Hominids
by Robert J. Sawyer
Summary
In a parallel world, Neanderthals became the dominant human species and Homo sapiens died out. Their civilisation has no agriculture as we would recognise it, a population held at a fraction of ours, no religion, and total surveillance by consent: every citizen wears a companion implant that records everything they do to an alibi archive, which has effectively ended crime.
Ponter Boddit, a physicist running a quantum computing experiment in a mine two kilometres down, is thrown across into our world and surfaces in a heavy water detector in Sudbury, Ontario, where he nearly drowns. On the other side, his housemate is charged with his murder, because a man has vanished and the alibi archive shows nothing.
So the novel runs on two tracks: a first contact story in which geneticist Mary Vaughan has to establish what Ponter is and manage what his existence does to human self regard, and a courtroom drama in a society where evidence is absolute.
Sawyer is an ideas writer, and the book is essentially a structured comparison of the two civilisations on religion, justice, gender and population. The characters mostly voice positions. Mary is also, early on, the victim of a sexual assault, which is handled seriously but which readers should know about going in.
The strongest sections are the ones inside the Neanderthal world, where Sawyer works out the consequences of the design properly: no war, no privacy, no gods, and a population kept low by a system of generational birth cohorts that a reader will find either enlightened or appalling depending entirely on their politics.
The prose is functional and the dialogue frequently explains things to characters who would already know them. This is a book that wants to be discussed rather than admired.
Around four hundred pages, plainly written and quick. It is the first of the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy and does not resolve on its own.
Best for readers who read science fiction for arguments, and for book groups, which is where it has always done best.
Historical Context & Significance
Hominids won the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the result was among the more debated in the category, since its plain prose and thesis driven structure were exactly what admirers valued and detractors objected to.
Robert J. Sawyer is Canada's most commercially successful science fiction writer and among the very few to have won the Hugo, the Nebula and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The novel is proudly set in Sudbury and Toronto, and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, where Ponter arrives, is a real facility built inside a working nickel mine.
The Neanderthal science was current for its moment and has since moved on considerably, particularly the discovery that most living humans outside Africa carry a small proportion of Neanderthal ancestry, which cuts against the novel's premise of two entirely separate lineages.