companion how did the Neanderthals judge whether someone had committed a crime? 80 years of supposedly perfect justice being used to wean out bad genes doesn't explain what mistakes may have been made were made in the past, when justice was far less perfect.
Occasionally Sawyer raises problems in the Neanderthal culture (such as unreported spousal abuse). But these read as throwaway issues so he can avoid the charge of writing a complete whitewash. He never explores how such issues could lead to wholesale difficulties. Again, any problems in the Neanderthal society are portrayed as minor individual trifles, never anything systemic.
Frankly, this trilogy reminds me most of Harry Harrison's trilogy, Stars and Stripes (an alternative Civil War history where the bumbling British manage to attack both the USA and CSA, and the combined USA and CSA forces pretty quickly smash the Brits, take Ireland, and conquer London).
One side is nearly perfect and decent and brilliant and the other side is nefarious and cruel.
There are no complexities, just the good guys triumphing over a bunch of bad guys. Take Harrison's trilogy, substitute Neanderthal for Americans and evil white men for the British, stir in a lot of politically correct attitudes, and you'd produce something similar to Sawyer's trilogy.
The best alternative history accepts complexities and portrays all cultures as something far less than pure. Sawyer, due to his obsession with pushing his weltanschauung ahead of everything else, fails miserably in this regard.
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