The second book of Robert Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, Humans, continues the story begun in Hominids. Neanderthal Ponter Boddit’s returned to his own dimension, but his thoughts continually bring him back to the strange world where his race didn’t survive the evolutionary race. More importantly, he can’t stop thinking about Mary Vaughn, the human geneticist who befriended him and taught him all about her world. Before long, he’s engineered the reopening of the dimensional tunnel, and again traveled to Mary’s world. But are the two separate worlds really ready to deal with each other? While Ponter and Mary struggle to forge a relationship despite the differences in race and world, their colleagues attempt to forge a new sort of cultural understanding despite violent opposition. And then, when things are at their best, a frightening discovery is made about the world’s magnetic field, and two universes are put into perspective. Is the end of the world at hand?
By far, the most interesting aspect of this trilogy is Sawyer’s examination of our own world through the eyes of an outsider. His perspective on war, religion, and society comes off as disturbingly true, removing some of the happy illusions we form about ourselves. As science fiction and social commentary, Humans comes off quite well, though Ponter Boddit’s world still seems optimistically utopian by comparison to our own and thus hard to believe in unquestioningly. Luckily, strong characterization and an interesting storyline keep things moving enough to overlook that flaw.