Hybrids | ||||||||
Robert J. Sawyer | ||||||||
Tor Books, 396 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Greg L. Johnson
The novel begins in a leisurely fashion, as we journey with Mary and Ponter through the peculiarities of modern human
culture. Among hard SF writers, Sawyer most resembles Kim Stanley Robinson in his willingness to indulge in exposition and
scene-setting. Sawyer prefers to build slowly instead of starting out with a bang, and by the time the conflicts in the plot
become clear, Sawyer has firmly established his world and his characters.
The conflicts mostly grow out of the different viewpoints of Neanderthal and human society when it comes to crime and
punishment. Violent crime is nearly unheard of in Neanderthal society, and when it occurs the penalty is severe: Sterilization
for the criminal and anyone who shares fifty percent of his or her genes. This method of justice had led Ponter, in Humans, to
commit an act of violence in revenge for Mary's rape at the beginning of Hominids, the first book in the
series. Ponter's secret hangs like a cloud over Hybrids, and when combined with the story of his love with Mary and the discovery
of a scheme to exploit the undeveloped, resource-rich Neanderthal world, the story inevitably leads to a point where individuals
must make decisions regarding life and death not only for themselves, but their entire society.
Now, in science fiction, that's not an unusual situation. The controversial element in Hybrids comes not from individual
characters making important decisions, but what, in the end, those decisions entail. At one point in the novel, Mary Vaughan is
faced with a decision whether to create a tailored virus that would kill only human males. The justification is simple, a
human male threatens the Neanderthals. The decision Mary makes is one of the crucial elements in Hybrids, but the actions of
another character make it plain that regardless of Mary's decision, unleashing the virus is the right thing to do.
The moral situation set up here is worth a much longer discussion, there are elements of guilt and punishment, the individual
versus society, and the use of violence in order to prevent violence. In addition, Hybrids injects an element of gender
politics; there is more than a hint that some actions are simply more likely to be committed by human males than anyone else,
and the proposed response to this proposition takes Sawyer into territory that recalls both the off-beat brand of feminism
espoused in David Brin's The Postman and the we-must-guard-against-men mentality of Sheri S. Tepper's The
Gate To Women's Country. It's an odd intersection where libertarianism runs smack into social engineering based on gender, and species.
In the end, Hybrids succeeds at completing Ponter and Mary's story, and at the very least confronting the moral
and philosophical issues raised by the contrasting approaches to justice and society found in Neanderthal and human culture. In
the end, the reader may or may not agree with the decisions Mary and the other characters make, but they will know why those decisions
were made. Hybrids is a novel that tells a good story, and doesn't back down from confronting the issues that story
creates. It's a first-class finish to a series that ranks with the author's finest work.
In one of those odd moments of synchronicity that help make reality fun, reviewer Greg L. Johnson recently found himself dining on pheasant while at that moment in their story, Mary and Ponter were doing the same. His reviews also appear in the The New York Review of Science Fiction. |
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