Great book, told entirely from the point of view of a world of intelligent dinosaurs. No human beings in it at all (heck, no MAMMALS at all!). But the characters Sawyer draws are as real as any you've ever read, and the book is loads of fun. Should appeal to adults and to the YA crowd as well. Enjoy!
When you think of Robert J. Sawyer and Neanderthals, you think of his Hugo Award-winning HOMINIDS and its sequels, HUMANS and HYBRIDS. But it turns out that he was writing about Neanderthals and characters who were geneticists long before those books, as this earlier Hugo Award-finalist by Sawyer demonstrates. The settings are Montreal, Canada, and Berkeley, California, and the template is that of a Robin Cook-style medical thriller (but with richer characterization than Cook ever provides). Interestingly for a science-fiction book, it's not set at all in the future. Rather, the setting is the Human Genome Project in 1997, where all is not what it seems, and people have dark secrets in… Read more
This book won the Science Fiction Writers Association's Nebula Award, and it's easy to see why. It deftly balances believable characterization with brilliant scientific exposition. This was Sawyer's first big award win (he went on to win the Hugo in 2003 for HOMINIDS), and definitely marked a turning point in his career. I've heard Sawyer say that he likes to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic and that's certainly what he does here, with the story of a marriage on the rocks set against the discovery of scientific proof for the existence of the human soul (and idea I was initially turned off by but that Sawyer sells very effectively). I think this was the first of… Read more
