Reflections on Human Civilization:
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生茶和熟茶哪个好Alternative Realities in Robert Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax
Tom Lombardo and Jeanne Belisle Lombardo
And now for a work of science fiction to plea a truly diver array of readers; anthropologists, bixuals, atheists, environmentalists, feminists, peaceniks, and promoters of male bonding and birth control will all find in Robert Sawyer’s brilliant trilogy, Neanderthal Parallax, an updated and relevant utopian vision of intelligent life and community on earth, as well as a gripping good yarn where the hero is, contrary to 30,000 years of vilification and underestimation on the part of the dominant species on earth, a highly intelligent, nsitive, and xy Neanderthal. Sawyer pos an intriguing thought experiment: What if the Neanderthals had flourished and culturally evolved and Homo sapiens had become extinct? To answer this question, he creates an alternative history of life on the planet and a parallel Neanderthal world which prent not only a very appealing picture of how human culture could have evolved (imagine no war and true equality of the xes, for example) but also an unsparing critique of contemporary human society and culture.钟南山事迹
韭菜摊鸡蛋Although much of science fiction deals with the future, the Neanderthal Parallax ries is science fictio
n that delves into a different arena of possibilities. This arena is alternative realities, which includes the engaging and interesting topic of alternative histories. What if some significant event or trend in the past had not occurred; how would prent reality be different? Alternative histories help us to e our world more clearly and help us to understand the causal significance of key events in history and how they impact the direction of history. One of the most famous alternative reality novels is Philip Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), which is t in a post World War II world in which Germany and Japan won the war. Although The Man in the High Castle turns our contemporary world upside down, it ends up having some very revealing things to say about our modern society, including the nature of military versus economic and cultural victory, and leaves the reader with a n of enlightenment (or confusion – depending on how you look at it) regarding what indeed is real and what isn’t. We are left asking who really did win World War II.
With Neanderthal Parallax Sawyer has written an extremely fascinating alternative history trilogy that rivals Dick’s masterpiece. The three novels in the ries are Hominids (2002), Humans (2003), and Hybrids (2003). The main scientific premi behind the novels is that there may be alternative causal pathways within history (bad on the Many-Worlds interpretation in quantum physics), and conquently there may exist alternative realities of the prent which co-exist in some type of quant
红色手抄报内容um multi-ver of possibilities. (Of particular relevance to futurists, the corollary of this idea is that there are multiple futures which will unfold, following different pathways into tomorrow.) Given this premi of multiple contemporary realities, Sawyer prents the reader with a technologically advanced Neanderthal civilization in many ways equal to, though clearly different from, our own and one not only with sophisticated justice and
governance systems but also rational, workable and, yes, humanistic approaches to the environment, gender relations and population control. Indeed, it is during a botched experiment with a quantum computer at the Sudbury Neutrino Obrvatory, coincidentally the same site in both worlds, that the main protagonist, Neanderthal scientist Ponter Boddit, is accidentally propelled into our reality. The story unfolds as he and then other members of his species interact with our species both in the Homo sapiens (gliksin) world and the Neanderthal (barast) univer. Needless to say gliksins and barasts alike suffer a considerable degree of culture shock and Sawyer throws no punches in suggesting that the Neanderthals have more reason to be baffled, disgusted and bemud than the Homo sapiens.
Finely crafted, inventive and credible, (Hominids won the Hugo Award for the best science fiction novel of the year and Humans was a finalist in the balloting), the novels move along at a brisk narrati
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ve pace and prent a variety of highly compelling characters, especially the Neanderthals. And Sawyer is perhaps at his best in depicting a Neanderthal world that is both in sync with our prent conceptions about the species and yet displays the kind of sophistication we would expect from an evolutionary path parallel to our own. The Neanderthals may still collectively hunt, slaughter and consume large mammals, as they do at an engagement feast, but they are also capable of designing a highly effective hi-tech crime prevention device, the companion, which is embedded in the forearms of all citizens and which keeps an ongoing record of all their actions through life. The Neanderthals know that if they were to commit a crime, this, like all their actions, would be recorded, transmitted to an archive, and possibly viewed by the legal authorities. The automatic punishment is sterilization, not only of the perpetrator but of any who share half his genes. Hence, they do not commit many crimes. And far from moaning about the violation of their civil rights, the Neanderthals find nothing wrong in having the monitors, since it has eliminated all rious crime.
Perhaps the most intriguing and educational dimension in the novels, though, is how much they say about Homo sapiens and our modern world. Alternative realities make our world more salient or visible through the psychological phenomenon called the “contrast effect.” Placing something next to something el which is very different, if not a complete opposite to it, highlights its reality; black next
蒯聩怎么读>马大力to white makes white look whiter and black look blacker. Contrasting our reality with a totally different reality brings out the unique qualities and features of our world that may go unnoticed since such features are commonplace. In Neanderthal Parallax, the contrast effect is amplified through the psychological reactions of the Neanderthals to the strangeness of our world and the ongoing dialogue and debate that occurs between Ponter and various human characters. Though filled with action, the novels have a strong philosophical flavor as well, and the issues of ethics, God, mortality, love, and war are argued and discusd through the novels. The Neanderthals, in many important respects, are very different from us. They have almost no war or crime (and do not honor warriors); have a much lower world population; are hunter-gatherer rather than agricultural; live in tune with nature (they build their hous
within big trees); are universally bixual (they almost all have mates of each x); and are all atheists, finding it incomprehensible how we could believe in life after death or a supernatural, all-powerful being who watches over us. Given such cultural and psychological differences, the Neanderthals find our world mad, frenzied, and irrational. Through their eyes we are unbelievably crowded and congested, nlessly abusive and destructive of our environment, abominably cruel toward each other in the name of freedom, and highly superstitious in our belief systems. By the en
d of even one novel, many a reader wistfully wishes the Neanderthals had prevailed in our own history.
Science fiction stretches the imagination and in Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax a plausible high-tech, culturally sophisticated global civilization is created that stimulates the reader into considering how our own world could be different and perhaps much improved if we were to alter some of our basic premis, values, and practices. In the final analysis, this ems to be Sawyer’s central message: Consider the Neanderthal world and ponder what lessons can be learned for our own world and its future.
