"Spectacular . . . What is astonishing is how . . . entertaining as
well as informative this book-an episodic novel with evolution as
its protagonist-manages to be."
-The New York Times Book Review
"MAGISTERIAL AND UPLIFTING . . . A brilliant, grand-scale
sampling of sixty-five million years of human evolution . . . It
shows the sweep and grandeur of life in its unrelenting
course."
-The Denver Post
"Strong imagination, a capacity for awe, and the ability to
think rigorously about vast and final things abound in the work of
Stephen Baxter. . . . [Evolution] leaves the reader with a
haunting portrayal of the distant future."
-Times Literary Supplement
"A BREATH OF FRESH AIR . . . The miracle of Evolution
is that it makes the triumph of life, which is its story, sound
like the real story."
-The Washington Post Book World
"A work of outrageous ambition. Baxter's goal is nothing less
than to dramatize the grand sweep of primate development. . . .
Evolution is a cautionary tale, warning of the dire
consequences to contemporary humans if we persist in behavior that
threatens the survival of our ecosystem."
-The New York Times Book Review
"Baxter's depictions are brilliant, with some inspired
conjectures to spice up events. . . . I highly recommend
Evolution. . . . [It] provide[s] food for thought,
confronts our notions of what it means to be human, and gives
warning that nothing can be taken for granted in the ongoing
struggle for survival."
-scifi dimensions
"Baxter chronicles the epic survival of the mammalian family
that ultimately ended up with us. . . . The sheer timescale makes a
great story that is panoramic in extent. I felt I was watching
Walking with Beasts rolled into The Human
Journey. Baxter's ability to turn science into exciting and
readable fiction makes him one of the most accessible SF writers
around."
-The Times (London)
"The overall narrative [is] a big, thick, geophysical stick upside
the head to remind us all that things can change, at any moment,
for any reason."
-The San Diego Union-Tribune
"I recommend this novel to anyone who appreciates novels that take
chances. . . . Baxter is not shy about painting big pictures about
big ideas. . . . [He] painstakingly moves us from the shrewlike
creatures that coexisted with the dinosaurs through the walking,
tool-using hominids of Africa, through Neanderthals, through
humans, to an entirely speculative future that is beyond brief
description."
-sfrevu.com
"A powerful fusion of science and imagination . . . Baxter makes an
impressive job of putting flesh on to the bones of the scientific
theory and in its imaginative vision Evolution deserves
comparison with SF epics such as Olaf Stapledon's Last and
First Men or Alfred Doblin's Mountains, Seas, and
Giants. Baxter leaves you with a memorable yet unsettling
sense of our insignificance in the scheme of things. In the story
of evolution, as in all good thrillers, an extinction event is
always lurking just around the corner."
-The Guardian (London)
"A tour-de-force . . . A sprawling, ambitious chronicle spanning
millennia . . . The account of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction
and the rise of mammals as the dominant life-form is particularly
fascinating. . . . Similarly well crafted is Baxter's projection of
a posthuman future."
-Booklist
"Taking a page from SF saga writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and
Brian Stableford, British author Baxter portrays humanity's
origins, growth, and ultimate disappearance in a loose-knit series
of brutal vignettes spanning millions of years of evolution. . . .
The book rises above its fragmented narrative . . . to reach a grim
and stoic grandeur, which clearly has humanity's best interests at
heart. Here is a rigorously constructed hard SF novel where the
question is not whether humanity will reach the stars but how it
will survive its own worst tendencies."
-Publishers Weekly
"Highly recommended . . . Spanning more than sixty-five
million years and encompassing the entire planet, Baxter's
ambitious saga provides both an exercise in painless paleontology
and superb storytelling."
-Library Journal