Hybrids

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"A Tom Doherty Associates book."
Sequel to: Humans.
In "Hominids," Nebula Award-winning author Sawyer introduced a character readers will never forget: Ponter Boddit. Now, Boddit and his homo sapien lover, geneticist Mary Vaughan, are torn between two worlds, struggling to find a way to make their star-crossed relationship work.

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great submitted by lawrencekl57 on August 29, 2012, 3:47pm a great book in a great trilogy

Wins and losses, but mostly wins. submitted by eknapp on January 23, 2014, 12:01pm Book three of the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. Our human female and neanderthal male protagonists decide to use technology to have a baby, and a dastardly human plots the extinction of the neanderthals and colonization of their world.

Hybrids is aptly named as it mixes a lot of win with a lot of silliness.

Wins:
1) The wonderfully logical neanderthal civilization. Sawyer imagined a technologically advanced hunter-gatherer society, as opposed to our agricultural society. It's tremendously different but all of the pieces fit together, they have reasons for being. Unlike John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, for example, in which the alien civilizations are just different to be different.

2) Challenges to the ethicality and practicality of the neanderthal ways of doing things. Their single planetwide government, their sterilization of violent criminals, their methods of population control, their Big Brother-like justice system, it all gets picked apart, examined, and put back together. Do the idyllic ends justify the oft-unsettling means? The discussions are fairly sophisticated, with no easy answers.

3) Exploration of religion as a purely electromagnetic phenomenon. A scientist is able to induce life-altering sensory experiences by generating an electromagnetic field around the temporal lobes of the brain. This raises some thorny issues and uncomfortable conversations for the protagonists. And for the reader.



Stumbles (and a couple minor plot point spoilers):
1) [minor SPOILER follows] To fit into her adopted "Barast" society with her male neanderthal partner, our human hero is pressured to also take a neanderthal woman-mate like all Barasts. Her conversion is abrupt and contrived: Sorry, not a lesbian, can't do it, just not wired like that, nope, nope, OH GOD I LOVE WOMEN! Oooooookay.

2) [SPOILER follows] I was put off by how the author followed up on the castration of the rapist from the second book. In Hybrids he is initially enraged by his maiming, then over weeks becomes calmer and calmer, comes to regret his antisocial actions, rejects his hatred of women, saves the world from evil, and dies contentedly an unrecognized hero. Really, the only difference between a serial rapist and a noble bastion of honor and dignity is the absence of testicles?

3) The lack of physical trade-offs. Sawyer's "barasts" are on average more intelligent than humans, due to selective breeding, and they're far stronger because, well, Sawyer says so. But they're also running 3-minute miles, in spite of being built like short bow-legged dump trucks. And super-coordinated.

Would neanderthals really be physically superior in every conceivable way? Bombers trade the speed and maneuverability of fighter jets for range and cargo capacity, adult trees endure through strength while saplings do so through flexibility; if you could fit all features in one package, we would. But even the unimposing nerdy quantum physicist protagonist is a bona fide kung fu action hero whenever he visits our Earth, just by virtue of being neanderthal. BAM! POW! Human miscreants, malefactors and evil-doers go flying at every turn. Sawyer needs to stop channeling Batman.

At the end of the day though I had a lot of fun with the book and the series.