A Different Flesh by Harry Turtledove

I like hominids.  When I was in college, I took a physical anthropology course to fulfill some of my natural science credit, and really enjoyed it.  I even remember most of what I learned, which is a feat in and of itself.  So I looked forward to reading A Different Flesh, which puts forth the question — what if American Indians never settled the Americas, and instead Homo erectus (here called sims) was present when Columbus sailed?

To tell the truth, I had no idea where Turtledove was going to go with this.  Having only read his Worldwar series, I was guessing that there would be a lot of warfare.  I was fairly wrong.  Turtledove, rather than following one particular person, spends each chapter in a section of time and explores human-sim interactions.  This felt to me to be a fantastic way of exploring the idea, and one that most authors don’t employ; movement along time to uncover the differences and similarities between his imaginary world and ours helps expose the gulf between the two.

In the beginning, there is violence, and the sims give as good as they get.  Soon, however, it’s clear that the sims are not capable of adaptation, and thus start losing ground — quite literally.  Their land is slowly taken from them, and they become more marginalized.  They are also “domesticated” and used for menial labor.  Sims’ existence also provides a backdrop for the earlier formation of the theory of evolution, which sparks earlier scientific achievements of other types.

Against this backdrop, Turtledove shows us a world in which the Americas outlaw slavery for humans at a far earlier date than our own country decided to — against creatures such as the sims, humans of any type are obviously much the same and are worthy of the full rights deemed appropriate for one’s fellow man.

While declaring all people of equal worth, there is also the prominent struggle of putting sims in the proper context.  Are they human, or merely animals?  What rights do they have?  Turtledove brings this topic up again and again, sometimes in disturbing ways.  Sims are used for medical experiments, much as animals are.  The arguments about using them in such a way are similar to those used to justify the use of other animals for medical research.  How strange it feels to use creatures who have the ability to understand language (plus create spontaneous sentences of their own), create tools, live in camps, cook their food, and plan ahead for our own benefit and not necessarily theirs.

I enjoyed this book greatly.  I have often wondered about what life would be like with another hominid still alive and kicking on Earth.  Turtledove did a remarkable job of providing a possible answer.  His prose is clear, and his conclusions follow in logical fashion.  It is a thought-provoking book, raising questions about how we treat one another and our fellow species on this planet.

Rating: 5/5

Island in the Sea of Time by S. M. Stirling

Island in the Sea of Time sounded good to me.  I love alternate history and speculative fiction.  What could be better than a book that blended both in an innovative way, incorporating some science fiction into the mix?  Unfortunately, despite some good aspects, Island in the Sea of Time fell flat for me.

Let’s start off with the good.  I liked the idea of an entire island of people from our own time being suddenly tossed into the far past.  What challenges they would face?  How would they meet the obstacles facing them?  A fantastic plot, in my opinion.

I also delighted in the anthropological aspects Stirling put in.  Linguistics is an interest of mine, so I found some of the exposition language structure and evolution absolutely fascinating.  His conjectures on how various cultures functioned and how they would react to visitors from today’s world were obviously well-researched, at least on the European side.

The cultural part that I disliked, however, was the heavy focus on building or maintaining technological conveniences, creating weapons, military training, and warfare.  I just wanted to skip over the pages that dealt with this stuff, and that’s bad, since it makes up about half the book.  Many (and I mean many) of the characters have military training, which I found too convenient to be believable.  This leads me to my next issue with the book.

The residents of Nantucket are far too accepting of their situation.  There are a couple of freak-outs in the book, as well as allusions to points of crises within individuals.  I, however, find it difficult to believe that there wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the time shift.  There are off-hand comments about suicide, but they felt like they were obligatory mentions so that Stirling could get on with the story.  We follow no character who has such inclinations; this probably would have made Island in the Sea of Time more compelling, more human on an emotional level.

Character abilities and skills also felt too well-distributed to reflect reality.  A Coast Guard ship just happens to get trapped in the time shift, so we have a military force with at least one fighting ship, plenty of trained soldiers, and modern weapons.  There’s the woman who runs the greenhouse, so we have someone who knows how to grow crops and can teach others how to do so.  We have a librarian who is apparently so freaking talented that she can keep everyone apprised of the information they need to perform their jobs.  We have a historian with interests in the time period the island has been thrust into, as well as a working knowledge of linguistics.  We have an astronomer, who has the ability to communicate with the English tribes because she also can speak a Baltic language that is similar to proto-Indo-European. We have a captain who is, apparently, God’s gift to both military strategy and tactics.  And we have a native woman who is gifted in so many ways that it makes suspension of disbelief very difficult.  On top of that, we lose exactly one of the main cast of characters.  He doesn’t happen to be a central character, either; we probably follow him about a half-dozen times, whereas most of the other characters get approximately thirty to forty sections scattered throughout the book.  That smacks of the unreal to me.

Also unfortunate, in my opinion, Stirling focused on the prehistoric British inhabitants, which was baffling to me, seeing as the island tossed back in time was Nantucket.  We are given very little information about the Native Americans of the area; he allows us to read about their first encounter, and then leaves them almost completely.  This struck me as strange; why toss away a fascinating people who could help the Nantucketers with farming, gathering and the like — as well as trading — in favor of the long sea voyage and constant skirmishes in England?

The other aspect of this is, when we are allowed to view one extended encounter with Central American natives, they are portrayed in a horribly brutal light.  While this might be accurate, some of the actions taken by the Olmecs were horribly graphic — graphic enough to cause me to have a nightmare about one particular scene.  It freaked me out to no end, and also felt unfair to the indigenous Americans.  Why do they get to experience such a characterization, while the European peoples encountered are as nuanced as the Nantucket residents?

Based on the comments by Harry Turtledove and Robert J. Sawyer, I thought I was in for a spectacular read.  I’m saddened to find that wasn’t so.  A more Nantucket-based, psychologically sensitive book would have been fascinating.  Since this is one in a series of books, many of the battles could have waited.  As it is, Island in the Sea of Time leaves the reader with a dry book about martial history, martial tactics, and flat characters.

Rating: 1.5/5

Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans by Brian Fagan

Climate change is not just a modern issue for humans.  Thus is the main statement of Brian Fagan’s Cro-Magnon.  Modern humans owe a lot of their cultural development to adjustments we were forced to make to adapt to fluctuating temperatures and precipitation levels, and our ability to adapt quickly is what made us survive and Neanderthals fade away.

Fagan presents Cro-Magnons to the reader with an astonishing amount of thoroughness.  He discusses tool and weapon development, hunting techniques, clothing and shelter creation, art, and possible religious beliefs in detail.  But first he talks about Neanderthals.

Neanderthals, Fagan argues, had an essentially static and conservative culture that did not develop its own adaptations to the environment quickly.  They were cognitively challenged compared to Cro-Magnons, and could not communicate like we do.  I found this interesting, since he does talk about Neanderthals possessing some of the same technological abilities as Cro-Magnons at about the same time Cro-Magnons developed them.  He claims that they were mimicking what Cro-Magnons had already figured out, and that they lacked the ability to actually think out new ways of handling environmental change.  But hasn’t he argued against himself here?  Isn’t the ability to take someone else’s innovation and use it to your advantage rather clever, actually?  And where did they get their technology from before Cro-Magnon appeared on the scene?  I find the dismissal of Neanderthals’ mental abilities and capabilities a little disingenuous — they were competent and smart creatures.

The rest of the book, though, has a very scholarly feel to it.  The information contained within is detailed beyond imagining.  So much so that it took me back to my physical anthropology class in college, in which I had to read a lot of academic articles on things like prehistoric middens and the earliest known hominid.  Fagan says that the more interested reader should take a look at the articles in his bibliography, but I can’t imagine any but the most die-hard anthropology enthusiast will need to look someplace else for comprehensive information on general Cro-Magnon culture and its changes over time.

And changes are what Fagan concentrates on.  He examines the culture at specific points in time, and discusses how the climate shaped the ways Cro-Magnons went about living life.  For example, reindeer were at one time much more common in Europe because of the lower temperatures.  Because they were more abundant, quite a few Cro-Magnon settlements depended on the annual reindeer migrations as their major source of meat, fat and skins for the winter.  I found this fascinating, since I was vaguely aware that, yes, climate dictated some adaptations, but Fagan masterfully shows how the outside world really has shaped human cultural development since our beginnings.

This is quite an impressive book.  I’d recommend it to those who are interested in the development of humans in Europe.  For both the lay reader and those who are coming to the topic in a more formal setting, Fagan has assembled a fine work that will satisfy.

Rating: 4/5.

Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows by Melanie Joy, Ph.D.

Before I start, let me declare my vegetarianism. Despite my inclination to be sympathetic toward animals, I found Joy’s book to be naive in the extreme.

I was expecting a book on the cultural reasons for why Americans have differing attitudes toward consuming different animals, and, while she has included some of that, there is also content I was not expecting — perhaps it is my own fault for thinking a book with an attractively cute title and describes itself as an introduction to “the belief system that enables us to eat some animals and not others” would be a bit more about that topic.

The one salient point of the book, in my opinion, is her discussion of the slaughtering process. Better oversight and more transparency is needed to ensure the safety of food that is consumed and to give food animals humane treatment at all steps of their lives.

The call to activism throughout the book is rather strident and unpleasant to get through. People can decide on their own whether to get involved, and providing some contact information at the end would be appropriate, but the oppressive nature of her encouragement is uncomfortable to get through.

Toward the end of the book, she encourages the reader to “view ourselves as strands in the web of life, rather than as standing at the apex of the so-called food chain.” From where I sit, the food web includes animals eating other animals. Humans are omnivorous creatures, and simply because eating animals is not strictly necessary for a complete diet does not mean that people are required to, or should, suppress the urge to consume animals.

Score: 1/5.