Hybrids (Hardcover)

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.

The premise is somewhat interesting - a Neanderthal physicist is experimenting with quantum computers and accidentally opens a portal between his earth where Neanderthals rules to the possible earth where homo sapiens dominate the planet (our world) (Sawyer never did answer my geek question - did the large possibly prime number he was trying to factor uniquely address our world, or was it due to other factors?).

The Neanderthal comes over to our world, and wackiness ensues. We actually see quite a bit less wackiness than I would expect to see, and this is another place where the books fail as "hard" science fiction - the reactions of the human institutions don't seem plausible, there's far too little security and oversight in what goes on with the "alien" visitors and the gateway.

The thousand+ page trilogy would have made a far better short story or novella, there just aren't that many ideas in the whole thing and the writing is not particularly engaging.

As "hard" science fiction, there are basically two strong somewhat novel ideas in the books. One is the quantum computer gateway, the other is that religion is an artifact of the interaction of the homo sapien parietal lobe with magnetic fields. The first is kinda interesting, the second is just loopy. He handwaves away the environments where humans do interact with strong varying magnetic fields and then he introduces a surge in the Earth's magnetic field (on New Year's eve when our characters are in Times Square, of course) and everybody on the planet has a religious experience. Whee.

The other aspect of the book is more "social" science fiction. Using the alien as a contrast to explore human society is as old as science fiction is. Such explorations, when coming from the deft hands as one such as C J Cherryh, can be both intriguing and entertaining. If the alien is 3-dimension and has both strengths and weakness that are used to contrast with humanity's strengths and weaknesses

In the hands of someone less adept, this can become a cliche where the author merely catalogs the failings of humanity and simplifies the issues to blame one or two factors.

Unfortunately, Sawyer does the second. Humans, especially male humans, *especially* especially white male humans, **especially** *especially* especially white American male humans (except when castrated), are bad. Oh yes, and where testosterone isn't to blame, religion is - but that's just a mutated part of the parietal lobe acting out.

Neanderthals are good - and where there's bad in Neanderthals, it's because testerone was involved and the Neanderthal's eugenics program was only nearly perfect instead of completely perfect.

There's a hint of a grudging nod given to homo sapiens' accomplishments, but it's lackluster and is only a few words out of a thousand+ pages. It feels like an editor said, "show some balance" and Sawyer tacked it on.

Sawyer doesn't even bother to do more than handwave how homo sapiens disappeared in the Neanderthal's world, but spends a lot of time on homo sapiens' genocides.

Anyway, I was disappointed. The books were vaguely entertaining but the ham-handed "social" aspects were far too simple-minded and comprised too many pages to be anything other than tedious and annoying. I've enjoy others of Sawyers' books, but I'm going to be wary of him now.