The winner of the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year, and deservedly so (although David Brin's KILN PEOPLE is also excellent).

Sawyer knows everything there is to know about Neanderthals (which, actually, isn't much, given that we only have fossil evidence of 400 Neanderthal individuals, spread over 170,000 years of time). In particular, he runs with two notions: the contemporary view that Neanderthals had no religious beliefs (sorry, Jean Auel -- but Sawyer's right ... there was no cult of the cave bear), and Lewis Binford's contentious suggestion that male and female Neanderthals lived largely separate lives. Sawyer extrapolates -- in the best sci-fi tradition -- all of this ahead to the present day, giving us a modern Neanderthal culture, technologically sophisticated and wonderfully drawn.

There's an "A" story and a "B" story. The "A" story tells of a Neanderthal quantum physicist named Ponter Boddit who is accidentally transferred from his version of reality (one where Neanderthals survived to the present day and we did not) to our version of reality. This gives Sawyer a "Stranger in a Strange Land" on a par with Heinlien's (the master's) Michael Valentine Smith, providing all sorts of wry, insightful social comment.

The "B" story takes place back in the Neanderthal version of reality, telling us of the aftermath of Ponter's disappearance, and a murder charge brought against his research partner -- Ponter's disappearance is taken as a sign that he's been killed. Sawyer uses this counterpoint subplot to let him show us the varied workings of draconian Neanderthal justice and keep a wonderfully ticking clock going in the background. The science is good and accurate, the philosophy well-grounded and compelling, and the characters believable and (mostly) likable.

HOMINIDS has a real beginning, middle and end, and so can be read as a standalone novel, but I'm sure you'll like it enough that you'll want to read the other two volumes in the NEANDERTHAL PARALLAX trilogy: HUMANS and HYBRIDS. Good books all.

A few thin-skinned, unthinking types below have accused Sawyer of anti-Americanism ... which can only be true if anti-Americanism means any comment that is less than 100% favorable to every single action the United States has ever taken. If so, Sawyer is also anti-Canadian; there are plenty of digs here (as well as in his CALCULATING GOD) at the actions of the government of that country ... the one he happens to live in.

Also, there are those who are so self-righteous that they are convinced they know where something is going without having bothered to read through to the end. One fellow -- Mr. Walters -- below says Sawyer is pro-affirmative action. First, there's nothing on this topic of any substance in this book, HUMANS, and second, in HYBRIDS, the concluding volume of the trilogy, Sawyer shows how a white man's career aspirations were destroyed by affirmative action, quoting directly the actual hiring policy of a major university. Sawyer looks with a balanced, skeptical eye at issues.

But certain keywords set off certain canned screeds from some people; they'd rather react, thinking they've heard it all before, than be exposed to new ideas ... which is their loss, because Sawyer's stock-in-trade IS ideas. In HUMANS, he looks at religion, agriculture, privacy, and more. And he does it in a balance way. Mr. Walters again argues that Sawyer is painting a rosy picture of a society without privacy and with genetic purging of the gene pool, but the whole Neanderthal-world subplot of HOMINIDS (which won a well-deserved Hugo) is about rampant injustice that happens because of such a system; another example of enormous catch-22 unfairness occurs in HYBRIDS. Mr. Walters and others confuse discussing with proposing, and, again, it's their loss.

As a novel, HUMANS packs a punch. The framing story is a fascinating series of psychoanalytic sessions, with a Neanderthal on the couch; there's a very passionate love story; and there's a story of revenge. There's also seeds planted for the big conclusion of it all that occurs in the subsequent volume, HYBRIDS, but HUMANS stands on its own -- and stands tall, proud, fair, and reasonable. A careful, open-minded read will show that Sawyer isn't anti anything. He's pro humanity ... in all its varied forms. Highly recommended for those who like to think.

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.