Feature: Exploring the bounds of human genetic diversity

For anyone writing evolution fiction the implications in this recent Life Scientist article can be amazing so long as writers avoid the typical eugenic pitfalls that so many writers of the late 19th century fell into. But, a side from those objections, exploring the exceptional diversity of  humans is an incredibly fertile field for fiction. 

Tim Dean 

Did you know that there is more genetic diversity between two individuals living only 800 kilometres apart in the Kalahari desert in southern Africa than there is between a European and an Asian living half a world apart?

If it wasn’t for the southern African genome project, co-led by Vanessa Hayes, no-one would have known this remarkable fact about humanity.  More....

Refuting a Myth About Human Origins

This article from American Scientist has interesting implication for evolution fiction because it suggests that human beings were always modern. There was no time where people were just brutes. At the moment that they (we) were anatomically human, we were, in effect, human, and behaved accordingly. We may have been ignorant, but we were not stupid. The reason this is an opportunity for evolution ficiton writers is because characters can and should plausibly exhibit complexity finally stepping out past their cavemen portrayals. They were us.

Homo sapiens emerged once, not as modern-looking people first and as modern-behaving people later.

John J. Shea

For decades, archeologists have believed that modern behaviors emerged among Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years after our species first evolved. Archaeologists disagreed over whether this process was gradual or swift, but they assumed that Homo sapiens once lived who were very different from us. These people were not “behaviorally modern,” meaning they did not routinely use art, symbols and rituals; they did not systematically collect small animals, fish, shellfish and other difficult-to-procure foods; they did not use complex technologies: Traps, nets, projectile weapons and watercraft were unknown to them. More...

Stephen Baxter: EVOLUTION

Evolution follows a fictional course of primate evolution up to and beyond the reign of humans. The novel focuses on moments of change and tension which lead to conditions necessary for the evolution of species. Those who can adapt and survive live on to bring about the next generation giving their lines a chance to transmit their kind into the future.

An interesting feature of the novel is that it also traces certain dead ends, even following some species which are trapped on the moving landmass of Antarctica where they will eventually die out as the climate gets colder and the ice caps overtake the continent. In this aspect, Baxter shows  courage for allowing his narrative to follow a meandering uncertain path that mimics, in a sense, the actual path of selection and speciation. In this respect, the work is enhanced by these strange dead ends, which in effect symbolize nothing, but you see the dire consequences both of choice and chance on the future of a species or group which can lead to extinction. You also get to see the pivotal moments as certain primates slowly pull themselves from the forest to become human and beyond. And at times you can feel how inconsequential and fleeting our shared moment of dominance is.


Change is the novel's recurrent theme, and in this I greatly admire the work, as Baxter dramatizes great moments of advancement which come about nearly accidentally or as the result of immense pressure which certainly makes it a great work of evolution fiction. The novel is also written well enough that you feel a sense of empathy for the different creatures and their merciless dilemmas without recourse to Walt Disney style sentimentalism or any overt ideological bent. Despite the fact that Evolution is not a conventional novel in any sense it is a book well worth reading.  

New Genre???

Yes. We need a new genre, and not just because I wrote a novel which I consider evolution fiction. I didn't start from the premise that we needed a new prehistoric fiction genre. Instead, I wondered about the invention/discovery of fire. I thought, what if a boy living in a really backward tribe had one day decided  to play with a small clump of dry grass lit from a lightning strike? And what if when he did this he was observed by one of the warriors of his culture and taken back to the tribe for his punishment? A punishment that the leaders were more than happy to give him as they needed a scapegoat to blame the drought on. But then he escapes.

Now, more or less, that's basically the story of Totem, but when I finished writing it and turned back to look at the market and to place it in its proper genre, I noticed that so much of what is called "prehistoric ficiton," which is where Totem would truly fit, was really nothing like Totem. The difference between what I wrote and the genre that's supposed to represent it is the difference between Batman and Robin on one side and the Dark Knight on the other; or it's the difference between Clan of the Cave Bear and Totem. And not only did I not want to be associated with that stuff, I thought it was totally inaccurate to represent the book as something it was most certainly not.

I also knew that there was more story left in the Totem world that fit the idea of natural selection. In the novel, I only tied up the direct loose ends, but there was a whole world of problems for the tribe outside of the struggle of one little boy turned violent young man. In fact, there was a struggle for life in a harsh and changing environment that speaks so well to the idea both of evolution properly understood, and the sort of "pop" evolution, or cultural evolution where a group of individuals will have to learn to change and to adapt to an indifferent natural world that is in convulsions or they will die.

The prehistoric aspect of that comes in because it is in a time and place before records, but since the prehistoric fiction genre has ossified to be a certain thing, and Totem has its own style and purpose, I knew it would be better off in a category that was friendly to its nature; therefore, this blog and the term "evolution fiction." But this is not to say that Totem is a genre to itself, there are plenty of books about the prehistoric past that share the drive and sentiment of Totem. Specifically, a book like the original Tarzan, which is so far from the Disney movie as to be funny. But Tarzan is perfectly in line with the idea of evolution fiction. There are plenty of others also. For current works of evolution fiction, I could use help in finding more authors who write about prehistory who don't adhere to the recent pattern of the genre and who are, at least to my eyes, writing evolution fiction.

Chris Moore
chris@crmooreauthor.com