Review: Robert J. Sawyer’s “Hybrids”

Books Tuesday, January 20, 2004. Post by bunyip

The genetic obstacle to this breeding exercise gives Sawyer the opportunity to display his research abilities.  How he resolves it is testimony to his writing skills.  Humans, he tells us, are unique in possessing 23 chromosomes.  Other primates, probably including the extinct Neanderthals, have 24.  Merging genes from two such creatures is unlikely to produce viable offspring.  Sawyer however, has no intention of boring you with clinical issues when there are bigger questions to address.  Neanderthals are not only genetically distinct, their social structure differs in ways that would give a sociologist nightmares.  Males and females live apart except for a brief period each month – Two Becoming One.  Living apart means that each gender "bonds" with another of its kind for most of the month.  Intrusions on this rigid social ideal aren’t welcome, and Mary’s  insistence that couples "live together all the time" violates Neanderthal social mores.  Tensions build as human and Neanderthals interact.

Neanderthals possess an electronic avatar called a "Companion."  These ultimate PalmPilots communicate with one another and with a central recording station.  All actions, conversations, decisions are recorded for posterity, or adjudication, if required.  Adjudication has a long reach in both time and subject.  Violence, they believe, is a genetic trait.  The "sins of the fathers" are punished along lines of genetic relationships our society cast aside with the rise of Christianity.  If "Hybrids" falls into the hands of a "mainstream" fiction reader, the howls of "genetic determinism" will disturb Sawyer’s Mississauga home.  However, there’s an even bigger issue  in this book than justice through biology.  Neanderthals have no concept of deities or an afterlife.  Why do humans believe in gods but Neanderthals don’t?

The question of "faith" builds as the central issue in this series.  Sawyer has flirted with it before, but never better than here.  His handling of the question is at once novel, entertaining and based on sound research.  Not only are Neanderthal and human chromosomes unalike, that condition reflects differences in brain structure.  Sawyer extends the findings of Canadian scientist Michael Persinger in coping with this question.  What gives humans a "religious sense"?  Is it really derived from the supernatural, or does some mechanism bring about faith – an "illness" subject to cure?  Ironies abound in this story, but none more potent than those Sawyer raises over this question.  What do we believe?  Why do we believe it?  How do we deal with the concept of gods?  There is no "rust-proofing" to cover the issue – Sawyer confronts you with it forcefully.  You must see through the ironies and address reality.

Can you read this book without having read the previous two in the trilogy?  Easily, if you can accept the notion of alternative universes joined by a quantum gateway.  Sawyer deals well with the advance in human cognition that supposedly occurred forty thousand years ago.  There are many ramifications branching off from this event and Sawyer handles them skillfully.  Sawyer doesn’t write simply to entertain.  He writes to challenge your thinking, make you ponder the validity of your beliefs and raise questions about how we view the world around us.  Read him and ask yourselves the questions.  [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

gypsysoul

January 20th, 2004 at 1:29 pm

The marriage of love/relationship conflicts with the profound questions of ethics/faith/values — sounds like a real page turner.  Thanks for sharing this, Stephen.

Drog

January 22nd, 2004 at 10:46 am

Great to see another review from you, Stephen. They’re always first rate. I also read Hybrids (and the previous two novels in the series) and have been meaning to write a review for some time.

I have to say that I am a big fan of Rob Sawyer’s work, and I enjoyed reading this series. But I must admit that I was a little frustrated too. Like most of his novels, a great deal of this series is dialogue between the characters, which Rob uses as the vehicle with which to explore theological and social issues and debates. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in previous novels such as Calculating God, I greatly enjoyed it. But this series was about two separate Earths, inhabited by different species with different technologies and cultures, finding each other. With the extra pages that a trilogy format provides, I had been hoping that Rob would have explored not just theolocial/social issues, but also the huge implications that this event would have on both Earths, changing them forever in significant ways. In other words, I was hoping for something grand and epic in scope, where monumental and profound events and crises took place, involving governments, militaries, religious institutions, etc. as a direct result of the contact between these two species. Instead, the novels centered upon two main characters, their budding relationship and their debates.

All that said, Rob wrote it the way he wanted to, and pulled it off. It really is a good read. So my disappointment really has more to do with what wasn’t in the pages, rather than with what was.

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