Evolution (novel)

Evolution is a novel by Stephen Baxter spanning 645 million years of Earth's history, with most chapters focusing on 65 million years ago to 30 million years in the future. The book is split into three parts: Ancestors, which focuses on various director ancestors to humans, starting with a ratlike animal that coexisted with the dinosaurs, Humans, which depicts various turning in human development, and Descendants, which is set After the End.

Tropes used in Evolution (novel) include:

• And the Adventure Continues...: A flash-forward mentions another planet that was seeded by the last life on Earth.
• After the End: Due to the timescale of the books, many chapters could qualify, but the Descendants section is the most obvious from a human perspective.
• Apocalypse How: Several categories.
  • Class 3a: Natural Human Extinction: Begins to happen in the 2031 segments, when a supervolcano explodes before the humans get a chance to undo the damage done to the environment.
  • Another 3a happens to the intelligent dinosaurs from "The Hunters of Pangea". It may have been hastened by the decision of the protagonist to kill the matriarch of the diplodocus herd that they depend upon, but at that point she was aware that they were doomed.
  • Class 4: Biosphere Extinction: Several. The extinction of the dinosaurs is described in detail, as is the effects of humans on the diversity. There is also mention of an asteroid impacting 30 million years from now.
  • Class 5: Planetary Extinction and Class 6: Planetary Desolation: In the flash-forward near the end of the book, the planet gets so hot that only bacteria are able to survive, then so hot that nothing can survive.
  • Class X: Planetary Annihilation: Mars gets it from some self-replicating robots that humans sent to Mars soon before dying out. The robots go on to create a civilisation that lasts much, much longer than humanity did. In the flash-forward mentioned above, the Earth is also destroyed by the dying Sun.
• Author Tract: Many interesting ideas are pushed aside by Baxter promoting his specific sociological views.
• Bittersweet Ending: All the primates are dead, along with all life on Earth, and all recognisable traces of humans are long gone, but they're succeeded by a mechanical civilisation, and bacteria from Earth seeded life on new worlds.
• Blessed with Suck: The transparent killers (no further taxonomy given) are blind, inefficient and very susceptible to cancer. All of them die before reaching adulthood. But that's okay, because they catch meat for their siblings.
• Corrupt Church: Religion is depicted as the creation of a manipulative woman wielding her dead son's memory as a weapon in a bid to gain political power.
• Cozy Catastrophe: The epilogue. Which reveals that Joan Useb, her daughter and a number of locals ride out the collapse of civilization in the Galapagos Islands. With working power and enough resources to keep their little civilized community alive for a lifetime, all they could really do is sit back and watch their feral successors evolve. Though it's also implied that they're doing some tampering to bolster said ferals' chances of survival, which have far-reaching consequences.
• Cryonics Failure: After well over a thousand years, only a handful of the awakened "dragon's teeth" team (out of 20) managed to survive, the rest having been mummified.
• Depopulation Bomb: Both the supervolcano's aftermath and Great Offscreen War are implied to have wiped out most of modern humanity. It's also speculated by one of the thawed "dragon's teeth" survivors that a reason for why there's no one else but feral humans is because just about all that remained were "sewer kids" who hid away while civilization died. With no knowledge of what they've lost, they gradually devolve until eventually, language and sentience vanishes.
• Downer Ending: Many resolutions to the individual chapters. The novel itself ends with the death of the last primate to reproduce, and might count depending on whether you care about bacteria seeding new life or robot civilisations.
• Everything's Better with Monkeys: Or monkey-like ancestors to both monkeys and apes.
• Foreshadowing: It's described early on that the mammals who survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous were like sewer critters coming out into a ruined city. Humanity's non-sentient successors, meanwhile, are described in a very similar manner, being descended from "sewer kids" with no knowledge of the culture and heritage they lost.
• Giant Flyer: The air whale, a giant pterosaur that lives in the stratosphere and leaves no fossil evidence behind.
• Gone Horribly Right: The self-replicating robot project NASA props up on Mars not only proves to be a resounding success but goes on to create an interstellar robotic civilization over the course of millions of years. Unfortunately, by the time they achieve true sentience, the original blueprints and records of their creators are lost forever.
• Great Offscreen War: While the supervolcano was the catalyst for the downfall of civilization, it's all but stated that some combination of societal collapse and global conflict was what ultimately brought down modern humanity. Over a thousand years later, the surviving "dragon's teeth" team members notice how the heavily decayed and overgrown ruins still show signs of destruction from such a war.
• Humans Are Bastards: Baxter's views on humanity (especially modern humanity) aren't exactly positive, as while certain individuals are portrayed sympathetically he nonetheless tends to emphasize mankind at its worse. Such as chiding humans' seeming preference for xenophobia and competition over collaboration and empathy.
• Irony: The epilogue reveals that Joan Useb named her daughter Lucy after the first true human. It's heavily implied that she's among the last of civilized Homo Sapiens as we know it.
• Just Before the End:
  • "A Far Distant Futurity" set 500 million years into the future, when the continents of earth have merged into a hot, flat, dry supercontinent that resembles the surface of Mars, and life is on the decline. "Last Contact", "The Dying Light" and the epilogue also count, for the end of the Neanderthals, Ancient Rome, and humanity respectively.
  • The Twenty Minutes Into the Future scenes are soon revealed to be this, until a massive supervolcano eruption sets the stage for the beginning of the end for Homo Sapiens.
• Nobody Poops: Averted. Boy, do they ever. There are few chapter where the author does not go into gratuitous detail about excrement, urine and/or raging erections.
• Ragnarok Proofing: Averted. Over the course of millions of years, most of human civilization is lost, save for fragments of plastics, glass, strata residue and very durable imprints (like quarries or a gorge excavated to build a road). Even in the time the "dragon's teeth" survivors wake up in, not everything stood the test of time.
• Reality Ensues: The "dragon's teeth" survivors initially think that they just might be able to start society anew, only to realize soon that with only five people increasingly at each others' throats and with limited resources outside of their training, any chance of rebuilding civilization is wishful thinking.
• Scenery Porn: The world is much more developed and interesting than the characters.
• Scenery Gorn: After many vivid descriptions of the world of the dinosaurs, both in the late Jurassic and the late Cretaceous, the destruction of that world is described just as vividly.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: A hibernating British "dragon's teeth" team (intended to set up resistance cells years or decades after an invading force conquers the land) never gets relieved; the survivors wake up millennia After the End and find nothing left of civilization but feral humans, heavily eroded roads and some odd-looking, grass-covered hills.
• Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying: While most of the time Baxter gets the science right, and the speculative leaps he takes are somewhat within the bounds of plausibility, a few examples must be mentioned. First of all, in the story about the sapient Ornitholestes, he mentions that the only evidence humans had of these species is the disappearance of sauropods in the Late Jurassic, since the sapient species bones and technology are too fragile to preserve. Problem is, sauropods didn't go extinct in the Late Jurassic, not even in the Northern Hemisphere. There were as many sauropods infesting North America in the Early Cretaceous as there were in the Late Jurassic, including Paluxysaurus, Sauroposeidon, and Sonorasaurus.
  • However there was a mass-extinction at the end of the Jurassic that claimed the dominant Jurassic sauropods, and the sauropods referred to in that story were all Diplodocus, which did go extinct then. The phrase was 'the disappearance of the giant sauropods'. This could easily have meant just those specific species, not sauropods in general.
  • The story about primates coming to North America has some anachronism and Misplaced Wildlife in it too. Not only does it have indricotherid rhinos (native only to Asia), camels (who were only found in North America at this time), and such, it has gastornid birds inhabiting Oligocene-Miocene Africa...yes, even after these animals were supposed to have died out in the middle Eocene.
  • In addition, the story involving Purgatorius has some flaws too. While Baxter does get it right by cloaking his troodonts in feathers, he leaves them off his dromaeosaurs. To add insult to injury, he makes the raptors cold-blooded, despite the fact that raptors are the very dinosaurs which ignited the cold blood, warm blood debate. In fact, even paleontologists who doubt endothermy in ornithischians and sauropods don't deny that raptors were most likely endothermic. And then there are the Giganotosaurus and Suchomimus in North America. Not only are these animals in the wrong place (Giganotosaurus was from South America, Suchomimus from Africa), but they are from the wrong time, both species were from the Early Cretaceous.
    • The Giganotosaurus in that story was no less implausible that any of the other speculations not directly supported by fossil evidence Baxter uses, namely that a giganotosaur species whose fossil remains had not been found by modern human paleontologists, descended from the known early Giganotosaurus finds, survived to the end of the Cretaceous and migrated to North America across the land bridge between North and South America when it formed in the late Cretaceous. Similarly the Suchomimus is a not implausible speculation that a member of that particular family did in fact live in North America, though only fossils from the African branch of the family have so far been found. This is certainly possible since similar pairs of "sister taxa" in North America and Africa are known for many other dinosaur families, and the origins of these families date back to when North America and Africa were connected.
• Super-Persistent Predator: A Troodon pursues Purga, the protagonist of the first chapter, not because she's hungry, but because she snapped when she found Purga eating her eggs.
• Theme Naming: The chapters involving humans tend to follow a diverse set of protagonists named Ja-ahn, Ejan, Jo-on, Jahna, Juna and Joan Useb over tens of thousands of years.
• Twenty Minutes Into the Future : The main Framing Story start off 30 years into the future, with civilization at its apex though simultaneously threatened by the damage mankind's done to the ecosystem that supports it.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • The boneheads (Neanderthals) once Homo sapiens sapiens takes over.
  • Elisha wonders if it is still rape to have non-consensual sex with a genetically non-compatible partner.
• Xenofiction: Only a few chapters are about humans, the rest count as this.